Afternoon Baseball

For most people, those dates are life and death. It goes without a second thought that we consider, at least at face value, a deceased person by noticing their date of birth and then their date of death. What we forget sometimes is that we, too, will have the same fate, yet our whole lives will be led with only the date of birth involved.
What's my point? Our lives, and thus our control over them, are open-ended. We hustle, bustle and busy ourselves with obligations, errands, activities, and save the date of so many things, but unless we are lucky enough to do something important, or, more likely, are in the right place at the right time through sheer fate, almost no one will remember those other things that we did or the other dates in our life.

Here's one man who, by being in the right (though, terribly wrong) place at the right time, will be forever recalled as the last man from the 1914 World War One Christmas Truce. Prince Charles recalled meeting this man, Alfred Anderson, several times. He recalled this with pride. That's significant.

But all around us, and every day, there are people who will be remembered for a time, short or perhaps for a generation or two, and there will be people who aren't remembered at all. Simply by birth and death. The barest outline of the life cycle. And, most likely, all their fretting, worrying and doubt affected that outcome not in the least way.
An anonymous life doesn't make you any less, or erase the good that was done, it just makes for a quieter afterlife. And it puts you in good company with billions of others.