In the summer heat, when I feel like snoozing under the air conditioner for a siesta— baseball—like an umpire, nudges me in the ribs and whispers, “You better wake up, or you’ll miss it.” Miss what? The stuff of life that matters, that’s what: the essential things that so easily slip through your fingers, the events lost in the routine, the joie de vivre, the joy of living.
It’s summer, and I’m regularly checking the St. Louis Cardinals score on my ESPN app. I’ve been a Cardinals fan since I can remember. I used to walk across the street from my grandparent’s house to visit Great-Grandad Whitlock. By then, he was in his late 90’s or early 100’s and still able to live by himself. Every night, or Sunday afternoons, he would tune to AM radio station, KMOX, listening to Cardinal baseball. It was common for Great-Grandad, a retired Baptist minister in Oklahoma, to stay up till midnight or later if the game went into extra innings or started late. He was a Cardinal fan from way back when because St. Louis was for years the only major league team west of the Mississippi, and the Dean brothers, Dizzy and Paul, and Pee Wee Reese, were Okies.
Besides that, his grandson, my dad, went to dental school at Washington University in St. Louis, where my older brother, Mark, was born. Like Great-Grandad, Mark would stay up late, listening to Cardinal baseball on KMOX. On October 4, 1964, the last day of season play, Mark sat in the garage, listening from our parents’ Cadillac Sedan Deville, as Jack Buck announced the play-by-play game against the Mets, which the Cardinals won, 11-5, capturing the pennant by one game, with Bob Gibson the winning picture. Mark bolted out of the car, running into our front yard, hollering to me, where I happened to be tossing a baseball up in the air, playing solo catch, having had one ear cocked to the radio. I dropped the ball when Mark shook me, “The Cardinals won the pennant, the Cardinals won the pennant, the Cardinals won the pennant.” We immediately celebrated with a game of catch while listening to the Dave Clark Five’s hit song, “Glad all over,” full blast on the radio, like two little devotees of some primitive religion when their gods proved invincible.
And what does this have to do with joie de vivre?
We, Lori and I, were at one of my grandson’s ball games earlier this spring when she turned to me and asked, “Does baseball always last this long?”
I get it.
Eli, our 9-year-old grandson, is in his first year of “kid pitch.” The games last longer, almost two hours. And my wife, who didn’t grow up with baseball, isn’t used to that. “Baseball is a slow game,” I tried to explain, “what with pitchers warming up between innings, batters stepping out of the plate between pitches, and coaches strategizing. Eli’s games are becoming more like ‘real’ baseball.'”
We like watching Eli throw a dart across the infield, go two for three at the plate, or catch a fly ball.
It’s the stuff between that drags: the warm-ups, the foul balls, the home-plate umpire calling “time” to wipe off the plate.
But then again…
That’s when we see our grandson struggling to latch on his catcher’s armor, with beads of sweat forming on his forehead. That’s when I notice him silently acknowledging my “Good play Eli,” or wince at his downcast eyes when he strikes out, or spy him shuffling his feet, kicking the dirt on the first base bag, or hear his voice chanting with his teammates waiting on the bench.
That’s when his little sister tugs on one of our shirt sleeves, asking for money to get a snow cone, in between playing chase with her five-year-old friends, and her mom, my daughter, rocking her right foot, crossed over her left leg, when Eli is at-bat, and my son-in-law, Eli’s dad, reminding his son to “swing steady.”
And it’s talking about the dust and dry weather and whose at-bat next with people I only see at ball games as we wait for the next pitch.
“For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven,” wrote Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3:1. The wise old king of Israel didn’t know baseball, but he knew that you grasp the joie de vivre in the seasons hidden within the seasons, for life isn’t usually thrown at you as you expect. Just when you’re anticipating a curve, you get a fastball, and if you don’t connect with the moment, it’ll swish by you, out of sight, disappearing into the fold of the catcher’s mitt.