A Walk in the Wetlands – Forest Park, St. Louis

Cardinal in Snow – St. Louis, Missouri

Sometimes you are given serendipitous gifts, like yesterday when this cardinal flitted into a magnolia when I was standing not 20 feet away with my telephoto already attached to my camera. Praise be!

Forest Park Beginning Bird Watching – St. Louis

This past Saturday, a friend invited me to join a group for beginning bird watchers in Forest Park which meets the first Saturday of every month from 8:30-10:30am. It was a great experience. The official guide, Amy Witt, had some extra pairs of binoculars for those without them to use and was very friendly and knowledgeable. In addition, Mark H. X. Glenshaw, the owl man, was also along and pointed out the amazing male Great Horned Owl, Charles, and showed us the hollowed out tree where his mate Sarah was nesting. Very cool. We also saw several species of kingfisher (one of which caught a fish before our eyes), a whole flock of Canada geese on the ice with some domestic geese and mallards and one pair of gulls, a Great Blue Heron, and also a simple sparrow and a Cardinal. It was great to slow down and quietly look for the birds. My lends was not quite up for the task, but there are some decent shots.

Haiku for the World Series

all the bloops and blasts
of long, languid summer; one
clear crack through crisp air

Of Giants and Gene Pools, Cardinals and Cardiacs, and Baseball Game Sevens…There Had to be a Game Seven

Tonight just after Angel Pagan hauled in Daniel Descalso’s final fly ball out to hand the Cardinals a second consecutive loss and yet again push them to the brink, my young nephew made a beeline to leave the room, to go sort out sorrow and anger and to lick his wounds alone. It is a response I recognize because it would have been exactly my own response at that age. In truth, it is often my own response today, and sometimes for far more important things than baseball. I did make it a point to haul him in and onto my lap tonight, though, to talk through disgust and hope together, to share the load of disappointment if only a little bit. I miss that sort of lap for me, too, to plop down into myself, but I reckon that lack is one thing that being an adult is about.

As my little doppelganger, it is amazing to see many of his similarities to me in his look, his frame, and mannerisms. It is less pleasurable to see the Das nervousness and bent toward the melancholy be passed on in the young ones, in him and his brother. Sometimes it makes you wonder whether you ought to pass along such things as the love of baseball at all. But even if the Cardinals lose again tomorrow and end their year, eliciting even deeper disappointment, it will have been worth it to have shared the excitement through the late summer and fall, to have received random texts about baseball scores, to be able to remember Andrew and Jack’s laughter as their silly, burly uncle missed the pitching screen in the summer again and again and again.

Speaking of that game tomorrow. It is a game 7, as it almost had to have been if you think about it, even if on Friday night Cardinals fans had fostered hopes of an easy NLCS victory to go on to face the raring-to-go Detroit Tigers. And though I could tell you that the Cardinals are at their best when their backs are against the wall, it would not be with much conviction. It does not look good. And even if we do make it through, that “we” a communal one of city and team, it may be as the poorer side with a weaker set of pitchers and more inconsistent hitters, but it will be nonetheless our team that makes it through, and, yes, a team that never gives up.

The Cardinals and Giants played each other 12 times this year with each team winning 6 games. They have played each other 6 times in the postseason, with each team winning 3. Something has to give. And with some bloops and some blasts from Cardinal bats, with a couple of pitchers making a stand, anything is possible. Tomorrow night about this same time I will make a tiny post with two simple pieces of punctuation, a colon followed by a parenthesis. We will just have so see which way that parenthesis is going to face.

And, finally, somewhere in the great beyond Carmen Miranda is saying, “Hey, wait a minute…”

inked in cardinal red – A Haiku for All St. Louis – Baseball Poetry

today all the lines,
city county divide, inked
in cardinal red
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I am not a fool (at least not all of the time). I know it is just baseball. Tomorrow St. Louis will be the same city with sad racial and economic divisions between black and white and city and county. In a month, even if we win the series, baseball will not have had the power to create change. That lies in efforts elsewhere. Even the beloved ball park, Busch Stadium, itself, is a microcosm of the city – if you notice who sits where and who it is who mostly sit and who mostly serves, even who rakes the infield between innings, sort of fun glory job.

Even so, it is amazing just who Cardinal baseball gets talking to one another, often in excited or worried fashion, as they articulate shared hopes and fears and sweat out the games togethr. Just now a bunch of biddies in the Goodwill, in search of a tiny red jacket for a rally squirrel, were talking baseball, even if they were all confused about the status of the series, as “Play it Cardinal Style” pumped out on the radio. Yeah, it’s that kind of town.

So, if for a couple of weeks in October even if only our dividing lines get drawn in Cardinal red, well, that ain’t too bad.

An Afternoon in Baseball Heaven – Cardinals vs. Giants – Busch Stadium, St. Louis, MO

A Place With the Greats? – Busch Stadium Statues and Albert Pujols

Driving home from Illinois tonight, I decided to stop by downtown to see what I might see through my camera. The area surrounding Busch Stadium was almost completely deserted, a far cry from the crushing crowd that night in October when the Cardinals clinched the World Series.

And as I walked I wondered to myself whether or not this version of Busch Stadium, Busch III, could rightly be called “the house that Albert built.” I figured probably not, but he certainly was key in filling the seats in it and its predecessor for the 10 years he played here, which makes it all the more sad that there is a good chance that he may never have a statue at the stadium. If he had not ended up an Angel, he would almost certainly have had one to match the large one of Stan Musial outside the stadium’s main entrance. Though I am still rather upset with Mr. Pujols, still rather sore, I guess deep down I hope that one day he may, indeed, join Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, and Rogers Hornsby in this pantheon of smaller statues–if that blasted personal service contract he signed will allow him!

One thing I do know–whether or not any night in St. Louis next October will approach the glory of those final two nights of the World Series this past October, the summer will be full of stories, nonetheless, of batting averages and home run totals and team records. It will be full of steamy days and rain delays, hot dogs and beer, Cubbies and Cardinals. And, yes, I will be keeping one eye on the coast.

“and here’s the pitch….BA-” – Haiku on Baseball – Phillies, Cardinals

and here’s the pitch…BA-
BOOM…BA-BOOM…BA-BOOM…BA…then
flat-line…………………out at first
_______________________

I was very much hoping that the Cardinals would win this game tonight and take a commanding 2-1 lead in the series so that my previous post might be validated 🙂 Alas, it was not to be. It is the one that got away, and we Cardinal fans may well live to regret this one game over any other in this crazy, glorious season. But, my goodness, the fight in those Redbirds, battling back, battling back even if they ultimately fell short! Even so, all is not lost…we’ll live to fight at least one more night!
_______________________

What is so amazing about baseball is that I can be sitting watching a little computer program that visually represents hits, balls, strikes, outs, runs and have my hands sweating and my heart beating wildly while sitting in a quiet library doing reference work. Part of the reason the tension can ratchet so high is that in baseball there are breaks in the action (which lets my little program work so well in conveying the drama), with any number of variables that can be tweaked between batters or even pitches which can alter the outcome.
_______________________

Whew! It is time to breathe…and then do it all again tomorrow!

I am going to Philly this Saturday morning and I am very much hoping that upon landing that the City of Brotherly love will be waking up in a surly mood, that I will being passing through an airport in which a jubilant Cardinal team would have passed through only a few hours before on the their way home to baseball heaven.

Watch Out Phillies! Here Come the Cardinals! – October Baseball – St. Louis, Missouri

Looking behind me yesterday, I saw the cardinal on this St. Louis City truck and wished I would have been able to pick up my camera and get a shot of it in my rear-view mirror, or better still in the passenger mirror so as to replicate this classic movie moment. But the shot was challenging and the traffic moving, so I just decided to enjoy the image. However, at the very next light the truck pulled up in the next lane just behind me, and I sure as heck was going to contort myself and get the shot. I only wish it had been a Mack truck, because then it would have conveyed an even better sense of what is about to broadside the Phillies in the next couple of days! A man can dream right? 🙂