Baseball
It all changed with one pitch and a hit.
One moment, the home team’s up six runs and then, with the crack of the bat, the ball soared over the right field fence and brought three men across home plate.
One pitch.
One hit.
The opposing team cut the lead in half in the bottom of the eighth inning.
Suddenly, despite the previous pitches, hits, scores and outs, I was acutely aware of the possibility of defeat. My team might lose.
Sitting there, listening to the game, I remembered another time, long ago, when I learned the acute sting of potential loss.
I grew up on a farm in central Kentucky. Not a Thoroughbred farm, mind you. Ours was a cattle-corn-tobacco-hay farm with a handful of Quarter Horses thrown in for pleasure and competition. My grandparents gave both my little brother and me heifers one year. I suppose it was a good payment for counting cows during calving season, slinging hay flakes and corn in winter, and checking fences no matter the weather.
One day, I stepped off the bus, checked the mail box, then began the quarter-mile trek down the gravel drive. Just over the cattle guard, I saw my heifer, panting and wild-eyed. When she turned, I saw why. Too early, the protrusion of tiny hooves, a tiny snout, that tiny tongue. I grew up with cows dropping calves. This was anything but normal.
I flung my backpack and the ever-present book to the ground, abandoned the gravel drive to a shortcut through the field. I cared not for the ticks or the sting of thistles I plowed through. I cared for nothing but my heifer and her calf — my calf.
I prayed as I ran, tears stinging my eyes, “Please God, please God, please God.”
You see, once a heifer gives birth, she is called a cow. A cow is a producer in whose womb is an implicit promise — one day, a calf.
If the cow drops another little female, there is the potential of two producers. Farmers can keep one and sell the other, once weaned; or keep both and grow a herd. If she drops a bull, there is the potential of filling the freezer to feed the family. Either way, the calf is a win. Meat or hope.
Farm kids tend to learn early the facts of life, and the necessity of virtues like patience and perseverance and prayer. There is only one window in the breeding house and when that window closes, we wait an entire year. Breeding season must be successful for length of life that comes at supper tables, and the depth of life that comes in the form of stockyard sales.
That day, Momma heard my screams through the open windows and within the half hour, Grandmother, Momma, Dr. Wall and Daryl had my heifer tied to the chute, her come-too-soon calf pulled from her body. My heifer was all grown up and throwing calves, able to hold promises in her womb. Yet, the reality of that precarious thread that connects life to earth smacked into my brain as I understood the battle was far from over.
Hope dies when calves die, but what dies when the cow dies?
“We still might lose her,” Dr. Wall said. He loosed one of the ropes before he looked me straight in the eye. I looked him straight back.
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” he said.
We waited. We saw.
The miracle of healing is often a mystery. Why it happens to one and not to another. That cow went on over the years to produce many calves — some heifers, some bulls — but all of them alive. Wonderfully slimy and terribly uncoordinated, but alive.
Life — like baseball and calving season — takes time, and there is something to be said about waiting and working and giving. Sometimes, we lose only to wait and work and give some more. There is also something to be said about an attitude of practiced, cautious optimism.
No matter the stats.
No matter the lineup.
No matter the possibility of victory or defeat.
In the stretched-thin moments between alive and not-alive, between pitches and hits and runs and outs, we trust the game, the One who keeps score, and we just keep swinging away.
YOUR TURN: What is one thing you have faced where you nodded to the potential of defeat, but just kept swinging? Share in the comments below.