Foul Ball Redemption

I have attended many baseball games in my life. Though I could speak of winning pitchers, dramatic homeruns, and dazzling catches- I have decided instead to use valuable column space to share with you some experiences I have had with foul balls. And if you're still reading at the end, there will be a point to this column. My first foul ball encounter occurred when I was eleven and my parents took me to see my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates play. At one point during pre-game batting practice, Manny Sanguillen- one of my favorite players- lifted a foul ball near the left field foul line that magically guided itself directly toward my personal space on planet Earth. Every child's dream. The fact I wasn't wearing my glove was irrelevant. I was about to catch my first foul ball. At about the same time my eyes recognized the distinctive red seams of a baseball, the self-preservation area of my brain secreted a message to the rest of my body, causing that body to bail out and duck for cover. A split second later the ball struck the seat behind me and bounced back onto the playing field. I was crushed and embarrassed. Some twenty years later I was attending a jam packed high school state playoff baseball game and decided to place my folding chair on a hill far down the right field line so I could be alone and peacefully evaluate some players I was recruiting. About midway through the game, a player stroked a line drive foul ball in my direction. I calculated the odds of a ball striking a person sitting all by himself to be extremely low and concluded that the best thing to do was not move and play it cool. A millisecond before would-be impact, my brain again secreted survival waves and I moved my head slightly to the right just in time to avoid a natural disaster. Most of the crowd laughed while a few hissed at the “cowardly moron” sitting by himself who didn't have the sense to get up and move when a line drive was headed his way. And so the saga continued. Until a recent high school JV game in which my son was playing. While I was sitting in the bleachers, a foul ball was launched high into the air and appeared to be descending in my vicinity. Again, knowing the odds were against it landing on me, I kept my seat as usual. But the ball, my right hand, and destiny would all meet in one dramatic instant. I reached up at the last moment and the ball stuck like glue in the palm of my hand. I tossed it back onto the field as an impressed crowd observed. A friend a few rows away yelled, “Hey, you can mark that off your list just like catching a (miniature) football from a cheerleader!” Maybe she has a point, I thought. So as soon as possible I checked the “To Do Before I Die (Bucket List)” on my laptop and there it was, bigger than life: “Catch a foul ball in the air at a baseball game.” As I crossed it off the list, I couldn't help but think that Manny Sanguillen would be proud, even if it was almost forty years late.

Sticking close vs. Letting Go

I have a love/hate relationship with super glue. I'm not questioning its effectiveness. I have used it in the past to hold together oodles of items, including the soles of shoes at times. Most recently I used it to repair a pair of broken sunglasses. The sunglasses were cheapies, but I'm attached to them. And smack dab in the middle of a baseball winning streak, I stepped on them and broke them into two pieces. "Gotta find some super glue," I told my assistant coach, "we can't mess with a win streak." The line came from a movie but everybody knows you don't change things during a win streak, underwear nothwithstanding. I've had those same sunglasses for about three years as best I can remember. If my memory serves me correctly, I paid three dollars for them. And they held up well until I stepped on them. "Coach, where are the sunglasses?" one of my players asked at practice that day. "No fear," I said, "I will find some super glue." Later that night I found some at home and set to work on my treasured shades. When I finished, they were a little whoppy-jawed and some of the super glue ran onto the lens, but they were intact and re-ready for action. I showed up the next day with my sunglasses and the win streak both intact. I have a perfectly good pair of replacment shades primed and ready for action, but they will wait in the wings as the first runner-up until the winner can no longer perform its duties. So why am I not a huge fan of super glue if it continually pulls me out of binds? Simple: I can't handle the stuff without getting it stuck on my fingers. And yes, I've accidentally glued my fingers together before, like many of you have, though few are willing to admit it. There are few sensations more irritating or distracting than super glue stuck to your personal self in some manner, especially your fingers. No amount of scrubbing with soap, water, and/or alcohol can rid me of the nuisance. Sometimes you gotta wait it out. Eventually the dead skin is replaced by a new layer and the super glue nemesis fades into oblivion. You wake up one day and the sensation is gone, but the new layer of skin is tougher than the last. I'm no theologian but I think there may be some sort of lesson in all this sunglasses and super glue mumbo jumbo. Sometimes we have to let go of things we are attached to. And other times we have to use everything at our disposal to repair the damage. The trick is knowing whether or not to open the super glue and risk becoming sticky and messy. Letting go can be painful but liberating. Conversely, enduring sticky situations can leave us tougher and stronger and more bonded than we were before. Life can't be fixed. Sometimes the best thing we can do is weather the storm and let it take its course. But there's also something to be said for resisting with all your might and all your resources when the storm's effects can be minimized. So where does that leave my sunglasses? For now, they're still on my head, stuck to my eyebrow.

Retiring From Beauty Pageants

Perhaps I opened a can of worms in last week’s column that I wasn’t quite ready to fish with. Lest your imaginations run wild, I now feel I must use valuable column space this week to clarify my participation in two separate womanless beauty pageants. It is indeed true that I participated and received the first place prize in a womanless beauty pageant at my church in South Carolina ten years ago. First let me note that no man wants to win a womanless beauty pageant, at least not this man. So the fact that I achieved that feat is not a source of pride or accomplishment to me. But win I did. Probably because I bucked the system and, emerging as the last contestant, rebelled against common dignity and appeared with a couch cushion stuffed in my “dress” to indicate my pregnantness. And to add to the effect, I grabbed a jar of pickles at the last minute and pretended to throw up a few times while walking down the “runway”. Mind you, I did all this to raise money for a good cause. Churches dress men up in women clothes so we can raise money to send mission teams to foreign places to teach people how to properly conduct themselves as godly men and women. Go figure. Of course it’s all in fun and the cause truly was a good one. So when I heard my current church would be conducting a similar pageant a few weeks back, I debated whether or not to risk losing my title. In the end, the event coordinators forced me to enter and in doing so, I saw an opportunity to relinquish my crown once and for all. I decided to rebel again and go with the whole pregnant theme and coming out last routine. This time, with my wife’s help and blessing, I sported a bathrobe, slippers, and sponge curlers in my wig. All was going well beforehand until me and some of the guys backstage got a little carried away. Unfortunately for everyone in attendance, I discovered a small baby doll in the church nursery where I was dressing before the performance. Why in the world I decided to stuff the hapless child up into my bathrobe next to my pillow I don’t rightly know. But I did. And at the proper moment, in front of several hundred fine Christian onlookers, I birthed a baby on stage. Caught up in the moment was I. Devoid of good sense was I. Inconceivably out of my gourd was I. Fortunately for me and everyone in attendance, I did not place in the top three. A guy in my Sunday school class who dressed like Cleopatra took home the crown. Thus my reign ended. Thankfully. And I decided then to hang up the wig and bathrobe for good. But the reverberations reverberated the next day at church. The pastor publicly mentioned something about a “churching,” which I think is similar to excommunication. I don’t know if I imagined it, but there were whispers about my continuing as a deacon. However, it seems everyone is okay now that I have announced my retirement. Hopefully I won’t pull a Brett Favre and come back seven or eight more times. (Unless it’s for a good cause.)

Parking dilemmas

I've never been good at parking, parallel or otherwise. When choosing the DMV where I would get my license when I was 16, I was careful to avoid a location anywhere near a parallel parking situation. Thus I remained unprepared and intimidated by the whole parking gig. The town where I live, Boiling Springs, is inundated with parallel parking spots near the one stoplight in the center of town. I avoid those spots like the plague. The few times I tried to parallel park in one of those spots in the past led to personal embarrassment and public humiliation. On more that one occasion I gave it a try, but eventually gave up, pulled out, and moved on while the waiting traffic and pedestrians observed. "Check out the moron who stopped traffic for five minutes for nothing," I think I heard them say. I tell you all this to set up the recent scene which occurred at the local Dollar General. There are no parallel parking spots there but the spaces are nonetheless cramped and challenging to negotiate. As I pulled into the parking lot that fateful afternoon, I noticed one available spot on the back row nearest to the road. I also observed two young men sitting on the tailgate of a truck directly across from the parking spot. Surmising that it would be extremely difficult to back out of the spot when I returned from inside, I made a courageous decision. I took a deep breath, mentally crossed my fingers, and decided to back into the spot with the goal of facing outward so I could easily pull out later. I could feel the eyes of the young men bearing down on me as I pulled forward, came to a stop, then turned the wheel hard to the right as I slowly began backing. "Don't panic," I told myself. "Use your mirrors and your common sense. Bad idea, forget your common sense. Just use your mirrors and whip it in there." With every bit of humility and modesty I can muster, I must say that I absolutely nailed it. On the first try. When I got out of my truck, my eyes witnessed a masterpiece of epic proportions. My truck rested precisely in the center of the parking spot, proudly facing outward for the world to see. The front end of my truck was smiling broadly at me in amazement and appreciation. So impressive was my feat that one of the young men on back of the truck commented, "Great parking job, Dude." I have played on state championship baseball teams and coached a world series team. I have received member of the year awards at two colleges where I've worked. And ten years ago I won first place in a womanless beauty pageant. Yet I can say that at that moment, when an impressed teenager paid homage to me for a parking job well done, I beamed with indescribable pride. "You are an absolute stud," I said to myself as I tipped my cap to the bewildered teens. And I strutted as if I had been doing it all my life. Franklin Roosevelt once said, "All we have to fear is fear itself." From this day forward, I will no longer fear parking spot dilemmas. (Unless they are of the parallel sort.)

The curse and blessing of technology

Technology has been driving me up a wall lately. I started counting up the things that were causing me stress recently, and the vast majority of my anxiety involved breakdowns of devices invented to supposedly make my life easier. There's a computer module thing-a-ma-jig that hides out of sight somewhere near the dashboard of my son's truck. Apparently it controls a lot of stuff I never knew about because when it decided to become unruly, various sorts of craziness ensued. The horn didn't work, the oil light stuck in the on position, and both headlights went out despite being supplied with perfectly good bulbs. The new cell phone I got in December when my old one conked out has begun misbehaving. It- not me- decides when, where, and if it wants to turn on and off. And I've made at least ten "pocket calls"- you know, the kind where your phone calls somebody when you didn't intend to. I'm quite certain it has a mind of its own. But the biggest pain in my technological life has been that wretched laptop of mine. I can't begin to explain to you the complicated tenuous love/hate relationship that dominates our mutual existence. I appreciate the fact my laptop partners with me in the production of these columns each week. I have three completed books and portions of two others stored on my laptop. And she keeps me connected to the world through the web. But I've got to admit, the laptop is a constant source of disdain for me. She won't turn on and off correctly. She freezes all the time. She taunts me by flashing error messages virtually every time I try to do anything. And recently, she decided she would no longer connect to the internet. My wife swore off the laptop weeks ago. I kept telling her that instead of hollering at it, she should just get up, walk away, and go upstairs to the PC in the bonus room. My wife took my advice and has been a better person ever since. When the strain of our relationship reached its peak, I made a drastic decision. As a result, we (my laptop and me) are currently going through a separation. We tried going to a computer specialist for therapy burt he said he needed to keep her for 10 days or so. I told him to take his time. We need our space. Not to be deterred, I produced this column on the upstairs PC. But technology would make a dramatic comeback on the day the baseball team I coach played its first home game in the new stadium. As the sun began to set, the brand new stadium lights gradually brightened and illuminated the field. And they came on automatically because I had called a guy in Iowa the day before and told him to set the lights to come on. He tapped a key on his computer and Poof! Let there be light. It was a beautiful sight to behold. As frustrated as I was with all my techno gadgets, those lights made me appreciate living in the advanced age we enjoy. I felt like stopping the game and calling the folks in Iowa to thank them for flipping the switch. And maybe I would have, but my cellphone wasn't working.

Feeling like a hero

It started for me when I was in high school. Because my mom was a fifth grade teacher, I spent as much time as possible hanging out with the kids in her class. I had a blast with the kids and for whatever reason, they treated me like a hero or something. One of the fifth grade girls even handed me a Coke outside the locker room after I played in a high school football game one Friday night. In a scene similar to the one with Mean Joe Green in the famous commercial, I gave her one of my jerseys when she gave me the drink. As I grew older, I made sure not to grow up. I’ve tried over the years to hang out with the elementary kids as a lunch buddy and as an occasional speaker at their assemblies and on other special days. Recently I was asked to speak to the first graders at a local elementary school on Hero Day. The teacher informed me that due to my being the college baseball coach in town as well as the author of this weekly column, I was somewhat of a hero (she used the term celebrity) to the kids. It was an honor to go speak but it’s comical to me to be considered a hero or a celebrity. I was even more intimidated when I showed up and the poster behind me said something about heroes and there were pictures of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. plastered all over it. Then all of a sudden it hit me. None of those guys were available to speak so they went for the first person who was willing to take the gig. And this person was proud to accept. The script is similar every time I do one of these things. I talk a little bit about working hard in school and not giving up. I tell them how bad I was at baseball when I first started. Then I read them the little children’s book I wrote (as yet unpublished) about a paper clip who overcame multiple obstacles to eventually succeed in holding some important papers together. Yes, it’s cheesy but it’s mine. Then it’s question time. Most want to tell me about their coach pitch and little league teams and how they toss with their brother in the back yard. That’s cool and I’m always glad to hear about that sorta thing. But I really like it when they ask me questions about writing. It’s a nice aside from the usual sports stuff. One of the little boys in the most recent class I visited raised his hand and asked simply, “Where do the words come from?” It was quite possibly the most profound question I’ve ever been asked. One that I couldn’t fully answer other than to say the words only form when I turn off the television, the video games, and either sit quietly or stick my nose in a book. No matter how wise I become as the years roll on, I can always learn something from a child. And I may not be a real hero, but when the kids step out of line to give me a high five while walking down the hall with their class, I sure feel like one.