A little while
ago I wrote about Roberto Clemente, my favorite baseball hero, in this space.
Today, let’s honor someone I never saw play: Satchel Paige.
First off, folks
like me, who carry the idea of being an athlete into their silver years, admire
Satchel Paige for being the oldest major league rookie (42) while playing for
the Cleveland Indians. He played in the pros until he was 47.
But here, I want
to write about these lines that are attributed to Paige:
Work like you don’t need the money.
Love like you’ve never been hurt.
Dance like nobody’s watching.
These words come
to mind because of something that happened about five years ago. Like we’ve
done for years in our married life, M and I went for a morning walk. She was
glum, upset about the lack of progress she was making in her writing. Many
years before, K, our daughter, had printed these lines, with a credit to Satchel Paige, on a bulletin board in
her bedroom.
It was in the
spirit of Satchel Paige’s quote that I said to M, if it’s possible, why don’t
you try to write stories from the place of excitement and wonder that you did
when your first stories appeared years ago. She took my advice to heart and did
just that with the superfine result that Narrative magazine would soon publish her story
“Standards” http://bit.ly/1gRSKCy, an MM
classic, if you ask me. And she has not looked back since.
M got word of
acceptance from Narrative on Yom Kippur, and this week, ironically, I too was
rewarded on the Day of Atonement with some perseverance of my own, with after
years of false starts and promises surrounding work short and long, fiction and
non-, I received word that a story of mine has been accepted for publication
at a journal that deserves the respect that it has among writers. Today I’m feeling
as M did when “Standards” was taken, not looking back on what has been.
So do what
Satchel says. You can't go wrong.
Next: Running for
Your Life: Nobel Peace Prize Candidate Couple That You Should Know About
