The passing of Gene Mauch this week makes me think again (just as in the case of Micky Owens) about how the slightest turns of fate can come to define our lives.   Mauch was famous for coming close to the World Series, never so painfully as with the the 1964 Phillies team that lost ten games in a row at the end of the season to lose the pennant, but never quite making it.  Thus, his obituary title: "Manager of Near Misses."

    That phrase, of course, overlooks the fact that he was one of the most wily and enduring managers in the history of the game: only five men managed more major league games than he.  But all those games, all those wins, over all those years seem to pale in comparison to a few key losses. 

     Is it just a media thing, an editor looking for the most dramatic angle on a long life?  Or do we really come to define ourselves not by what we have accomplished, or the people we have gathered around us, but what we lack?  That seems odd to me, but I think it is true.  We tend to measure ourselves by what we are not.  And this is not just a matter of a celebrated baseball manager, but also the meaning of a disabled child’s life.

  For Mauch, that lack of a
World Series was a fateful thing.  He came incredibly close in 1986:
one strike away from finishing off the Red Sox in the league
championship and Dave Henderson hits a home run.  One pitch.  If it had
curved a bit more or moved a little faster, his obituary may have read
differently.  But it didn’t. 

    I know "baseball as life" stories are not for
everyone, but the nearness of Mauch’s misses, the closeness of a very
different story line, are simply haunting.  In my own  life, I think of
how Aidan’s brain developed in the womb.  At some point, at the most
minute biological level, some set of cells moved in the wrong
direction, failed to follow the usual pattern of growth, and set off a
series of chain reactions that have left him profoundly neurologically
impaired.  A very near miss, very early in the developmental process has
shaped his life fundamentally. 

     Mauch’s lack is less significant than
Aidan’s on the level of daily life, but it is that uncontrollable
quality of an unforeseen turn of events that unites them. 

    I don’t look for transcendent meaning in either Mauch’s or Aidan’s fate.  I have come to believe that meaning is immanent (this is the worldview of most ancient Chinese philosophers) in the immediate context of a moment or a life.  We can actively create the meanings of fateful turns of events, especially in the ways in which we cultivate the personal relationships that emerge from such trials.  I am sure Mauch did not see himself as a failure (though I imagine many Phillies fans are less charitable!).  We do not have to see him in that light: how many of us had the talent and luck to manage all those major league games. 

     Similarly, Aidan’s life is not a tragedy.  It has the contours of most lives: he wakes, he takes nourishment, he is surrounded by a loving family, he enjoys the sounds of the summer – the birds outside his window – he brightens to his sister’s voice when she reads to him, he sleeps.  If we avoid negative definitions, characterizations of what we lack, we can construct positive meanings, meanings that are as real as any others, about baseball managers or profoundly disabled children.