What an ideal guest Tom proved to be! He and his wife Maria came down from Montreal last weekend to visit. Maria herself is a marvelous person, always welcome for her own gifts of personality and her flexibility as a guest. Whatever plans you as host have, she is ready and willing to accommodate herself to them.

On this occasion, the arriving guests found me just about to leave the house for my weekly softball came. It was a steaming hot day, not the kind of climate the ordinary person would choose to run around a shadeless field. Though neither an Englishman nor (presumably) a madman, I was eager for the noontime sun.

Did my duties as host require me to stay home? Certainly not. Instead I invited Tom to come and play with us. Mind you this is a guy then on the eve of his 65th birthday, someone who grew up in Poland, France, and England, all countries not enlightened enough to have chosen baseball as their chief sport.

With no perceptible hesitation, Tom agreed to accompany me and play ball. So I gave him a fielder’s glove, lent him a Red Sox cap, and off we went to the field in Allston , next to Harvard Stadium.

After a warm-up period, the game started. Tom, chosen for the other team, took his position at second base and batted low in the order. During the game I observed his play closely because, without acknowledging it, I felt somewhat protective of my guest.

Well might I have felt solicitude for Tom’s well-being. Though a frequent tennis player and daily swimmer, he had presumably not played softball for years and I was not sure how he would handle drives hit hard in his direction. Our players do get injured sometimes; I would have been thoroughly chagrined to have Tom spend his 65th in a local hospital.

It would be heartwarming to report that Tom’s performance in the field and at bat was outstanding. The fact is that he allowed several shots to get by him; at bat, he got one good clean hit, a drive that carried between the third baseman and the shortstop into left field. The rest of his contacts resulted in either outs or errors.

My own efforts were little better. Though I do not recall making any errors at first base, I made precious few solid contacts at bat. The one notably hard shot off my bat went back at the pitcher with dazzling speed; somehow, he was able to catch it, thus preserving his vital parts from injury.

So Tom and I, later-life warriors both, experienced failure at first hand. We freely endured the frustrations built into the game of baseball. Is any other sport so designed that those who claim success themselves fail at least six times out of ten when in the batter’s box and other times when deployed in the field?

Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, speaking of people who have grown up with the game, said the same thing better: “Baseball teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball, and precisely because we have failed , we hold in high regard those who have failed less often.”

This quotation I have borrowed from a book recently sent me by an old friend, Ernest Kurtz. He and his co-author, Katherine Ketcham, entitle their 1992 volume, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories. Their writing pleases me because it provides a rationale for what I did many years ago: give up the effort to become perfect.

Mind you, these authors stand in favor of spiritual growth; it’s just that trying for human perfection, in their view, can block such growth by falsifying one’s life. They draw on stories from many of the great spiritual traditions of world history to show that wisdom requires us to accept ourselves as we are, rather than as some abstract ideal would have us be.

So this forms the background to my perseverance in playing the game, inglorious as so much of my play continues to be. I make outs, often in clutch situations. And I screw up in the field, sometimes even allowing runners to advance because I fall asleep while awake. But it’s good for my soul as well as exercise for my body.

Whether Tom clutched failure to his heart that day and grew in true spirituality, I have not discovered. Nor should I try to impose my rationale for the game on him. But he and I, as the oldest players on the field, may have served the others as outstanding models of  failure. At game’s end, we could leave the field with the hope of having shown our juniors the wisdom and beauty of self-acceptance.

Richard Griffin