In Praise of the Undazed Life: a personal recollection of my Dad

TITLE: In Praise of the Undazed Life: a personal recollection about my Dad
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AUTHOR: Ken Sehested

SOURCE: prayer and politiks newsletter at www.prayerandpolitiks.org

PERMISSION TO PUBLISH granted by the author

My Dad wasn’t the least bit athletic; nor were others in his family. (Though my mom played for a year in a semi-pro women’s basketball league, her team sponsored by Phillips 66 petroleum company—she worked as a secretary in their corporate office by day and played b-ball by night.)
 
Other than her influence, we’re not sure where my sporting interest and coordination came from. I played every kind of ball available, whether organized or ad hoc sandlot. (Last I heard, I still own my high school’s track and field discus throw record.)
 
Dad found a way to stay connected with my love of sport by volunteering as an assistant coach of my Little League baseball team. It required little experience—or skill, for that matter. Only attentiveness. (There’s a lesson in there for us all.) It certainly wasn’t for the glamour.
 
The demands of his job meant he arrived late to practice—straight from work in his grease-smudged overalls and steel-toed boots, having wrestled large diesel engines all day. No one noticed his attire, though, since most of us came from blue-collar homes.
 
Our practice field was a baked dirt lot on the edge of a Mexican American neighborhood in our small West Texas town. It would be a few years before African Americans were integrated into our schools and cultural institutions (like Little League baseball). But Chicanos were school-and-playmates from an early age. My earliest Spanish language tutoring involved schoolyard cuss words.
 
On the field, two-handed catches were stressed. Anyone failing to do so had to run to the railroad tracks in the distance, through patches of tumbleweed and prickly pear cactus. From time to time foul balls grazed passing autos. Cracked bats were heavily taped and reused.
 
Local businesses sponsored different teams in the league, providing bats and balls and game uniforms—though I don’t recall them using our jerseys to advertise. The “Mad Men” ad culture hadn’t yet infected backcountry regions like ours. Moms repaired the occasional uniform tears. Our head coach bought us hotdogs and colas after every game, win or lose.
 
We were taking infield practice one afternoon when, from the corner of my eye, I was startled to see Dad sprinting toward the road paralleling our field, yelling “Hey! Hey!” The rest of us stood gazing, frozen in shock—focusing now on a young boy rumpled on the pavement, having fallen from the back of a passing pickup truck. (Pickup bed passengers were a common sight in that era.)
 
Whether it was Dad’s yelling, or other pickup passengers, I don’t know; but the driver quickly screeched to a halt.
 
Luckily the boy suffered no serious injury, though the pavement took a layer of skin from parts of his face, arms and hands and knees. Likely some lingering frightful memories, too. The whole affair was over as quickly as it began. And we got back to play, nursing dreams of dramatic game-ending catches and big league walk-off home runs.
 
Even so, to this day when the memory arises, it plays in slow motion: Dad running. Yelling. The rest of us gazing like deer-in-a-headlight daze.
 
I want to live undazed like my Dad. Ready to run as needed; yell when appropriate; always attentive; never merely dazed, sleep-walking through history as though it were but a testing ground for life in the sweet bye-and-bye.
 
More than any other, this is the injunction under which I live, sometimes joyfully, sometimes in complaint: drawn back, through and from beatific gaze, then toward Jerusalem’s deceit; back toward skinned children; caught up anew to the innumerable sites of Heaven’s assault on Earth’s duress.