Secret Lives

Yesterday, I saw a dozen friends from the Coastal New England Baseball league at the Hampton Falls First Baptist church. They were sitting together in a pew in the back, looking none too happy.
We were there for a funeral.

2014 Champions; Our secret weapon in the 2nd row

When the email went out last week saying one of our long time players had died, a lot of people assumed it was me. I'm the oldest player in the league, by several years. "Dickie sort of died out of turn," someone said. 
"Well, he never did like following rules," another replied. 

I hadn't been to a Baptist church since I moved to New England. Of course, below the Mason Dixon line Baptist churches are like squirrels and deer--you see them everywhere.

I was reminded multiple times, during the service, that my soul was going straight to Hell because I had not been reborn in Christ. The Good News is, if only I decide to find Jesus, I can get right past St. Peter and waltz through the pearly gates.

What really astonished me is that in the four years I'd known Dickie, he never once mentioned God or Christ or anything religious. We talked baseball, mostly. He felt about baseball the way some people think of fly fishing--sort of a religion. He snorted at softball as a desecration of the sport. (Personally, I disagreed. I can't play softball because I'm no longer a good enough athlete. In softball, you have to provide all the power. In baseball, if you hit a 70 MPH fast ball, it's going out under its own power.) 

The minister told a story about a training session they did with Dickie at the church about how to be an effective evangelist. You were supposed to ask enough questions of your quarry to determine whether or not you had a receptive audience and then get to the save-your-soul part gently. But Dickie, not being one to follow any script, just sailed into the "Brother, your soul is in peril," the first time they went out into the field to save souls.

Dickie never mentioned anything about my soul to me. Maybe he could see it was hopeless.

Each of his four children spoke. The youngest was adopted from the Phillipines and she told how Dickie had flown out, only to be grounded by a volcano and he told her it would take more than a volcano to stop him from getting her home. She said he had given her a life she never could have had without him and their family. She had just had a child and she said the sort of love she felt for a child was something she could never have imagined and she now understood what Dickie felt for her. 

His son described playing baseball with his father. His father batted ahead of him in the line up and hit a home run. The catcher, looked over his shoulder and told the umpire, "Can you believe that old guy could hit one out of the park?"  The ump replied, "Well, then, you'd better watch out, 'cause his son is next up.'"  The son said, "And three strikes later, I knew I still had some work to do catching up to my father."

Much had been made about Dickie being proud of being left handed. "Everyone," he said, "Is born right handed. Some of us over come it."  But, he was disappointed, several speakers said, because none of his children was left handed. Then his older daughter got up and held up her left hand for everyone to see. It was really not a hand, but a stump, a birth deformity.  "Actually," she said, "He did have a left handed child, but I didn't count." She told the story of being in the Shriner's Hospital as an eight year old, having a horrible time, not wanting any of the hand prostheses offered. Dickie, sitting next to her bed, held up his hands and said, "I wish I could give you one of mine." And she replied, "Why would I want some giant hand?"

After the service, Dickie's baseball friends gathered in the church lobby and I said, "I never realized Dickie ever had a life outside baseball."
Everyone laughed and said they had been thinking  the same thing.
"They kept bringing up people from his church, from his family, from his engineering job, from his hockey team--who even knew he played hockey? And that project for disabled kids in Kenya? Did he ever say a word about going to Kenya?"

"I kept thinking what people would say at my funeral," someone said. 
"That you never could hit a curve." 
"No, really, you guys would be surprised to hear from the guys in my law firm. And my kids. And the Republican club."
"You a Republican? That, somehow, does not surprise me. You never could hit lefties."

Someone asked me if I had any secret lives they did not know about.  
Everyone should have secret lives, I thought. 
I'll have to work on that.