Wake

Word of the Week

“Look lively!” said my father, also my baseball coach, as he slapped a ground ball this way or that way, at one of us boys playing in the infield.  That was to sharpen our baseball wits, so we could “see” the ball coming toward us even before it was hit.  I’ve watched many an excellent center fielder (I’m thinking of you now, Jim Edmonds), and it sure does seem that their bodies are in motion before the ball has hit the bat.  And as every fan knows, that fleet instant of anticipation makes all the difference between the great and the ordinary.  It’s as if all their instincts are sharply awake, never a nod or a yawn or a shuffle of the feet.

Is your name Greg, short for Gregory?  I think of Pope Gregory the Great, always sharp on the lookout for strengthening and spreading the Christian faith, so that when he saw some strikingly light-haired lads in the slave market in Rome, and he asked who they were and where they were from, he determined then and there that the Angli – the Angles, th…