We spent the day in Fargo for my birthday today watching a minor league baseball game.  Baseball has offered itself as a remarkably consistent companion to me over the years, complementary with its nuances and quirks, and today was no exception; a game with numerous ejections, weird plays, and a blowout loss for the home team to Sioux City.  It was a nice sunny day with a few clouds and  a breeze that wasn’t quite autumn, but definitely not summer.  As the game progressed, in this early fraction of the seasonal change, I thought about the ballplayers, most of whom will return to regular jobs in the next several days as this baseball season ends, and the many, many times I’ve sat in ballparks for my birthday over the decades.

The interstate home had a lot of construction, so I decided to bypass it and go on old U.S. 81, now relegated to the status of several connected county roads but still a direct route from Fargo to Grand Forks. I drove through the farm fields filled with maturing crops including beets, sunflowers, barley, and corn, and thought of my own history working on my grandparents farm back in the 1970s in Nebraska- we listened to a lot of baseball on the radio in those days, including the Cardinals, the Royals, and the Cubs on the old “clear channel” broadcasts as the daylight of early evenings faded, my grandfather taking a break to smoke his pipe while we drank some cold 10 ounce bottles of Pepsi out of the cooler.

As I got within about 30 miles of home tonight, Lisa was sleeping, and I noticed the sun had been getting more low-slung in recent days, beginning to hasten the trip toward fall and eventually winter. As a result, all of the cycles I’d seen today became apparent. The 3’s and 9’s marking time with no clock in baseball, birthdays marking our own individual years, and the tempo of seasons with the crops that follow their beat. I turned up the music on the stereo (in this case, the Grateful Dead, another frequent companion) to find my own groove, driving that old highway and riding the planet on its turns through the universe in its infinite cycles, content in the reverie of the fading light guiding me home.