We like to think of moments as fixed events - a time in our life with set parameters, where things happen in one way, and are frozen that way for the rest of our lives. We attach definitions to them - happy memories, sad memories. We think of moments as static, as having one, definite truth.

But in actuality, none of this is true. Moments have lives beyond their ending. Our whole lives are up for revision, vulnerable to time and loss and mortality. The truth of a moment is no clearer than any other truth. It’s malleable and fragile and labile.

It’s October here in Istanbul. Though I’m here, it doesn’t feel noticeably different than the other Octobers in my life - those spent in Philadelphia or Valparaiso. October, and autumn in general, has a universal smell - a fecund richness, like earth being burned. The light has a certain splendid yet sepulchral quality; it’s like a last great profusion of beauty before the barrenness of winter. October is more or less the same everywhere - in cities or suburbs or farmland. It’s sharp and clear.

And we have general memories that go with October; at least I do. We remember apple cider and nights spent pulling lovers closer to us for their warmth. We remember the sight of our breath for the first time since spring. We remember the crispness of the stars. These are continuous memories, moments that might not have even happened to us but that we’ve constructed anyway. I remember my grandmother ladling warm apple cider from a stove, my hands raw with cold. I’m not sure if it ever happened, but it’s something I associate with October.

These general memories are a kind of cultural foundation, a way for us to understand one another and the context of our world. We associate these things with October and early autumn, and so does everyone else (at least those people not living near the equator), and our definition of this time of year is pretty firm. You tell someone you love October, and they have a pretty good sense of what you mean. These memories don’t really change because they help to orient us within the larger world.

Then there are specific moments, the ones we also assume to be fixed.

~

Two years ago, in early October, the Philadelphia Phillies were playing a playoff game against the St. Louis Cardinals. It was Game 1 of the National League Division Series, in Philadelphia.

At that point in my life - I was 25, about to turn 26, delivering pizza and cutting grass, living about ten minutes from the house where I’d grown up - the Phillies meant way too much to me. And really, they meant too much to a lot of people, my friends included. Like communal memories, they were a cultural lodestar for people in and around Philadelphia during that time, a shared point of pride and joy. You could walk up to someone and casually talk about the Phils; you could reminisce about where you were when the Phils won the World Series, or when Jimmy hit his walk off double the year after. If you were in a different city or country, and saw someone wearing a Phils hat or shirt, it was an immediate bond, a sort of shibboleth that seemed to say, “This person understands where I’m from.”

In 2011, the Phils barnstormed through the regular season, racking up the best record in baseball. They were expected to win the World Series. My friends and I made a sort of ritual around the Phils: almost every night, we’d gather at one of our homes to drink beer and watch the game, bullshitting away the months while the Phillies played in the background, their games forming a pleasant sort of white noise (this constant presence is why I think baseball fans are so loyal, and why the game is so deeply entwined with the American mythos; baseball, more than any other game, becomes a part of your daily life, becomes habitual.) The Phils were, maybe more than anything - save for perhaps booze and weed - the foundation of our friendships then.

So it was, on that early October afternoon, me and two of my closest friends got tickets to attend Game 1. We drove down and drank beer in the parking lot before the game, commiserating warmly with our fellow fans, people we knew nothing about except that they loved and believed in the Phillies as much as we did - and this fact alone was enough to make them kindred souls and instant friends in our, and their, eyes.

As the daylight faded and the stadium’s lights flickered to life, we made our way to our seats on the lower third base side. The stadium rocked and rollicked, forty-five thousand people waving white rally towels and creating a strangely gorgeous and surreal sea of white and red. Anyone who claims sports are irrelevant should attend a playoff baseball game, the stadium lights burning down on the emerald field while the October sky dies gloriously, the collective noise reaching a crescendo…it’s extraordinarily beautiful and rare to see so many people all desiring one thing.

The game got off to a poor start. The Cardinals scored three runs in the first inning, and the Phillies offense scuffled for the first five innings. Then, in the sixth inning, they exploded. Ryan Howard hit a mammoth three run homer after a long at-bat. Two hitters later, Raul Ibanez hit a two run homer, and the Phillies were on their way to a victory.

It’s hard to explain the joy of a sporting triumph to someone who isn’t a fan. And it’s harder to explain the specific joy of a great baseball moment. It’s what makes the sport great. Those singular instances when the entire narrative of a game or season can be won or lost on a single pitch - a Jimmy Rollins double in the gap, a Brad Lidge slider buried in the dirt. It’s these moments, and the collective narrative that leads up to them, that makes baseball so special.

When Ryan Howard hit that sixth inning home run - a towering, no doubt-about-it shot where the whole stadium erupted the second it left his bat - I felt a joy, a collective joy, that has to rank as one of the most visceral experiences of my life. The fans around me, people I knew nothing about, mobbed one another; one of them lifted me off my feet. My best friend picked me up and carried me down the row, high-fiving strangers. It was the pent up frustrations of those five innings, the cresting expectations of an entire season, the temporary lifting of a communal grudge that every Philadelphian knows well - that we’re somehow inferior and lesser because of our place in New York’s shadow. It was all of those things, and our own personal failures and fears - forty-five thousand of them - melting into that crisp October night, replaced by a deep, almost transcendent, elation. It was, in so many ways, better than an orgasm, better than great art, better than love. Those things are, all too often, abstract. This was immediate, right there in my gut, and my best friend’s gut, and the gut of everyone else there. It was pure joy.



~

After the game, I sat in the parking lot for a little while with my friends and our neighbors, drinking beer and basking in the glow of that ecstasy. Impromptu “Let’s go Phillies” chants reverberated through the parking lot. Strangers came over to hug us.

Later in the evening, we drove home. My friend and I picked up his wife, and then we drove over to my girlfriend’s house. Both of the women had assumed Phillies fandom through a sort of osmosis. They were fans by virtue of loving us.

It was a crisp October night. The smell of burnt leaves hung over our suburb. We parked at my girlfriend’s house and made a decision to walk down her street At the end of the block there was a Catholic elementary school. The school was having its annual Autumn Fun Fair, which meant carnival rides - a ferris wheel, the zipper, the whirli-gig. We were happy and punchdrunk: what could be better than carnival rides?

We were probably the oldest folks there by about five years - discounting those parents being dragged around by their kids. We smuggled in a bottle of whiskey, which we passed around between the four of us, both couples holding hands, occasionally laughing at the delirious joy of the evening - a new season, a baseball triumph, communal memories, good friends, love, carnival rides.

We played a few games before climbing aboard the whirli-gig. While we were being flung around, the sky, which had been cloudy all day, broke open. A cataclysmic rain came down. The ride shut down. Hordes of screaming teenagers ran for cover. The four of us took our time. We basked in the rain, laughing, passing around the whiskey.

Eventually we walked home, all of us completely drenched. My friend and his wife went home; before they left, we hugged, still elated. I drove my girlfriend back to my apartment. We stripped out of our wet clothes, giggling and gleeful. We took a hot shower, made love, sat in bed talking about baseball and the night we’d just had.

What I felt is a happiness that I hope you, reader, have been lucky enough to experience. A feeling that life is beautiful and rich and expansive, and that sometimes the world grants you moments of grace. I felt that life couldn’t possibly be better. My friends and I had just watched our baseball team win a dramatic game. I was in bed with the woman that, I was beginning to realize, I wanted to marry. It was October. We opened the windows and listened to the rain. I remembered my grandmother ladling out apple cider. I remembered jumping into a pile of leaves with my father. I thought: this is beauty, pure and simple.

~

A week later, after a back and forth series, the Phillies lost Game 5 of the series, 1-0. Their season ended. I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at the time. I remember walking home from the bar where I watched the game, feeling a hollowness in my gut. I actually cried. The pain was so intense that it changed my relationship to sports. You’re 25,I remember thinking, a grown fucking man. Sports cannot matter this much to you.

And they haven’t: ever since that night in Baton Rouge, sports have been nothing more than background noise. They’re something to occupy a few lazy moments, or an excuse to spend a few hours with my family at the ballpark. I stopped thinking about the Phillies before bed. I stopped having hour long phone calls with my friends where we talked about possible trades or playoff opponents. My blood pressure stopped rising during their games. In many ways, Game 1 of the 2011 NLDS was the final great moment of my life as a sports fan - one last moment of ecstasy before adulthood set in. And yet, despite sports’ diminished role in my life, I still can’t think about that home run without feeling the way one feels about an ex-lover - a deep, irrevocable melancholy. A sadness that something so beautiful couldn’t remain so. And I feel pity looking back at myself, so joyous and naïve, for not knowing what was coming.

Just over a year later, the girlfriend broke up with me. It was Thanksgiving. We were in my car, sitting in the parking lot of the school where we’d shared our first kiss. She thanked me for a beautiful two and a half years and then told me she no longer loved me. These are things you can’t fault a person for, as much as you might want to. Love is a mystery. Its origins are impossible to trace; sometimes, it just ends. We like to think that if we do the right things - behave well, support the other person in their pursuits, try to grow as a man - that love will endure. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it ends, or undergoes transference.



~

I live in Istanbul now. I could not have predicted this, or even dreamed it, while sitting beneath those stadium lights, or running through the rain with my lover, on that October night two years ago. My definition of happiness and joy has changed. It is, I like to think, more mature and less impulsive. I like to think my happiness more closely mirrors gratitude now - gratitude for friends, for my health, for my family.

There are also depths of pain, now, that I didn’t know existed back then, either. But in a way, these depths have shaped my new definition of joy, giving it a different, hard-won context. Happiness, like so many things, is richer when contrasted with immense sorrow.

The other night, I was sitting on my balcony, watching the sun set over Suleymaniye mosque and the endless, rolling hills of Istanbul. Something in the wind shifted. I caught a scent - one I couldn’t begin to describe or place - and I remembered being in that stadium, listening to that crowd.

I went into my room and loaded my computer. I found a video of Game 1 on Youtube. I watched Ryan Howard’s home run, again and again. The crack of the bat. The fans immediately rising to their feet. I tried to remember that specific joy, that boundless and unfettered sense of completeness and possibility. I tried to remember running through the rain with my girlfriend, laughing, so light and possible, our future wondrously open. I tried to remember what that moment felt like when I lived it, when that night was the very end point of my life, when everything that would come later was mysterious and shrouded, when that night could shimmer and pulse like a kind of apogee.

But the truth is, I can’t remember that feeling. I can’t separate that night from what came after. I can’t separate that home run from Game 5. I can’t separate running through the rain from Thanksgiving. The joy I felt has been altered, been muddied by possibility become reality. Watching the video, I felt a furrowing in my chest, like someone was butchering me, piece by piece.

The question, then, is what is the truth of that October night? Is it a moment of pure joy, or pure sorrow? Is there a truth to our moments - and, if our life is just an accumulation of moments, to our lives? Or are they forever in limbo, under threat of revision, threatened by loss and failure and the fickleness of the human heart and the looming specter of mortality? If even the most joyous of moments can be broken apart, can be dismantled by decay, what hope is there?

I’m not sure. The first question - regarding the truth of a moment, its inherent ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ is probably precocious and is definitely beyond my authority to answer. How do we live in the present with the knowledge that some future occurrence might render the present untenable, even horrible? Almost all of our pursuits are aimed at eliminating this uncertainty. It’s why we seek out careers and homes; it’s why we try to pick stable friends; it’s why we get married. These things, we like to think, attenuate the future‘s possibilities, and make its wends and curves easier to predict. They are not guarantees of future happiness, but they are, at the very least, guarantees that the terms of our past happiness will not be changed - that happy memories can remain happy because the context of the past has not been unexpectedly altered.

In ways, this is illusory, too. Death eventually nullifies all of us, no matter how careful and well-plotted our lives are. Relationships end despite the good intentions of both parties. The human heart wanders, or fails. All joy, no matter how great and seemingly permanent, will have to face the reckoning of impermanence.

So what hope is there?

Watching that video - Ryan Howard flipping his bat; the ball flying deep into the Philadelphia night; the fans, my kindred souls, mobbing one another in unadulterated joy - I felt a deep sadness, but I also felt at least a glimmer old joy. Maybe it’s different now - tarnished by experience, gutted by loss - but it’s still there. It’s there in the smile I can’t help as Howard flips his bat. It’s there when I send my best friend the video, typing the words, “Remember when we were going to win the World Series?“

And it’s there when, later in the evening, my roommate knocks on my door and says, “Let us go,” and I begin reciting, without thinking, the lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

Let us go then, you and I,

With the evening spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table…

“What’s that?” my roommate asks.

“It’s a poem. My old girlfriend used to whisper it to me whenever we were going out for the night.” I smile; she shakes her head.

Memories are no more static than we are. It means we can revisit them. It means we can go back to their contours and shapes, and feel them once again as new people with our new lives. I can be in those stands, or in that rain, as a man living in Istanbul, just as I was there, once upon a time, as a boy who grew up in a small town in Indiana.

Just as - sitting on my balcony here in Istanbul - the wind can come up out of nowhere, carrying the scent of baseball in Philadelphia, the evening spread out gloriously against the sky, I can exist in this specific happiness as a young man on a carnival ride beside the woman I once loved. I could not have imagined the shape of this life in that moment. And someday, I will look back on this city as a different man, and I realize that I cannot fathom the shape of that life.



Let us go then, you and I,

With the evening spread out against the sky…