Ecclesiastes and Little League Baseball

We're going through Ecclesiastes at church. It's my favorite book of the Bible. The book spends 12 chapters kicking any meaning in life we derive for ourselves in the nethers. For me, it takes the pressure off.

Ecclesiastes makes it easier to play the Middle C of my personality: melancholy. Sometimes I feel like I'm most myself, most honest, when inside I'm like a rainy February morning. And I like it that way. I've learned not to filter that but follow it instead.

Because following it, sometimes I reach the other side where I can find my favorite part of myself. It's the part of me that looks at a February morning and starts thinking about late evening in July. Longing is the short-hand word for it.

I'll sit down, let my longing run amuck, and just try to write something pretty:

I like the first day it gets into the 70s in April here in Tennessee. The parks fill up with people lying about on towels, the sounds of a little league game, a symphony of popping mitts, clanging metal bats, Coach Ron waving Jimmy home, and the cheers of proud parents. The redbuds wave their pink blossoms in the breezes. They are second to bloom behind the Bradford pears, and I like redbuds better because the Bradfords smell like nature's farts.

I like Douglas Lake up in Dandridge. It runs up against the Smokies. I like to bob in the cool water, looking up at the mountains with my hands resting on my life jacket straps, not worrying about getting back into the kayak. I'll float there, and thank God I get to live here where mountains and lakes are next-door neighbors. And for sunscreen.

Also, I like to think of how Dandridge got its name. Like some farmer between spits of tobacco said, "Oh, you mean that little town up on the damnedridge?" That isn't historically accurate, but I like to think about it.

I like going to the movies alone. It's like saying to the filmmaker, it's just you and me, bub. Tell me a good story. I'll be here, unable to finish this medium popcorn because I talked myself out of the small again. And sometimes they tell such a story that I'll walk out of the theater with an ache in my bones to wake up tomorrow, and jump into my life's story, to live whatever has been placed before my feet.

I like to think about summer and not filter my romanticism out. The cool of the late evening feels like some things will never truly end. I can't explain it. But I know it as surely as the grass under my feet is cool and itchy: There are eternal things.

Yet every cool summer breeze hints at the coming winter; they rattle the leaves, which will soon dry out and fall. I feel this too. Trying to savor this is like chasing the wind, the toil of a fool, bad business.

But I don't get stuck in those thoughts. I follow them until they've done their thing.

What the bird said early in the year

by C.S. Lewis

I heard in Addisons Walk a bird sing clear
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year times nature will no more defeat you
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you
This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older by the well worn track
This year this year as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell
Often deceived yet open once again your heart
Quick, Quick, Quick, Quick! The gates are drawn apart.