Waltz Time – Entry 13 – Your Religion

 Waltz Time – Entry 13 – Your Religion

“The field could no longer hold you; the guitar was already waiting.”

I found out you also began in the Church, though your path through it looked so different from mine. While I was fidgeting in wooden desks under the eyes of nuns, you were in public school, where your father was the principal. That must have been its own kind of pressure, carrying his presence in the hallways every day. But you never spoke of it as a burden. You seemed to wear it like a quiet badge of honor, a steady compass that kept you on course.

You were an excellent student—disciplined, focused, determined to do well. Where I wrestled with rules and tested boundaries, you trusted the structure that was handed to you. You believed that effort would be rewarded, that hard work mattered, that showing up with consistency was its own kind of faith.

Baseball was your sport, and you were really good at it. The diamond was your sanctuary, the field your chapel. You found holiness in the crack of the bat, the thud of the ball in a glove, the dust rising beneath your cleats as you rounded the bases. You carried yourself with the grace of someone who understood discipline and joy as two sides of the same coin.

But then came the moment that changed everything. You were in a state championship game when you saw it happen: a boy on the opposing team, humiliated and berated by his father right there in front of everyone. The cruelty of it lodged deep in you. You carried that image home, unsettled by it, though you didn’t yet know why.

A few years later, it was your turn. You made a mistake on the field, and your own father—the man you trusted as both parent and principal—unleashed his anger on you. The same shame you had witnessed in that other boy now burned in your own skin. Something inside you shifted that day. Baseball no longer felt like a sanctuary. It felt like exposure, like betrayal.

You quit. Your father tried to convince you not to, but you were done. And then the very next day, life made its own decision for you. You climbed a tree to grab an apple, fell, and broke your back. When you told me that, I was stunned—not just that you had survived, but that you had recovered. Yet clearly, competitive sports were behind you.

That fall became a turning point. With baseball gone, music stepped in. You picked up the classical guitar and, with the same discipline that once drove you on the field, you mastered it. Soon, you were performing with a local teen group, your fingers pulling sound out of strings the way your body once moved across the diamond.

What mattered was this: you had turned toward a different journey. Where the field had once been your sanctuary, the guitar became your prayer. And though neither of us knew it then, your music and my art were already moving us toward one another, preparing the rhythm we would one day share.

Your resiliency surprised me. You had endured disappointment, injury, even the weight of your father’s expectations, and still you found a way forward. I was mesmerized by you—by the quiet strength beneath your calm, by the way you turned loss into music, and by how you carried your story without bitterness. It was then that I began to realize that what drew me to you wasn’t just your smile or your talent, but the depth of your spirit.

I carried that thought with me as we left the diner, our steps falling into rhythm once more on the way to the subway.

💞