And I’m so happy to be alive

I watched the 2023 World Cup Final in my living room at my dining room table. We had moved the table out of the dining room so we could unfold the leaves in anticipation of Thanksgiving dinner. I had woken up to India’s total and thought: we have a game here, don’t we?

In like the 10th over of Australia’s innings, a very good friend texted me to tell me that he was in Duluth, two hours north, because his father-in-law had died in the night. My friend has lost both his parents in the last two years. His wife has stage four cancer. It cast a pall over the game, the morning, the weekend. I felt so sad for my friend, for his wife, who is also my friend.

Australia batted on.

I had seen this before. We all had. In 2007. Gilchrist with the squash ball in his glove lacing balls around the ground. Now it was 16 years later and it was Travis Head. Against India. In India.

My partner came home with breakfast and we ate with our toddler at the table with the game on in the background. I felt sad. The game felt already over. The stadium was silent. The Indian bowlers looked exhausted; the fielders resigned. You could almost feel the whole of India deflating. Just one wicket, I thought, just one and we have a game again. But it just never came.

It was a sunny morning in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. Cool, autumnal, pretty. We’d had a good day, a good weekend, with good weather. And it was only Sunday and there was more to come. There is so much joy in my life right now. It’s almost too much at times. My son and partner went into the kitchen at around the 35th over, and played “cooking.” Their sounds and voices filled the whole house and became the soundtrack to the game as it rolled downhill to its inevitable conclusion.

Right before the Head wicket, which came far too late to save India, my toddler brought in a bowl of “soup” to eat — just an empty bowl with a spoon it. He warned me that it was too hot and he blew on it. I slurped it and told him it was delicious and he waddled back into the kitchen. Head flew out to deep midwicket. Maxwell ran out. And then the game was over. And the World Cup was over. I turned off the television and thought the same thing I always think:

I wonder where I’ll be in four years time?

In 2027, when the players trot out to the center of a ground in South Africa, I will be 51 years old. My son will be a first grader. And what about four years after that? I cannnot imagine really. It’s too far away.

So much can happen in four years. I have written that sentence so many times. But I never fail to feel the same melancholy at the end of every World Cup. Time has put a marker down. Cricket has put a marker down. And I cannot help but look forward and then look back and then look forward again; like I am crossing a street. Four years ago my life felt so different than it does today. Eight years ago feels like a dozen lifetimes ago.

Where has the time gone? Where does it all go? It runs downhill, like Australia batting in a World Cup Final. Like we saw in 2007. And again in 2015. And then again just last week.

Today I am sad. Today I am melancholy. Thinking about what will come, where I might be four years from now. I think that’s because today I am also happy. Content. Okay. And I don’t want that to end. In previous years I saw the change that four years might bring as welcome. Today, this time, I am not so sure. And the passing of time always haunts. The days speed up, the overs fly by, the runs accumulate with the years, and then we are doing it all again. The fact that Sunday’s final felt strangely familiar was, in that sense, a little comforting. Everything changes but not everything changes.

Here’s what I do know today, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, four years shy of the 2027 World Cup, three days past the 2023 final: I am thankful for this old game that causes me to take a few minutes, every four years, and think about where I’ve been, and where I’m going, and — most importantly — where I am; that reminds me to embrace each sunrise and understand that no matter what: time passes. All while I watch cricket in my living room at my dining room table, as my son and partner play in the next room, their voices filling my heart, as the sun gently slopes down at a low autumn angle through the bare trees on a Sunday morning, with so much weekend left to come.

As I type every four years:

What a gift this game is.