Fifty one years and counting. Fifty one springs and
counting. Fifty one seasons and counting. And it all will begin for me in the
car, on a chilly late March day, about a month from now. The birds will finally
be returned to my backyard feeder. There will be a whiff of spring in the air
and tiny buds pushing up through the dirt. Remnants of the last snow will still
stick around, all muddy and melting in the driveway.
I'll turn on my radio and there it will soon be. A sound as
heart soaring as the first robin of the season singing away. A dependable soundtrack for life that soothes
my soul and comforts my heart and helps me believe in the constancy of this
life. Trusting that some things, some people, some hopes: they always come
back. They just have to.
Like baseball. Red Sox baseball. As it was. As it is. As it
will be. Preparations are already under way for this imminent arrival. Out of
shape players are training and huffing and puffing down south, to one day soon
come home to the city. Yes, it will probably snow again, maybe a couple of
times. Remember last March and those
wicked storms that caught us all off guard?
But the game, this past time: it can't be stopped. It will return.
It has to return.
There must be some things in life that we can count upon. Believe will still go on while other people
and events and fads fade away.
Truth is I fell out of love long ago with the more human,
fallen traits of professional sports.
The petulant and braggy personalities that come and go. The loud din of the media that inflates
sports to a crazy level of cultural importance.
The few players who will always cheat and find someway to win, even if
it breaks the rules. The business of the
sport, the reality that a night for a family at Fenway Park
is pretty darn expensive, out of reach for too many fans.
But this is not why I am still a fan.
I've realized after more than a half century of fandom that
what I really love about the Sox and spring and baseball is the constancy of it
all. It's year after year after year dependability. The fact that for most of
my life baseball has just been there, faithfully, as I've grown up from a
little boy listening to the game on my transistor radio late at night to a
fifty-something grown man who still jumps out of his Lazy Boy and yells in joy
when the BoSox win a nail biter or even the world championship.
We humans need to be able to believe in such faithfulness,
yes, even if it is corny and yes, even if it is overly romantic and even if it
breaks our hearts some times. Last week
I said a final goodbye to a dear friend and co-worker who was a constant
presence in my life for the last eleven years. Almost every day that I went to
work, I would open the church office door and see Jose sitting at her desk,
smiling, always ready to greet me and in her faithfulness, I somehow felt more
grounded in this life. Solid. Stable. So
when cancer took her away, it rocked my world.
It robbed me of the constancy I need.
We all need such constancy to claim a place to stand in this
world. Fidelity to people and in relationships: a marriage, a friendship, a
constant connection to one faithful soul who stays. In our God, in a faith that
at its best walks with us through all of the valleys and all of the mountaintops
that life throws our ways. In something
or someone or some ideal or some power or some hope that just keeps on keeping
on even as so much in modern life comes and goes, rises and falls, burns bright
and then burns out.
This is how the character of Terrence Mann, in the 1989
baseball film and fairy tale "Field of Dreams, spoke of the game and its
return every spring. "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has
been baseball. America
has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a
blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This
field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that
once was good and it could be again."
Even something as seemingly simple as a game, as an on field
competition among overgrown boys--even this can remind us of the hope in every
human heart that some things in life must be constant. Less than four weeks and counting to Opening
Day. It's time to pull the faded ball
cap out of the back of the coat closet and tune the radio to a game.
Come spring. Come hope. Come constancy. And play ball.
No comments:
Post a Comment