By Kevin Brown
I was a pitcher until the age of 11. I wanted to pitch longer, but everybody figured out before I did that I wasn’t destined for a major league career. What career I did have effectively ended a few years later. My father helped me all he could, and he had the ability to help me. He was a college-level athlete in both basketball and baseball, almost making it to the majors himself in baseball. He tried out for two teams—the Royals and the Red Sox, I believe—pitching batting practice for both of them. He even struck out two Hall-of-Fame hitters: Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski (I could be wrong about which two it was, as their careers don’t quite overlap, but I chalk that up to my memory, not my father’s exaggeration; he was not one to boast). I don’t remember much of what he taught me, but I do recall one piece of advice.
Whenever I was struggling to throw a strike, my father wouldn’t stop me and work on my mechanics. Instead, he would turn into a Zen master and say, Don’t aim. Just throw. My father had grown up poor, so he was a practical man, one not given to fancy or imagination of any kind. He worked hard throughout the day, then spent his evenings watching whatever sport was in season at the time. And yet, when it came to pitching, this unclear, unhelpful statement was his main piece of advice. It is counter-intuitive, at best, and it goes directly against any other baseball advice he gave or that I’ve ever heard. Whenever I struggled with hitting, he said, Watch the ball. When I let a ground ball go through my legs, he said, Stay down. When I didn’t listen to him while running the bases, getting thrown out at third because I hesitated, he said, Listen to me. Those made sense to me, but this one didn’t, especially in elementary and middle school.
It’s not advice one would give in other areas of life, at least not on the face of it. If I were learning archery or marksmanship, nobody would suggest that I not aim. It also doesn’t sound like it applies to school or careers, either. My parents saw I was a strong student, so they encouraged me to have an aim of attending college, then finding a better career than the ones they had. Like many parents, they wanted me to have a better life. We differed on what that looked like, as they were more practical and suggested accounting and computer science, while I went into English (and teaching, at that), but they could at least recognize that I had an aim.
Perhaps, though, my father knew more about life with this expression than he ever let on. He wasn’t prone to telling me how to live. Like many men of his generation, he wasn’t all that communicative, in general. In fact, the only times I find myself missing having the chance to talk to him center around sports, even though I don’t keep up with any developments beyond those that hit the major news stories. This saying, then, could have been the one way he was telling me something valuable about life.
While my father was practical—he didn’t end up taking the minor league offers because he had a young family he needed to provide for, and minor league money wasn’t going to do that—he wasn’t somebody who was focused on his career. His job was simply a job, a way to pay the bills and feed the family, with a vacation to the beach or even a day at Disney World once a year. He was a teacher, as well, beginning his career as a driver’s education instructor, then moving into helping students learn how best to teach vocational education, but I only saw him bring work home once.
He was more interested in play than work, even while he always did what he needed to do, whether for his job or the house and his family. But he continued playing basketball against college students until he was in his fifties. He played in softball leagues whenever he could find the time to do so. He was an avid golfer, still able to shoot fewer than ten strokes over par into his seventies. He enjoyed jokes, both verbal and practical. From at least what I knew of him, he didn’t seem to have an aim at all beyond completing the tasks of his job and what he would see as his responsibilities as a father and a husband. Beyond that, he just threw.
I, on the other hand, spend much of time worrying about my aim. I write essays questioning whether I made the right career choice at all, having moved from math to ministry to English in the span of two years. I’m seven years from the age when he retired, and I spend my time thinking about other careers I could still have, despite seemingly being quite good at the one I’ve chosen. My father died with the same address he had for roughly forty years. In my thirty years of living since I left that address, I’ve had nearly twenty, living in six different states, moving from one job to another. He was satisfied with just throwing, while I seem to have spent a life throwing one idea after the other, all of them outside the strike zone, all of them not where I was aiming.
When he was younger, he had a job offer from a high school in his home town to coach football and baseball. My mother didn’t want to live there, so he didn’t take the job. He never expressed any bitterness about that, simply moving back to the town where he went to college and working there. When one pitch was a ball, he just went back to the mound and threw again, not aiming. Perhaps our difference in height and build had nothing to do with why he was a successful pitcher, and I wasn’t.
About the Author:
Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or athttp://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.