With my father, one never knew what was going to happen from one moment to the next. On one occasion he and I were walking through an uptown street in New York after dark. In those days Fifty-eighth Street was far uptown. We probably were walking through Fifty-eighth Street from one avenue to another. There were any number of house lots which had not yet been built upon. These lots had board fences to prevent passers-by from falling into the rock pit which most of the vacant places seemed to be. In front of one of these board fences, and in the very dim light of the infrequent gas lamps, a tough-looking specimen demanded money. It really amounted to a hold-up, although no pistol was involved.
My father was an extraordinarily powerful man and as quick as a cat. Before the man had finished speaking my father grabbed him and actually boosted him up on the top of the fence and pushed him over. What he fell into on the other side, how much he was hurt, how he got out, and what he thought had happened to him have filled me with wonder these many years.
from A Genius in the Family, by Hiram Percy Maxim
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And sometimes just because you could have done better doesn’t mean you’ve done badly.
Carlton Fisk (addressing his father during his Hall of Fame speech)
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On our way back to the motel and well within the city limits of Tucson, a coyote ran across the road. The coyote is a great favorite of ours. If every town had more coyotes and less people, the world would be a much safer place in which to live. You will understand that my aversion to the human species is not so much that I dislike people as that I can’t stand them.
Adventures in Birding, by Jean Piatt
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Birding takes one out of doors; it satisfies the craving of every decent person to brush the morning dew from the grass and inhale what is left of our pure air. It is an engrossing pastime and one never wearies of it but only from it. It affords endless hours of armchair debate and exchange of bird lore with like-minded friends. It is exercise, of a sort. It offers an inexhaustible treasures store of knowledge to be assimilated; one never learns the millionth part of all. It helps one meet other people and make friends — if you like that sort of thing. It interrupts your work, which, in almost all cases, is a very good thing both for you and for the work. But more than all this, it is adventure.
Adventures in Birding, by Jean Piatt
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Not many people would feel impelled to buddy up to Bob Gibson. I suggested that he must be exposed to a good deal of barside baseball expertise at his place of work [Gibby’s restaurant in Omaha], and he said, “Who wants to talk to fans? They always know so much, to hear them tell it, and they always think baseball is so easy. You hear them say, ‘Oh, I was a pretty good ballplayer myself back when I was in school, but then I got this injury …’ Some cabdriver gave me that one day, and I said, ‘Oh, really? That’s funny, because when I was young I really wanted to be a cabdriver, only I had this little problem with my eyes, so I never made it.’ He thought I was serious. It went right over his head.”
Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell
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Quisenberry [Dan Quisenberry of the 1985 Kansas City Royals] when pitching invites more similes than stats. His ball in flight suggests the kiddie-ride concession at a county fairgrounds — all swoops and swerves but nothing there to make a mother nervous; if you’re standing close to it, your first response is a smile. … The man himself — Quis in mid-delivery — brings visions of a Sunday-picnic hurler who has somehow stepped on his own shoelaces while coming out of his windup …
Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell
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In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 6-6. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 3-2, and then sailed a massive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly’s account book for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driving in, including the game-winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, “This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone.”
Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell
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[Politics is] the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor, on the pretext of protecting each from the other.
Oscar Ameringer, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph L. Woods
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A Bag of Tools
Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders in eternity?
Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make —
Ere life has flown —
A stumbling block
Or a steppingstone.
R.L. Sharpe, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph L. Woods
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You get exactly the same results in Colossians 3:16 when the Word of Christ dwells in you richly that you get in Ephesians 5:19 when you are filled with the Spirit. There is an old rule in mathematics that “things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.” If to be filled with the Word is equal in result to being filled with the Spirit, then it should be clear that the Word-filled Christian is the Spirit-filled Christian. as the Word of Christ dwells in us richly, controls all our ways, as we walk in obedience to the Word, the Spirit of God fills, dominates, and controls us to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
From In the Heavenlies, by H.A. Ironside.