Andrée Seu Peterson: Diamonds in the sky

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Today is Monday, May 13th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Megan Basham.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. WORLD commentator Andrée Seu Peterson now on the glory of a heavenly team on which no one finds herself getting benched.

ANDRÉE SEU PETERSON, COMMENTATOR: When the time comes that I can’t remember who I talked to yesterday, I will still remember the names of Denise Turcotte, Karen Holmes, Gloria Legare, and Marianne Charette.

And if you wheel me up to the chalk-laced edge of a baseball diamond some years hence, I know their ghosts will still appear in the mist, like Shoeless Joe Jackson stepping out from the corn in Field of Dreams.

Those were the Nephilim, the giants in the land, in the hardscrabble Rhode Island town of my youth. The universe consisted, in those days, of your true sandlot field, such as are as rare now as drive-in pictures and millinery shops.

A ball pulled too far to the left could well have plugged the window of St. Joe’s, old textile mill turned elementary school. And the outfield’s complexion—crabgrass not so much mowed as struck periodically with a blunt instrument.

It had “character,” as they say, in a day when what separated the men from the boys was the defiant grit of teeth in the face of a bad hop.

Turcotte was a man in a woman’s body, with an arm like a pneumatic drill. She held court over shortstop, and any base she had to—plus shallow or deep center field, as the need arose.

Holmes, 40 parts talent and 60 parts bulldog tenacity, had honed her craft till she whipped that strike zone into submission.

Legare, great with one hand tied behind her back, rubber in her bat, and a magnet in her glove, looked positively bored with most of the opposition’s batting line-up as she made short work of them at first.

Charette, a natural phenomenon behind the plate, was Salieri to Holmes’ Mozart.

I was the hole in right field, and that only when no one better showed. Most often I collected splinters on the pine bench bestriding the first-base line (third base had no seating).

As I think it over in a new century, when the grasshopper drags himself along and summer belongs to other children, it wasn’t so much about winning against Queen of Martyrs as about winning together—aching to be part of a well-oiled machine for a glorious enterprise.

Father Abraham looked up and beheld better diamonds than that pockmarked theater where we skinned our knees for momentary glory. So now let men resign the childish toys of youth and strain toward better enterprises, where whoever wills may take his place within the roster of a team that saves men’s souls: “And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever” (Daniel 12:2-3).

No one who has courage collects splinters on that bench.

For WORLD Radio, I’m Andrée Seu Peterson.

(Photo/Creative Commons)

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