Kiss of Autumn

Overnight temperatures reached 50 degrees this week. I examined our trees the next day and the Green Ash and Autumn Blaze Maple were both kissed by cool weather and leaves had begun to turn. Summer is over before we know it.

There is a large-scale sporting event this morning. I had to look it up: The University of Iowa football team is playing Utah State at Nile Kinnick Stadium. It’s a day to avoid the traffic and congestion in the county seat.

I attended a few football games at Kinnick. When in graduate school, I lived near the stadium where the house-owner rented his yard for game-day parking. Sometimes patrons had an extra ticket to give us. When I worked in Cedar Rapids, one of my supervisors was a sporting enthusiast. He required his managers to attend certain games with him so I went with the group to Kinnick for an unremarkable contest. During meetings with national staff, we were required to attend professional sporting events. That’s how I was able to watch Patrick Ewing play basketball in Dallas. I don’t regret learning of the ballet-like moves of professional basketball players. Sports has not been my thing.

In high school, almost every freshman boy tried out for the football team. I didn’t make the cut and decided to pursue interests in the arts: reading, writing, music, and theater. High school was an awkward time and I spent most of my non-classroom time on the high school stage crew, reading, or practicing the guitar. Most of my classmates seemed to have a natural instinct to find a partner and be with each other. That wasn’t my thing either.

Being part of a sports team was not that interesting. I suppose of one were on the 1961 New York Yankees roster it would be different. When I played baseball for the Sears Roebuck team it was never at that level. That was a team: Whitey Ford, Elston Howard, Roger Maris, Moose Skowron, Yogi Berra, Clete Boyer, Mickey Mantle, Bobby Richardson, and the rest. On a Saturday in the 1960s, one could listen to the neighbor’s backyard radio broadcasting Chicago baseball games from across the alley. After Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961, I lost interest in watching or listening to baseball games on television or the radio.

In 1982, when I worked at the University of Iowa, the football team had a berth to the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1959. It was a really big deal and half the city cleared out to travel to Pasadena for the game. I lived on Market Street in a small apartment and tuned in to watch on my 12-inch black and white television. Iowa was pathetic. Washington shut out Iowa 28-0, the first Rose Bowl shutout in 29 years. “Sports are important at a Big Ten university,” Hayden Fry said in his memoir. He apparently didn’t mean winning was.

It will be cool this morning, with temperatures rising to above 90 degrees this afternoon. I’ll work among my apple tress for a while, then turn indoors to process garden produce. I can see the end of the garden. It has been good this year.

Now that the season has begun to turn, I linger under the foliage. At least for a few more times as late summer becomes autumn.