Hope in 2009

Hope which Springs Eternal

When our children were younger, I directed the youth hand bell choir at our church. It was usually a fun exchange between director, bell ringers and listeners. There were a few times that the exuberance of the participants and the director clashed with the traditions of the worship service, but everyone, including the kids, seemed to have a good time.

One year the ringers and I were asked to perform at a secular event. It was a dinner held at one of the original homes of the town, cooked by the ladies auxiliary, or some such charity. Stevens Cottage presented a little bit of a problem in presentation for the hand bells, in that there were three separate rooms that would be used simultaneously for meals and no one area large enough to hold both the 8 bell ringers and the diners. It was early spring and the weather to iffy to chance performing on the cottage porch, so I decided that we would be traveling minstrels, going from room to room with our noise.

The song we came up with, practiced and modified to fit a few of our participants was “Daisy”, and her bicycle built for two. We followed that with a short rendition of ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame” interspliced with a reading of Ernest Thayer’s poem, “Casey At the Bat”. We recruited a talented female singer to help us with Daisy, and we all sang the Ballgame, although it was asking the kids to do a lot with both playing the hand bells and singing at the same time. I recited the poem. It was a good evening and as there were three rooms of guests, and two settings for dinner, we got to perform six times. By the sixth time, we had our lines down pretty well.

I remember all this because of the section of the poem – “The hope which springs eternal in the human breast.” It was used as the hometown crowd of Mudville entered into the ninth inning of the baseball game. There were two out and the Mudville nine were down by two runs. The home team’s best player, Casey, had two batters in front of him before he could hit, Senn and Dougy Blake (members of the bell choir, not the ball team actually). The former was a phony and the latter was a flake. I had to say that with a smile so they wouldn’t get mad at me.

The poem ends of course with these famous lines:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out

I write this now not for the strike out part, but the hope that springs eternal part. We’ve come through a remarkable year. It was remarkable, not necessarily in a good sense, but certainly 2008 was a year to remember. Nancy and my financial portfolio has diminished, but at least we have much company in that misery. We’ve lost friends in the past year. The current state of the world does not seem to be much better than it was this time last year.

We still have our health, our jobs and our hopes. We suspect that you have your hopes and dreams, too. Perhaps there are diminished after this past year, more realistic, but I suspect that they’re still there. And as long as we hold onto those dreams, the band will be playing again sometime soon.