So an old friend gives me a call. Well, she's really only middle-aged, but we've known each other for a long time. We've enjoyed the kind of friendship that allows significant gaps in contact, yet provides immediate connection. In response to my "Hello," she takes off at maximum rant. Recognizing that my son has gone through youth, travel and high school baseball at a pace just a couple of years ahead of her eldest son, she figures I can play soundboard with a reasonable degree of understanding and, as always, provide advice with a certain brutality. With some justification, she complains how her son is being underutilized by his high school coach, if not ruined. The coach apparently prides himself on his confidence crushing power over high schoolers, as opposed to the sometimes more fruitful approach of developing individual talent, teaching teamwork and encouraging maximum effort. When she tried talking to the coach, she was instructed that he'll only talk to parents after the season is over. I try to connect with a story of my son's most agressive coach, who once indicated at a parents' meeting that in a perfect world he would coach only orphans, but she barely takes a breath.
After twenty minutes of listening to the escalating and ever so precise details of her concerns, I stop her cold and tell her, "Your son is a good kid, a great student and a strong athelete. A few MLB scouts have taken some interest and he's scoped out regularly by NCAA Division I recruiters. With or without baseball, he's going to attend a top ranked college, and have a great future. In the grand scheme, the quality and input of his high school coach really doesn't matter."
At first I take her silence as a sign that she has redirected her frustration toward me, but then she starts to cry. We've been friends for decades and, though I have always suspected abundant tenderness beneath that hardened, sarcastic Irish skin, I have never once seen or heard her cry. I ask her, "What's really going on?"
She cries a while longer and then struggles to tell me that one of her younger sons has a brain tumor, which is growing, and needs to be removed. Despite her knowledge that I'm not all that religious, she asks me to pray for him. I tell her I will, and I will. A minute later our conversation is over.
Ask someone who doesn't have thirty seven cats running around his or her apartment, What matters most to you? and you'll likely get one of three responses, God, family (and friends) or health. I suppose some people might say work, but that strikes me as sad. I suspect that Steve Jobs, undoubtedly one of the greatest industrialists of all time, likely would have given up all of his commercial success for another year of good health.
My friend and I spent a half hour talking about what really matters, twenty-seven minutes about baseball, two minutes about brain tumors, a minute about God, and all of it about family and friends. On that particular day, it all mattered.
