CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…
[The Reds’ pitchers and
catchers report for spring training today.]
Jimmy Moore, our pastor,
tells of how his father, older that most fathers when Jimmy was born, would
come home from work, dead tired, but still play catch with him. Baseball
uniting fathers and sons—a red thread of meaning that has run through baseball
from its beginnings, as in the movie Field
of Dreams, based on W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe.
It’s not just fathers and
sons. Many younger men, with mothers who grew up in the 1970s or later, when
sports for girls were coming to the fore, say that their mothers were the ones
who were their sports playmates and mentors, and often coaches, the ones who
taught them how to play ball.
And fathers and daughters.
Rebecca Ninke’s parents were in their forties when they married and adopted
children and were not sure how to raise kids, but her dad knew he should play
catch with her, and that gave her a sense of identity. [1]
I think girls who play
sports have a better body image. They don’t think of boys as strange creatures
if they can compete with them. Because of that, they relate more easily to
boys. Our younger daughter, Katie Kennedy, the famous YA author [2], was the
only girl on a twenty-two member cross-country team [3]. She saw those guys
sweat and stumble and puke with exhaustion and fall by the roadside, just as
she did. They were just teammates, not an alien species.
It doesn’t take baseball,
or sports at all, to create memories of good times together, parents with
children, but in our culture, baseball is one of those mythic deep wells of
memories. I think that is one of the reasons we love it so much.
My father never played
catch with me, in great part because he lost his eyesight when I was five years
old. But Uncle Randall, my father’s brother, taught me to swing a bat and to
love the Reds, and later Uncle Johnny, my mother’s youngest brother, gave me
his own old bat and ball and glove and hit flies to me by the hour.
The people who think they
own baseball {MLB} need to remember that it’s not really about the baseball.
It’s about the memories, those present and those to come.
JRMcF
I tweet as yooper1721. Now
that we are no longer Yoopers [denizens of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where
winter is thirteen months long] I would change my “handle” to something more
current, like “writesfortfunandprophet,” but I don’t know how.
1] I’m not sure Lutheran
pastor friend Rebecca can be trusted about identities. She says that she and I
are twins, except that I am old, male, Methodist, and eat meat.
2] Learning to Swear in America and
What Goes Up, published by Bloomsbury, and available from B&N, Amazon,
Powell’s, and your friendly independent neighborhood book store.
3] The only girl ever to
win a letter in a boys’ sport at Hoopeston-East Lynn High School, Hoopeston,
IL.
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