Canter Bridge

Back then, ‘work stoppage’ belonged to the patois of the factory, not the baseball diamond.

It had not yet become the lingua franca that mediates between the players’ ‘strike’ and the owners’ ‘lockout’. You played baseball for fun and for as long as you could, and you assumed everyone else who could did the same. The idea of deciding not to play baseball had not occurred to us, perhaps like the concept ‘Interstate Highway’ before the invention of the wheel. If picketing at the plant meant some kids ate tuna fish for two weeks straight, at least you could comfort yourself with the Phillies’ box score in the morning paper. If they had beat up on the Mets, labor disputes or a dad’s missed paycheck seemed a slightly irritating footnote.

Back then, miraculous healing was in the air. A stomach-ache serious enough to keep a guy out of summer school often fled at approximately 4:45 in the afternoon, allowing its erstwhile victim to be observed trotting to the field by a quarter after five, no longer doubled over in pain, cleats in hand and candy bar in pocket. You might have struggled to remember what denomination your family belonged to, but you never missed batting practice. We were very religious.

Yes, there were perils. Shoehorned in between the Susquehanna River and the local delegation of the Appalachian mountains, our little town’s sewage treatment plant—just down the right-field line—delivered itself of an overpowering stench about every three and a half innings. This was a kind of double-speed seventh-inning stretch without the inhalation. A stranger could have followed his nose to the baseball field. If he was too dumb for that—strangers were often very dim—you could have directed him to the plant by telling him just to follow the right-field line.

An emergency visit to the weeds behind center field could leave a kid with a case of Poison Ivy in the nether regions that made the unyouthful idea of mortality seem a blessing too long deferred. Job-like, he scraped himself with shards and groaned for the end.

We didn’t know the word ‘self-image’, but collective attempts to keep that foreign concept at bay were de rigueur. My nickname ‘Beaver’—friends called me ‘Beav’—was inspired by nature’s endowment of buck teeth, a feature of my appearance that eventually ceded to the metallic counterattack of braces after someone began to call it ‘overbite’.

You didn’t complain. You just kept your eye on the ball, especially if you had a man in scoring position. My man-made endowment of a crew cut was enough to generate a second nickname: ‘Moon’. Thirty years later, old acquaintances still greet my occasional visit with those names.

My father had played well. His curve ball took him to a series of White Sox minor league teams in the Midwest, where he met my mother. She came back east to root from the bleachers at home games and bruise her shins playing shortstop on Sunday afternoon family outings at the ballpark. Dad returned to drive a truck and preside over the local town council for years after that, but it wasn’t decades without a sick day or years of small-town public service that made him a local hero. Baseball did that.

You either followed the Phillies or you plumped for the Orioles. It was almost like your race, only you got to choose. The occasional kid who declared himself a Yankees fan was considered an aberration, to be tolerated the way people do with an uncle who drinks too much. There was clearly something wrong, but maybe it was ‘genes’ and he couldn’t help himself.

None of this was remarkable. It was just the way things were. Perhaps that’s why I was a little offended—years later, living in England—to hear baseball described as a ‘game of waiting’, with brief furies of motion spaced by interminable periods when nothing happens. I had never thought of it like that. It still seems grotesquely off base. But there I go again, speaking from the viscera the language of baseball.

Perhaps there is waiting in baseball, if one must entertain the accusations of the mad. If so, it has nothing to do with ‘nothing happens’. Between pitch and swing and run, there is a world full of strategizing, of signaling, of warming up, of wanton crotch-scratching that would be banned in any other public space, of pinch-hitting, of lefty versus righty, of calling back to the dugout, of chatter in the infield, of dusting off and feinting to go, of really going, of ‘there-he-goes’, of sliding, of cleats in the air, of second baseman leaping over a cloud of dust to save his skin.

If this is waiting, it is the fullest imaginable kind.

That’s the kind of high-tensile, alert waiting I watch now, as my eyes gleam with pride. Out on the ‘pitch’ my favorite midfielder moves fluidly from defense to offense and back again. Transition is his game, the Germanic surname ‘Baer’ on the back of my son’s ‘strip’ mixing it up with ‘Sánchez’, ‘Rodríguez’, and the like. A whole new vocabulary has invaded the sporting language of our family as we’ve made our way and raised our boys in Latin America and England. Sadly, it has nothing to do with gloves, breaking pitches, or double plays.

My wife’s ‘Wilson’ glove collects dust in the back of the closet. Worse, my ‘Spalding’ leather was left at a friend’s house and never recovered. In my day, this would have ranked just behind discovering Aunt Mae buried in the basement on any decent person’s table of horrors. On my children’s list of domestic tragedies, it lies just ahead of leaving the ice cream out over night or forgetting to feed the dogs.

Soccer is the thing now. It is every spare moment, it is recreation and deadly serious and Wednesdays after school and Saturdays on any muddy open space. We know it in three languages: soccer where we came from, football on a foggy island where we grew oddly endeared to Newcastle United and Liverpool FC, futbol where we now live.

It is 90 minutes of ceaseless motion. It is headers and corner kicks and yellow cards and muscle and lung. Unlike baseball, it never stops.

Or so they say. Watching my midfielder, I know better. He is waiting.

He is neither static nor passive nor still, but I know he waits. With cunning instincts and practiced intelligence, his eye studies the field of blue and orange that moves kaleidoscopically before him. He trots here, backtracks there, angles towards the sidelines, jets toward the center. Every movement on this field matters, though some more than others. Deep inside that 14-year-old brain, computer-like, probabilities are instantly measured, angles are brought under calculus, decisions are simultaneously produced and enacted.

It is stealthy and restrained. It is calculating and cool. At the proper instant, it explodes into passionate action. One of myriad probabilities becomes reality, and Johnny is there. A half-second before, a quarter-second later would not have worked. But his calculation is a perfect one this time. He receives the ball from his defender with a fluid left foot while his eyes search a new set of possibilities just ahead. Slanting towards center, he adds two effortless touches, now at something closer—but not quite—to full speed. Orange defenders collapse in his direction. He has become their prey and their danger. His eyes never look down. They are a scanning miracle, now thirty yards nearer the goal. He looks right and at an impossible moment sends the ball—it looks like blind luck but is in fact the most astute foresight—left, towards his own angling teammate who touches once and goooooooooooaaaaaaaaallll!

I ask him later what quality a midfielder needs most. ‘Stamina’, he replies without hesitation. You have to wait so long sometimes, so energetically, so astutely, so invisibly.

Ken sits across from me at Starbucks, his forearms on the table between us, his hands perpendicular to the surface, palm facing palm.

Ken is one of the holiest men I know, earthy, without pretence, set apart not by sanctimony but by uncommon integrity. I anticipate every chance we have to talk, to compare notes, to catch up, to laugh before a departing flight takes me far from him and plunks me down in front of the stingy gray of email. Faithful to his wife through thick and thin—there has been some of both—Ken and I have walked parallel paths through the obstacle course that is marriage, family, and their seductive alternatives.

‘The problem with being middle-aged’, he tells me with something earnest shadowing his face, yet the beginnings of a grin lightening its corners, ‘is that the range of women who are attractive does not shift.’ His two palms maintain their spacing and move across the table to his right. Always the effective teacher, he allows me to see what that scenario might have looked like. ‘It does not shift’, he explains. A pause. ‘It expands.’ Now the space between his hands steadily grows, opening up to measure a table-wide panorama of attractive landscape. He peers at me over his cup of Kenyan brew to see whether I comprehend the poignant dilemma of a faithful man in a beautiful world.

I do.

Ken waits. Attentively, gratefully, astutely, he invests himself in the circumstances he has chosen. Ken’s life mimics the alert and goal-bound readiness of sport. On a recent dash to his office, he turned to me and said, entirely unprovoked, ‘I am so fortunate that Lisa loves me.’ I could barely see his scars.

When our family first met Doris, she lived with her little boy in a haphazardly thrown-together wooden house whose crazy angles clung to a hill over a river that frequently flooded the neighborhood. Doris could be found chasing the rats that fled the rising tide from her squeaky clean floors with a lethal broom and a how-dare-you look on her face.

We knew little about Doris’ husband. He had been killed in a motorcycle accident recently enough that her nights over the foul-smelling river must have longed for a man to bolt the door and share the covers. Doris was a domestic maid. Such women occupy the next-to-the-lowest rung on Central America’s social ladder. Survival in that jungle too frequently comes down to conniving thievery or honest poverty. Dignity is a luxury few can afford. If you have it, you carved it out for yourself with bare hands. In Doris’ neighborhood, you could buy lots of things on the street corner, but nothing that could help you to hold your head high. That had to come from within.

In Doris’ case, it did.

For several years, Doris spent two days a week in our house washing clothes, peeling one toddler from another, baby-sitting, and mopping floors. In these parts, maids jostle for jobs in foreign homes like ours. We are rumored to sneer less, pay more, and forget about the money we leave in the pockets of our trousers. When you only take home a few dollars a day, five dollars absent-mindedly abandoned in the right pocket of the boss’ dirty khakis goes far towards putting food on the table next week. He’ll never miss five dollars.

Which is why the right front corner of my office desk became a shrine to heroic patience, to the costliest kind of waiting. On the afternoon of laundry days, a small offering used to appear in that place, erratically but not infrequently, four or five coins, a small-numbered bill, on one or two bank days enough for Doris to make a month’s payment on her ramshackle collection of boards down by the river. Meanwhile, my washed and pressed trousers would be laid, respectfully, in their closet.

Over the years, a maid’s small fortune, the tattered edges of a foreigner’s financial life, accumulated in that sacred spot. Doris seemed politely offended that I would thank her for her honesty, so I eventually stopped. It became our silent contract to say nothing. Why should a woman with her head held high be thanked for doing the right thing? I reluctantly ceded to dignity’s strange logic, imposed upon my home by Doris, from down by the river.

I have not seen Doris in years. To this day, I cannot think of her as poor. She worked out a fine schedule of evening studies that allowed her, over the course of several years, to work patiently towards her high school equivalency degree. Once or twice, I failed to stifle a smile as she tried out some newly-minted English phrase on us or explained how hard algebra was getting to be.

She tried her hand for a while at being a receptionist, but found smiling at an endless stream of strangers rather more awkward than mopping floors for people who had forgotten that she was not a member of the family.

Eventually, the government bought out Doris and her neighbors in order to pour that ever-flooding river into huge concrete pipes and hustle it, underground, to some even less fortunate place outside the city. Doris was able to buy a compact little row house south of the city, where sewage smells from the river no longer filled her kitchen, even if the neighbors had to run out en masse into the street whenever thieves ran up and down their row of roofs looking for an easy mark. Doris felt uneasy about her next-door neighbor’s gun, but decided it was probably better that the thieves knew he had one.

Though maids don’t do so, Doris invited us over for dinner in her new little house, four gringos squashed around a little dining room table under a bare bulb. Raising a teenage son was not going easily, and the evidence of disappointment was not invisible. Doris was still very active at church, a bustling spiritual family two bus-rides away for which she seemed to have become something of a pillar. Maids around here have strong arms and legs, but Doris’ strength went deeper. She was not unattractive and would not have struggled to find a man, though perhaps she would have been frustrated by the character of the available ones. She once mentioned that a ‘brother’ from church had shown interest, but it didn’t go anywhere. I feel certain that Doris, one evening at home while her son was out somewhere, decided over the dishes that the man wasn’t the right kind. That would have been the end of it.

Contentedness competes with a thousand loud alternatives. In the center of this mêlée, biblical wisdom would teach us to wait. Waiting has nothing at all to do with voluntary passivity. Waiting is virtually an athletic tour de force. It is restraint and cunning when to act is the short sprint of fools.

Sometimes the biblical story speaks of a kind of waiting that is the faith of the desperate. When one has done all one can do, yet the threat which surrounds grows ever closer, biblical figures like the rejected prophet Isaiah or the anonymous psalmist wait for the Lord. Ammunition spent, lungs burning, public turned against him, options exhausted, this lonely figure waits as one waits for a bus while the skies darken with approaching rain. If God does not show up, it is going to get very wet.

But faith knows another kind of waiting that is not the costly resignation of the desperate, but rather the contented self-giving of the focussed. This is the habit of the person who knows where she is headed, who believes so forcefully in the destination that she will not compromise the journey. It is the passionate embrace of one’s circumstances. To wait in this way is to throw one’s arms around the limitations that one’s commitments have built into this life. It is to renounce a thousand alternatives in order to invest in the single thing that one has chosen. It is to know that the sweetest things are available outside those limitations right now, but to decide that the best and the richest await me at my destination. It knows that the most stunning artistry is achieved when one refuses to mix one’s paints. Though it can feel like an illogical leap of faith, it is instead a determined sticking to the plan during the dark, the mediocre, and the disappointing. It is refusing to lurch in a new direction when the visibility has grown very, very poor.

To wait in this way is to bet on the future that one chose in the past.

The late ethicist Lewis Smedes observed that biblical faith forecloses every option for knowing and shaping the future except one: to make promises and keep them. Astrology, magic, the artful manipulation of one’s peers, and a panoply of less esoteric machinations are no recourse for the person who believes this world is governed by a divine person who is good, and worthy of our trust. Such a believer renounces his desire to know the future, giving himself instead to a way of living that constructs a worthwhile world for those who will follow, in glad cooperation with God’s purpose.

To do so is to live expectantly. It is to wait. It is to engage the power of ‘I do’ and ‘I will’. It is to promise, without comprehending all that one is saying, ‘I will be there for you, as I will be for no other.’ Given the commitments I have made, it persuades itself, I will trust that ultimate satisfaction consists not in furtive deviation from them but rather in following them through to the end.

The most needed quality for enduring this long game is stamina. You never know how long, how astutely, how sacrificially, how invisibly you might need to wait, as the brain whirls and the heart yearns. But you know deep in your bones that this game, if you keep your eye on the ball, leads to celebration.

From somewhere earthy, authentic, and focussed, an ancient phrase reverberates. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’, it can be discerned to say to a generation that no longer has a word for purity. ‘For they shall see God.’