24: Kissing, Moral Ambiguity, and Free Will

I haven't posted about 24 in a few weeks, but after seeing the previews for next week's show, I just have to make a prognostication: There will be kissing. Here's the back-story:

Little Agent Freckles started off the day with her professional ethics intact. She and her buddy, Boss Moss, were on the same page when it came to interrogation torture: it's wrong, don't do it.

But five minutes after hooking up with Jack "We don't have a choice!" Bauer, her integrity crumbled, and she told Jack to "do whatever it takes" to get an answer from a suspect. Later she backpedaled a bit, telling him that she didn't really mean whatever it took--it was just, you know, a figure of speech. I think he rolled his eyes at her.

But by the next episode, she was fully engaged, threatening to pinch a child if mommy wouldn't dish, and defending Jack's killing of a suspect to a disgusted and disbelieving Boss Moss. "We're supposed bring suspects in, not murder them!" he said. He obviously has not spent enough time in the company of Our Morally Ambiguous Hero.

So back to my point: there will be kissing. In the preview, Agent Freckles is upset about all the questionable interrogation practices. "Tell me it bothers you!" she yells at Jack. "Tell me you feel it!" Then she slaps him in the face. "Do you feel it?" She slaps him again. "Do you feel anything?"

And here's where the fan fic writers will get all moist and fire up their keyboards. Everyone knows that where there's sexual tension and slapping, there is kissing. The previews teased us and didn't show this, but I am willing to lay odds that Jack grabs her tiny wrist and tells her in a voice like gravel in a velvet bag tied with a silk ribbon, "Come here." She'll resist, of course, but he'll pull her close, put his hand on the back of her head, and kiss her--and then all moral ambiguity will melt away, and two lost souls will comfort each other in the knowledge that everyone else just doesn't get it. They didn't have a choice.

Free will means you do have a choice, Jack. You always have a choice.

But I still love you, even though you are a hot mess.

My Hero, by A. Peevie

My hero is my dad. He plays games with me and helps me with my homework. I like playing X-Box with him. He is kind and loving. He reads to me at night. We read a book series together called Alex Rider. It's very fun to read with him.

On Saturdays he either takes me out to breakfast or to lunch. Sometimes he makes coffee in the morning and sometimes he even takes me to Starbucks Coffee. Sometimes after dinner we sit at the table and we tell some good things about that day that happened to us.

The End.

In Which the Littlest Peevies Meet Honest Abe and Snore Their Brains Out

Dateline: Springfield

The new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum is a wondrous, amazing place. You should make plans to go there immediately, if you haven't already been. You'll take photos next to wax Lincolns. You'll see two fabulous multi-media presentations about Lincoln's life, either one of which validates the entire trip.

If you have kids with you--and maybe even if you don't--you won't want to miss Abraham's Attic, where you can play with Lincoln Logs--which, BTW, were invented in 1916 by John Lloyd Wright, son of the illustrious architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the attic you can also dress up in period costumes, and play with replica toys from Lincoln's day--like a ball on a string attached to a tiny cup on a stick. I don't know what it's called, but the object is to swing the ball so that it lands in the cup. It's harder than it sounds.

M. Peevie tried on every outfit in the Attic, including the men's outfits.

We had lunch in the tea room across the street, where, for some reason (five kids at our table?), the waiter felt obliged to warn us that if we picked up the sugar cubes with our fingers, he would break them. Our fingers, not the sugar cubes. Also, he'd have to charge us $25 for the entire contents of the sugar bowl.

A. Peevie's chicken noodle soup was inedibly salty, and when it came time to pay, I asked the cashier to take it off the tab, because I don't believe in paying for unsatisfactory food. She did. I'd probably pick a different place to eat next time because we all left hungry, and it really wasn't terribly kid-friendly, what with the finger-breaking and all.

We walked across town to the Old State Capitol building, where Abraham Lincoln and his peeps legislated and speechified. Lincoln delivered his famous "House Divided" speech here in 1858, which many say lost him the race for the U.S. Senate. "His law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that Lincoln was morally courageous but politically incorrect," according to Abraham Lincoln Online. (The photo also comes from ALO.)

Then we toured the Lincoln Home, where Mary Todd Lincoln, according to the custom of the times, matched wildly patterned wallpaper with garishly patterned carpets.

All in all, it was a great trip: educational, fun, interesting. We all learned tons about Honest Abe that we didn't know before (although my friend Biv had boned up, and really had her Lincoln facts down.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the only downside was sleeping in a hotel room with three children, who, when they weren't bickering, were snoring their frickin' brains out. Seriously. You would not think that a skinny 10-year-old and a zaftig seven-year-old would have the capacity for such tremendous volume, not to mention variety--but you would be wrong. C. Peevie did not snore, but he made up for it by ranting and huffing and sheeshing and relocating himself in response to the cacophony of night sounds coming from his sibs.

At 2 in the a.m., lying there next to and partially under my heat-seeking daughter, with her leg flung across my hip, I tried to spell the sounds of her eruptions. "Snoooorrrkhkhkhkhmuhmuhmuhmmm," she said. "Snork, snork, sssshhhhhh."

Meanwhile, A. Peevie, also heat-seeking, had traveled from his own side of the bed to C. Peevie's side; and C. Peevie gave up and buried himself under the comforter on the floor. "Bzzzzzzz-snorkle-honk!" A. Peevie snored. "Bzzzzzz-snort-snort-pssshhhhh."

It was a long night.

Eulogy

I got a call from a woman I didn't know, asking me to write a eulogy for her brother, whom I'd never met. I've never written a eulogy before, but I knew that I could do it. The bigger question was, what do you charge for a eulogy? How do you charge for a eulogy?

I interviewed the woman about her brother; let's call him Stephen. It turns out he was really a great guy, and in writing his eulogy, I got to know him. You should know him, too. Here's the eulogy his sister gave at his funeral:

I miss my brother Stephen. I’m sure you miss him, too. I think the world is going to miss him, because Stephen was the kind of person that the world needs more of: the kind of guy who didn’t think that love was a weakness or that faith made you a sissy. He knew that generosity made him richer, and making someone laugh was one more way to give a gift.

Stephen, as you know, was a big guy, and in many ways, a tough guy. He served as a sergeant in the Korean War, and led men into battle. Not only did he take his own turn on the front line, but more than once he went to the front line in place of a friend who couldn’t move for fear of the battle around him. It reminds me of a verse in the Gospel of John, John 15:13—“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Stephen was a tough guy, and a decorated soldier—but he wasn’t so tough that he couldn’t care deeply for his parents. He swore my cousins to secrecy when he was stationed right in the middle of a fierce fighting zone, because he knew mom and dad would lose sleep from worrying about him. When they found out, from a cousin who had missed the swearing-to-secrecy ritual, he reassured them as soon as he could that he’d be fine. And then he got wounded. Twice.

Stephen was married to his wife Annie for 54 years, and they had 10 beautiful children together. He instilled in his kids his own values of caring, giving, and respecting other people.

But even as he was being a father to his own kids, he was also sort of a father figure to my sister Kathy and me. When we’d have heavy hearts, we’d go to him, in private, and talk to him about our parents, or about whatever was bothering us. Stephen was a compassionate listener, and would always lift our spirits and help us feel better.

I admire how much Stephen loved and respected our parents. Even after he got married and started having children of his own, he’d still drive up to see them every two weeks. When Stephen was expected, the rest of us were chopped liver—“Stephen’s coming! We’ve got work to do. Let’s get cleaning! Let’s get cooking!” She’d cook—and all of us girls would help—all day Saturday and present a feast for Stephen and his family on Sunday. It was all about Stephen. Not that I ever resented him—I adored him, too.

And by the way, that was back when big families drove enormous station wagons, the kind with fake wood on the sides, and the kids all tumbling around in the back. It seemed like every time Stephen and Annie drove up, there’d be another little head popping up!

Later, after we grew up and moved away, he and Annie would come and visit us in Chicago. Kathy would introduce him to her friends and neighbors, and every one of them, without fail, would tell her later what a wonderful brother she had. Even Kathy's husband Andrew, who is as reticent as they come, always said he wished he had a brother like our brother Stephen. “He is going to be missed very much,” Andrew told me.

Stephen didn’t only care deeply about mom and dad. He loved every single one of his four brothers and five sisters, and none of us ever doubted it. He was the kind of guy who put family and friends ahead of most everything else. When his best friend Joe was getting married, Joe’s brother declined to be his best man because his fiance had the misfortune of not being Catholic. But Stephen stood by him, and stood up for him at the wedding.

Joe isn’t with us anymore either, but he told a story about how honest Stephen was. One time the two of them planned to skip school and go fishing. Joe wrote a note to tell the school that he was sick at home—and he forged his father’s signature. Stephen didn’t write a note, though, and the truant officer came to our house and busted them. What did Stephen say, what kind of an excuse did he make for not being in school? “We were going to go fishing,” he said. He couldn’t even tell a tall tale to the truant officer to get himself out of trouble.

There were thousands of stories—too many to count—that Stephen himself would tell about his youthful outdoor adventures. One time he led Joe and the other kids out to the woods. They were camping and being regular Daniel Boones, living off the land. It didn’t end well, though: Stephen and Joe had brought some bacon with them, cooked it over the campfire, and served it to their young woodsmen friends. I don’t know how you can cook bacon wrong—it’s already preserved, right?—but they all ended up getting violently ill.

Recently, Stephen’s friends and brothers and sisters have been coming from all over to support him, to try and help him heal just by being near him. “Why’d you come so far?” he said to us. “There was no need for that.”

But when our sister Corrie needed surgery, he had climbed in his beat-up hunting truck and drove non-stop across the country to California in order to be with her. You see, he had very high expectations for himself when it came to caring for other people—but he had very low expectations for what other people should do for him. He never gave a seminar on love, or wrote an article on friendship—but this is the way he lived, and as it turns out his life was an eloquent testimony about what love looks like.

I talked to our cousin Jack Bauer in Sydney, Australia last night. This is what he said about Stephen: “He was a true Bauer man, like the Last of the Mohicans: a tall man, a wide man, strong and honest, a man of principle and integrity, of heart and hard work.”

Stephen never complained—at least, not that I ever heard. He worked hard to provide for his family, because ten kids don’t feed themselves. He frequently worked double shifts as a tradesman in the tool and die business—but he never complained about hard work. Stephen would say that he worked himself fortunate.

Instead of complaining, he liked to tell stories and to make people laugh. When Stephen came into a room, you knew that you were about to hear a great story about a 10-point buck or a ridiculously stubborn Northern Pike.

He never lost this ability to make people laugh, even when he knew he was not going to get better. His family stayed close, and did what they could to keep him comfortable—but Stephen, who never missed an opportunity to make a joke, said, “You know what’s worse than dying? Having 10 women hovering around me, asking me can I get you this or can I get you that.”

The author and columnist Anna Quindlen published an essay in the New York Times almost exactly 14 years ago in which she said that her great journalistic contribution to her family is that she writes obituaries. She ponders death, and grief, and loss:

The landscapes of all our lives become as full of craters as the surface of the
moon…I write my obituaries carefully and think about how little the facts
suffice, not only to describe the dead, but to tell what they will mean to the
living all the rest of our lives. We are defined by who we have lost.

When someone we love dies, we grieve—but this is only the first part of our shared experience. This loss, Anna Quindlen says, is a “continuous presence of an absence.”

We have all been touched by Stephen’s excellent life. I think, now that we are sharing the experience of his loss, of the continuous presence of his absence, we should honor Stephen’s memory by being more like him: Complaining less, and laughing more. Giving more than we get. Choosing to do the loving thing, without expecting a payback. Allowing our faith to shape us into better, kinder people.

I’m going to close this with a verse that I think Stephen might have chosen as his final message to us, also from the Gospel of John, chapter 14, verse 27: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

We’re going to miss you, Stephen.

In the end, I charged my client a hundred bucks. I remembered that when we dealt with Tohle Funeral Home to have our tiny Caitlin cremated, the funeral director was so kind: he didn't charge us for his time, but only for the costs he incurred. I wanted to offer the same kindness to my client.

It turns out that writing a eulogy is, essentially, story-telling--just like a lot of other rhetorical forms. But I don't really want to add eulogies to my repertoire. It would be a little like ambulance chasing.

But for this once, it was actually an enjoyable assignment. The only downside was that somebody had to die for me to get it.

The Avon Lady and Jesus

I love the story in Luke about the sinful woman who annointed Jesus' feet with ointment and her own tears in the home of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50). This story has three main characters: a religious host with an impeccable reputation; a woman with a reputation as bad as reputations come; and Jesus, with a reputation as a troublemaker or a teacher/prophet, depending on your perspective.

The woman--I like to call her the Avon Lady, because she arrives with perfume samples--behaves in a shocking and scandalous way toward Jesus, but Jesus accepts and defends her. Simon silently wonders how Jesus could allow her to have such intimate and inappropriate contact with him. Jesus takes this opportunity to tell a parable about faith, and to clearly claim divine authority to forgive sin.

The story is filled with irony, and as the vast readership of The Green Room knows, I heart irony.

Who is Simon?
Simon the Pharisee was a religious, temple-going guy. Maybe his dad was a Pharisee also, and his parents brought him up strictly, going to temple on Saturdays and Wednesday nights, and going on Pharisee youth group outings when he was in high school. They observed the feasts, fasts, and sacrifices; they tithed their dill and shekels precisely; they counted their steps on the Sabbath so as not to break the fourth commandment.

Simon's identity was wrapped up in his religious faith, and he took it very seriously. Maybe he invited Jesus to dinner so he could get to know him better, and decide for himself whether this controversial troublemaker was a real prophet, or a fraud. Either way, Simon would be the go-to guy with 411 on this crazy Jesus character.

Simon reminds me of me sometimes.

Who is the Avon Lady?
What about the woman who had lived a sinful life? Somewhere she had heard Jesus teaching about God's mercy and forgiveness. Maybe she followed him around for a few days or weeks, so she could hear more about God's willingness to forgive any who would come to him. She had never heard anything like this before, and only knew that everywhere she went, people knew her reputation.

I can imagine that she began to weep, standing on the edge of the crowd, hearing the parable of the prodigal son, and feeling forgiveness and acceptance for the first time.

When she heard where Jesus would be dining, she sought him out. The text doesn't indicate that anyone expressed surprise that the woman entered the Pharisee's house uninvited. The shocking scandal is that she goes right up to Jesus, and he allows it--in direct, ironic contradiction to the separation enjoined by Simon the Pharisee.

The Avon Lady anoints Jesus' dusty feet with her tears. She kisses them, pours perfume on them, and wipes his feet dry with her own hair. She is expressing a shockingly inappropriate intimacy, and the dinner guests were horrified. This woman was oblivious to what others thought, or else she didn't care. She had forgotten everyone except Jesus, and she was boldly compelled to show her love and gratitude to Jesus in the most lavish way she knew how.

Why? How did she reach this point of such deep love for and gratitude to Jesus?

Who is Jesus?
Simon doubts that Jesus is a prophet when he doesn't send the woman away. Ironically, Jesus reads his mind, and tells him a parable in response to his unspoken criticism. The parable is simple:

Two men owe a debt to a moneylender. One man owes about two months' income, the other owes ten times more. Repayment was possible, eventually, for the lesser debtor; but the second man knew he'd never be able to pay his debt. The moneylender freely forgives, or cancels, both debts.

Which debtor, Jesus asks Simon, will love the moneylender more?

Simon, who had been reluctant to give Jesus even the smallest and most common courtesies normally shown to a visitor, was also reluctant to believe that Jesus was a prophet. Now he's reluctant to give Jesus the correct and obvious answer to the question raised by the parable, and does so with indifference: "I suppose the one who was forgiven more."

He's also reluctant to acknowledge the depth of his own sin. He had shown very little love to Jesus, in comparison to the woman, who had shown great love--because he did not grasp the nature of his own debt, or the depth of his own sin.

It is a mistake to think that in telling this parable, Jesus was suggesting that the sinful woman was more sinful than Simon the Pharisee. It's a mistake to think that the sinful woman was sinning worse sins than Simon.

The point that Jesus wants Simon, and us, to understand, is that the woman showed
extravagant love to Jesus because she understood the depth of her own sin.

Jesus makes an astonishing statement to the woman: "Your sins are forgiven." Simon did not even believe that Jesus could possibly be a prophet--but now he's hearing that Jesus is claiming to be much more than just a prophet.

Don't let anyone tell you that Jesus never made a claim to be divine. By accepting worship and
reverence from his followers, and by proclaiming the forgiveness of sins, he was announcing his
own divinity. You may choose to believe that Jesus was not God, but don't kid yourself that he didn't claim to BE God, as some false teachers will have you believe.

Do you see this woman?
This is what Jesus says to Simon. He wants Simon to take a closer look at this woman he had judged so harshly. When Simon looked at her, he saw a woman who was not only not as righteous as he, but who was much more of a sinner than most.

But what did Jesus see? He saw a sinner, for sure; he said, "...her sins, which are many..." He knew that her sins had separated her from God.

But he also saw a contrite heart, a forgiven woman whose freedom from guilt and shame compelled her to love lavishly. The irony is that Simon saw a sinful woman, but he himself was the one who still remained in his sin, unforgiven; and he loved little.

Her sins, which are many
I want to be known, like this woman, as a sinful woman. I want people to know that when I walk into a room, sin has entered that room--and not just a little bit of sin, but a great big steaming pile of sin.

And guess what? I don't have to be an embezzler, a prostitute, a child molester, a murderer, or even a Republican! I can just be me, with a deep and realistic understanding of my own capacity for idolatry, anger, selfishness, laziness, gluttony, and pride.

I don't need to go out and find new ways to be a sinner, because sin always finds me. But I want to be like this woman, who poured expensive ointment from an alabaster jar because she knew the depth of her own sin so intimately that she gained a deeper appreciation for forgiveness and an
unselfconscious, extravagant love for Jesus.

Believers--maybe we need to be more transparent about our dirty little secrets, because that's the basis for the Good News in our lives. God didn't choose us because we were already great
people. Rather, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

What a debt we owe! What a vast forgiveness we've been given! And what a price was paid. Where is our extravagant, unselfconscious love?

The Avon Lady is my hero.

Snapshots of Retirement Living: Bringing Order to Chaos

On the first official day of mom and dad’s move to Telford, we faced 61 boxes and disorder in every corner of every room. We emptied about 10 that day, but the rest of the job seemed daunting.

Dad had hired two people from The Perfect Plan, a relocation company, to help unpack boxes the next day. Before they came, we speculated that it would not be terribly helpful to have two extra people getting in the way while we unpacked. They wouldn’t know where to put things, mom figured; we’d have to oversee every move they made; it might just be easier to do it ourselves.

Well. The next day Lynn and Trish walked into chaos, and by the time they left seven hours later, they had transformed it into order and even beauty. Little did we know before we met them that these women are not just relocation specialists, they are relocation magicians.

Every box was emptied, many items were “downsized” or “repurposed,” closets were organized, beds were made, shelves were filled with books, photos, and knickknacks. They set up the computer, found the linens, made the bed. They brought an intuitive and convenient organization to the kitchen, totally rearranging my structure from the previous day in a way that clearly and painlessly illustrated that this is not where my gifts lie.

Mom and I made a trip to the store to pick up some clutter containers and other supplies. While we were gone, the wizards of where-does-it-go fixed up the spare room as a special service to me. When we left, the room was packed so full of furniture and boxes that there was no room to open up the cot that I’d be sleeping on that night. When we returned, the room had been transformed into a legitimate guest bedroom. The boxes were gone, the TV was set up and operational, the computer sat blinking on the dresser, and most astonishing of all, the cot was dressed up to look like an actual bed, with clean sheets, a comforter and two matching pillows. The only thing missing was a mint.

These guys are good, people. I could not recommend them more highly. They made our lives and my parents’ unpacking process so much easier and so much less painful than it could have been.

If you need a relocation specialist, someone to help you unpack and get organized, email Lynn at lynn@theperfectplan.us. Or go to their website.

(And no, Mr. and Ms. Cynical, they did not pay me to write this, nor am I related to them.)

Impostors and Heroes

I spent the past five days as an impostor in my own life. Here's what it looked like:

Thursday afternoon I took public transportation (bus and train) to the airport. Usually I get on the train going the opposite direction, so I felt like a runaway housewife, with my carry-on bag, my wallet loaded with cash, my ID in my pocket. I pretended I was somebody with an interesting life.

I love traveling, I love flying, I love having conversations with strangers that I will never see again. Like Miriam, who was flying from LA to visit her sister in Bucks County, PA. She was reading Harry Potter and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day, or whatever the latest tale of HP's
adversities is called; so of course we started talking books and movies.

The pilot must've switched on the turbo boosters, because we got to Philly speedy quick (as Junie B. Jones would say). Again, I was a cosmopolitan pretender, trekking through the airport on my own and navigating public transportation from the airport to the end of the train line.

The whole point of this exercise in impersonation is for me to give my enfeebled parents a hand for a few days. (They'd love that word, I'm sure. Sorry, Ma. I couldn't resist.) Mom's been suffering from an undiagnosed malady that causes debilitating pain and weakness. Meanwhile, my 86-year-old dad's been handling mom's care, plus the running of the household, all by himself, for the first time in nearly 60 years of marriage. It's too much for him; too much for both of them.

So I get to play Rescue Hero, swooping in from my cluttered life to chill with the cronies, toss in a few loads of laundry, whip up a few gourmet delight meals to freeze in pint-size zipper bags, and generally save the day. I get credit for being a hero, when the real hero is Mr. Peevie, who's holding down the fort at home, juggling camp schedules and swimming pool maintenance, meals, laundry, and general household upkeep, while trying not to get fired from his real job.

I'm also posing as a Healer. The day I arrived, mom's pain departed as mysteriously and suddenly as it arrived. We visited the pain management specialist the next day. He looked at us through the tiniest pupils I have ever seen on a human being and basically said to come back and see him if the pain returns. Of course, I'm taking all the credit, and I plan to start my own healing ministry. Send $7.77 today for your personal healing miracle!!!

Dad and I went grocery shopping, and I wore him out. I sent him off to get some turkey gravy while I browsed the meat and dairy aisles; when I found him a half hour later, he was forlornly standing by the check-out with a carton of OJ, but no gravy.

The next day I turned into Rachael Ray, dicing, slicing, sauteeing, mixing, pouring, simmering, boiling, and baking. Finally, when every pot, pan, mixing bowl, baking dish, and cooking utensil was dirty, and two weeks' worth of dinner smells permeated the house, I was done. I loaded up the freezer with individual servings of lasagna, spaghetti, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, chicken with mushroom gravy, and one lone broiled chicken breast.

Then came the hard part: washing the dishes with one hand while pushing my mom away from the sink with the other. That woman has some kind of genetic anomaly that forces her to clean things, even when she's too shaky to stand for more than three consecutive minutes. It must be a recessive trait, because I didn't get that one. I got the dirt-blindness gene. If you don't see it, you don't have to clean it; that's my motto.

I tried to do the "Be healed by my presence" miracle on Uppie, but for some reason it didn't take. So instead she popped pills and sucked on pain pops while we watched my boyfriend solve crimes on cable TV. (Have I mentioned lately that I really wish I had cable?)

Uppie let me borrow her 'Stang, so I got to affect a persona way cooler than a mini-van driving, PBJ-making, laundry-doing middle-aged mom for a couple of days. I tooled around town with the top down, Harry Connick's smooth and moody strains blasting, and my fake cigarette (props to King!) dangling between my fingers. (OK, so maybe it's not so much "cool" as it is "queer" to have a fake cigarette. But whatever. I yam what I yam.)

In my final nod to imaginary alter egos, I sat at an airport bar drinking no-name merlot and teaching a Texan how to do sudoku. I was exactly as successful as you might have guessed. Meanwhile, I figured out that the slightly tipsy and slightly loud guy on my left was waiting for the same delayed flight to Chicago. How surprised would you be if I told you that Tipsy Guy ended up sitting in my same row on the plane? Ain't life funny.

Anyway, the clock has struck midnight, and I've reverted from my swinging, day-saving, Mustang-driving cosmopolite facade back to regular me.

It was fun while it lasted, but as it turns out, I like being me after all.

Heroes of Summer

There's a group of guys, and a few women, who willingly give up ten, 15, 20 hours a week--maybe more--every week for three or four months, to teach a bunch of kids about baseball. These guys in general, and my kids' little league coaches in particular, are the heroes of summer.

"Nice try!" they say, encouragingly, when the throw to first base hits the dirt in front of the second baseman, or beans a spectator.

"Keep your eye on the ball!" they repeat 10,000 times over the course of a season.

"Keep your head in the game!" they urge the boy who's hunched over in left field, watching an ant lugging a dead roly-poly across the dirt, and another boy who's making honeycomb designs with cleats in the short-stop dust.

They pack, unpack, load, and carry 30 pounds of bats, balls, bases, and equipment three times a week. They make 15 phone calls every time it rains to let parents know if the game's been cancelled. They create line-ups and game plans; they calculate batting averages and ERAs; they organize snack schedules.

They make time to play with and teach and put their arms on the shoulders of other people's children. Sometimes they make good players out of them. Sometimes they make not-so-great players feel like Honus Wagner. They give every kid a chance to shine in the field.

They stand behind your child and mine in the batter's box: they position his hands on the bat handle, tap his elbow up, and demonstrate how to step into the pitch. "Step into the pitch," they remind the batter. "Don't step out of the box." When my son swings wildly, like an ambitious lepidopterist, the coach hollers optimistically, "Good try, A. The next one's yours!" They give every kid a chance to shine at the plate.

(It's hilarious that some coaches can't compartmentalize as well as others, and their day job lingo creeps into their coaching. "You got a taste of it," said Coach Paul, a chef, to a batter who hit a foul ball. "That was an appetizer. Now go for the entree." The fans on the sidelines looked at each other and shrugged. "Yeah, eat it up!" I screamed, because, hey, it doesn't really matter what you holler for encouragement, just so long as you holler.)

They're heroes because they're patient, they're kind, they're engaged. They stand with the sun in their eyes and the sweat dripping down the back of their necks, persuading an anxiety-ridden nine-year-old who changed his mind about playing baseball and would rather be home sorting Pokemon cards to stick it out because his team needs him.

They're heroes because they gather the boys in the outfield after a grim 19 - 2 loss, and remind them of everything they did right. They're heroes because they shrug off a bad call, and the kids get an object lesson in frustration management and keeping things in perspective.

Coach Lou, Coach Bob, Coach Paul, Coach Ben, Coach Matt, Coach Neil, and any coaches I've forgotten -- thanks for being a hero this summer.