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"Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue." --Ambrose Bierce
I have a lot to learn about patience. A whole lot. Like how to remain calm while the lady in front of me takes forever to write a check for her groceries. Who hasn't heard of a debit card these days. Banks give them to you free. They work just like a check. Oh, my mistake, you can't talk about the cashier and her latest family crisis while you run a debit card. Only when you can slowly scribe out a check, writing one line at a time, can you make time stop. For everyone behind you in line too. Put down the pen, listen, write another line on the check, talk and listen some more. Well, you get the point. I must be invisible, standing with my cold, getting warmer 6-pack of beer and my cold, getting warmer gallon of milk. Glad was I that I didn't have a craving for ice cream. In fact, this is the truth, her daughter had taken the cart to the car and unloaded the groceries and was on her way back into the store by the time she received her receipt. I am not lying. She knew there were people in line behind her but she just didn't care.
And I smiled when she looked at me. But I was not happy inside.
Inconsiderate shopper #2. Once again, I found myself behind the customer who's clueless to the world of 2nd hand retail give-a-damn. She found a great deal on a steamer machine. $9.99. Was going home and steam her shower curtain. Who steams a shower curtain? Telling everyone around her about how she has always wanted one. I'm thinking, "Wouldn't $9.99 buy a new shower curtain?" Then the lady in front of her starts talking about her "find". Pottery Barn towels and wash cloths. 1 towel, 2 washcloths and I believe 3 hand towels. Yes, granted, not a whole set, but they are "Pottery Barn". I'm wondering to myself if the 1st lady wants to steam the Pottery Barn towels for shopper #2? All the while, heavily tattooed salesgirl, with a barbed wire and flaming skull preference in tattoos, seen by the revealing, shall I say trampish apparel that she is working in, could care less how fast this line is moving. Hourly worker or possibly community service work are her reason for getting up today.
So, my patience is being tested, I want my two $.99 cent flower pots and my baseball umpire pants that I found in this store and move to my next destination. But wait, I thought it couldn't get more bizarre, steam lady hands the cashier a gift card and explains, "Not quite sure how much is left, but I will pay the rest in change." Change?
Steamer total with tax: $10.59
Gift card: $4.65.
Change: $5.94
Counting out the change: This is where it gets good. Customer dumps pile of change on counter by register. Quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Huge pile of coins. Looks at cashier for what to do next. Silence and no movement by either soul. "Could you count it out for me?" Cashier begins counting.
My head didn't explode, but it wanted to. Right then I felt like Barbara Johnson when she said, "Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.”
My total:$6.01. I hand the cashier girl a ten. I smile and say, I don't have a penny. She hands me back four ones. "I don't want to count out $.99 to you, guess my register will be a penny off." We both smile a little at each other. She gets it and I don't.
"The job of arguing with the umpire belongs to the manager, because it won't hurt the team if he gets thrown out of the game." -- Hall of Fame Manager Earl Weaver
I often wonder why I do it. Sometimes it stresses me out beyond belief. I question myself constantly. Was that the right call? Did I do the right enforcement of the penalty? Did I really see what I thought I saw? Oh no, this is going to bring the coach out of the dugout. Are you serious coach?
Coaches don't help you out, as they shouldn't. 99% of them don't know 1% of the rules for the game that they are trying their darnedest to compete at. The ones that do are easily the superior ones and cause very little problems with the flow of a contest. However, get a coach with a limited amount of knowledge and you can be spending a lot of time explaining the subtle differences in his and your interpretation of the rule book. Or as I like to refer to it as, "The Game Bible." Worse than coaches with limited rules knowledge are the ones that forget the level of the game they are playing. The 8 year old community rec contest is not Major league baseball and the youth league football game may be played on Sunday but its not the NFl. Similar game...different rules.
You better hope your partner is doing his job and keeping his focus. At least you pray he knows some of the rules of the game. If not, be prepared to answer for his failings and every other official that didn't meet the standards of what coaches and fans expect from them in every past contest of the season. Sometimes many seasons.
When I get yelled at, it most often goes back to me making a call that wasn't what was called "last game by the officials" or I must just not "like" that team. Yeah, never liked teams wearing the color red, have pirates as mascots or have idiots for coaches. Oops, idiots for coaches do help me with my officiating. Those games tend to end up as mercies for the other team which makes idiots more likely to blame me. My one bad call (in his opinion) is what caused the whole team to melt down and lose by 100 points. It was definitely the officials fault. How am I going to sleep at night knowing I cheated for the other team?
And I firmly believe, that everyone, coaches included, are entitled to their own stupid opinions. But the smartest of coaches--and fans for that matter--would do wise to heed the "real" Bible's interpretation of how one should act during athletic contests: Proverbs chapter 17, verse 28--Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
Can you hear that blessed silence, where the game can be watched for the simple joy of the sport? Baseball could even be as much fun as fishing, if it wasn't for certain fans and coaches. Though you can fish when it rains. Watch the games for the movement and ignore the mistakes. After all, they are as much a part of the total game as the rest. And for gosh sakes, most of the times the athletes are kids...and other peoples kids at that.
Once you rest your attitude(and shutteth your lips), then you could get a bit of perspective of why I officiate.
"Umpires have the toughest job in baseball. Ever since the birth of the boos, they have suffered more abuse than a washroom wall." -- Ernie Harwell in Tuned to Baseball (1985)
“Thus we play the fool with the time and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.” -- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The far side of the clouds, a side we standing on the Earth cannot see, must be strange to behold. Only those that pass on before us could tell us what it may look like, but I suspect they are staring in astonished wonder at the beauty, and they have forgotten all about us. I hope they aren't mocking us as Shakespeare implies.
I think I will make it my job to dream what the ancestors are withholding from us. I will join into the wonder of life and celebrate the sky, sun and stars that peek at us through our days and nights that we live. Perhaps pretending to be the moon and the many eons that it has spent circling and observing the evolution of mankind will broaden my understanding of the purpose I serve in the universe. I will envision a distant star as the "Eye of God" and the sparkle of it, the reflected love for man.
“A pessimist only sees the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all--he's walking on them.” -- Leonard L. Levinson
Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.-- Chinese Proverb
I am going to tell a story.
As I was leaving a dairy farm in the rural community of Springport, Michigan after a photo shoot, I noticed along the side of the road in a pasture a couple of newly-born Angus beef calves laying down in the grass with their mothers grazing contentedly along side them. It was a beautiful spring day and I was enjoying the slow ride down the gravel road from the farm, windows down smelling the freshness of the air. I thought it looked like an idyllic shot, so I stopped along the quiet road, whipped the camera from the case and started to capture the scene as viewed from my passenger side window.
Then my attention was taken over by not the sight but the sound that came into the driver’s side window. It was a bird song, one that just made my brain cloud and try to find a focus of what it was it was hearing. A sound I had not heard in quite some time, I was sure. It was a vague recollection of something in the past that meant something. I lowered the camera and turned to the opposite side of the road and began to search for the vehicle causing this memory. The roadside I was peering into was an overgrown, viney stretch of thicket, brown with just a smattering of green emerging from the newly opening vine and tree buds.
Then movement, large movement, and again the song. I immediately recognized it among the branches, a brown thrasher. I felt warm all over, flooded with a feeling of peacefulness that I had not experienced yet during this day.
How could this happen? This feeling?
While I was thinking this, I raised the camera and got a few quick shots of the brown thrasher, hoping that he would present me with a decent pose in the tangled mess he was singing from. He did allow a few photos and continued to entertain me with his singing, just a few yards from me.
The song the thrasher sang transported me back to a time when I lived across a dirt road from an Osage orange tree fence row. Spring mornings I would take my coffee on the front steps of my house and breathe in the silence that only nature can provide. It is a silence that is not quiet, but is a cacophony of birds singing, frogs creaking and gentle trembling newly-budded leaves quaking in the breeze. Every year, a brown thrasher, would take up his place in that fence row and sing and sing and sing with a voice so loud and a song so variant that it is very difficult to describe.
It just plain made me happy. Happy then, as it did now. And for that feeling, at that moment, sitting in my Jeep along a country road, I thank that bird and the memory it stirred of all those songs those many springs ago.
Share a favorite bird story...we all have at least one. I could tell you the one about the flock of starlings and the motorcycle...
Listen to the song of the brown thrasher at these 2 sites below. They don't do justice, heard on a computer, so try to find an old hedgerow in the country, the thicker the better, and listen for the loud call and song that may be coming from it. You may hear it for real, against a natural backdrop, if you are lucky.
http://www.nps.gov/miss/naturescience/upload/BTHRA.mp3
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Brown_Thrasher/id
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