Jay Kuten
THE autumnal weeks in the United States are the time for miracles of nature and man.
In New England, the trees lose their chlorophyll, the green that we see all spring and summer, and expose their underlying colours -- yellows, reds and purples. The process takes several weeks and culminates in a brilliant display that attracts tourists as the "leaf peepers" to the region.
This year the season has become abbreviated as the trees need water to perform their magic best and there's been a prolonged drought and so the cycle is accelerated to preserve the trees' nutrition.
In effect, there's more brown showing as the leaves curl and are shed.
The other beauty of this season is in the game of baseball.
Baseball, which I understand is indecipherable to many here, evocative of mostly boredom in locals who have spent time watching, is close to any American boy's heart. Or it used to be before the advent of professional football, gridiron-style.
Baseball was the quintessential American game, called the national pastime for many years by sports writers.
It was once believed that a man named Abner Doubleday invented the game in the early 19th century in Cooperstown, New York. That's been debunked, but the site itself, Cooperstown, has been overplanted with baseball's Hall of Fame, a museum and honour roll of those deemed to have been extraordinary in their performance years in the professional sport.
Sports historians have now attributed the beginnings of the game of baseball to an old British sticks-and-ball type game, rounders, which bears some resemblance also to the later invention of cricket.
Thus, we may have, in Churchill's terms, not only a common language that divides the American and British traditions, but a common ancestor for our kid's game that is played by grown-ups.
Fandom is a matter of the heart and of location. As a kid I was a fan of the New York Giants. My heart raced and I exulted when the radio announced that Bobby Thompson had hit a home-run and single-handedly won the final 1951 World Series game over the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I lost interest in both teams when they moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco.
For clarity the World Series -- best of seven games played at the end of the season by the top-ranked teams -- was a misnomer as the series was completely American until recently when the players, who used to come primarily from the American heartland and were exclusively white, now come from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Japan; that is, wherever the game is played.
When I lived in Boston, I adopted and fretted over the Boston Red Sox who, until 2004, had not won a World Series since 1918, their fate of failure said to manifest the "Curse of the Bambino" resulting from the management's greed in having sold the contract of a pitcher named George Herman Ruth, also called "Babe", to the hated New York Yankees, where he blossomed into a great home run hitter who helped his new team win five World Series.
In 2004 the curse was set aside under the management of Theo Epstein, who studied the techniques of manager Billy Bean depicted in the movie Moneyball (disclaimer: Epstein is the son of a nearby Boston neighbour and friend).
This season brings the possibility of a miracle to Chicago, where the Chicago Cubs are playing in the World Series, having last appeared there in 1945.
That time they didn't make it. This time they've brought in Theo Epstein to help stem a drought of the longest failure to win their sports championship in all professional sports.
They last won the series in 1908. In the succeeding 108 years they've tried but failed seven times, once losing to the Red Sox in 1918.
This year it's time for another miracle. The oft-pitied Cubs making it to the top and Theo Epstein's leadership struck by lightning for the second time.
�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.