When I was in fourth grade I always finished my pre-recess desk work ahead of classmates’ so I could ready my baseball glove by pounding the pocket into softball size obedience in preparation for recess on the playground. In sixth grade when recess monitors readied the athletic equipment room for the switch from October baseball to November football, I led a revolt that created a 1956-57 Sierra Vista Elementary School recess dominated by baseball from the first day of school to the beginning of summer vacation. When I was ten, my baseball infatuation led to Little League and power-hitting prowess that made local sports page headlines. My fireplug build left defensive efforts wanting, but gave power to the swing of my bat. The praise that came my way sprouted in fantasies of Major League accomplishments like that of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Most nights for the next five years I dreamed major league baseball dreams and most days daydreamed a steady road of endless triumph in baseball with crowning glories of tickertape parades honoring World Series wins. It never occurred to me that the baseball door would close when part-time after-school jobs and batting female eyelashes entered my life. The thought that slugging homers would end and other skills emerge to replace them, and physical decay would eventually wipe them clean from life’s slate escaped my contemplation skills. Weakened and sore joints and muscles dominate my days now so that the best exercise I can muster is grunting and groaning as I clumsily climb out of the recliner. Invincible at ten, I’m now very “vincible.”

After school jobs and batting eyelashes may have felt like unfortunate obstacles to major league fantasies at the time, but maturity assured me that hitting homeruns is overrated. Climbing to the summit of Los Angeles Dodger homerun statistics would have challenged every cell of body and mind, and likely have failed. The odds of reaching pro ball summits require a microscope to see they are so miniscule. What’s more, baseball obsessions would have diverted me from other things. Schooling, travels, youthful ventures, and the people and achievements that accompanied them would have been very different. Some mistakes might have been skirted, but so would some of my most cherished memories. As my hair grayed and thinned, someone suggested I join a softball league team. My reaction surprised even me. It was as alluring as a dinner plate of insects like that of reality show survivalist contestants. Baseball is okay but maniac fandom is no longer in my wheelhouse. My baseball needs are filled by televised games during fall playoffs and the World Series. I’m happy I did not spend myself on an occupation that makes its most successful occupants useless at the age of 39 and those less successful even younger. Fortunate people are at their occupational peak just as they enter retirement.

I think it was 2004 of my pastor days when I looked down the front of my pulpit robe while descending a sanctuary riser, only to miss the bottom step and fall headlong onto my face before a few horrified front-pewed worshipers who heard the thud that the organ kept the rest from hearing and felt the quake of my belly flop. At the time I blamed my bifocals, but quickly found truth pointing to physical diminishment. For a time I ascended and descended steps with aplomb but sensing unsteadiness and possessing a smidgeon of wisdom, deliberative pauses slowly preceded my stairway ventures. My fervor of youth grew sedate. The 30-something Jim became but a faint memory, and few remain who knew me then (truly evidence of grace showered on them). I no longer spend weekends on trips and retreats with teens. Early enthusiasm has imperceptively morphed into quiet rumination, with an occasional detour into cynicism. The siren temptation of slackened pace at first spoke in whispered tones, then in firm declarative voice, and finally in deafening shouts. Sometimes the transformation felt like maturity growing into a steadiness able to discern trivial from crucial. In its best moments I heard the vocabulary of wisdom saying from someplace beyond the here and now, "I have something else for you to do."

I was saved from a career as a professional baseball slugger, successful or just wannabe, and for that I’m grateful and credit a Higher Power for directing the path that led there. I enjoyed the challenges and rewards that came my way, that the tasks required of me mattered, and that occasionally the waters of passing things parted and, if only briefly, the things that are eternal were saluted. Though adults no longer ask me, as they did in my first decade, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’m still not sure what the answer is. After all, I’m not grown up yet, even though I live in what they call my twilight years.