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This is the springtime cusp for deep spiritual reflection—another baseball season emerges and every team is temporarily equivalent in the standings and the box scores do not wax hot yet and hope springs as green as those diamond spaces in the urban centers.   A forgiving breeze softens the game’s steroid crises. There is no NFL football to watch nor are games expected this fall due to labor conflict.  Something may or may not be happening in hockey, but if I want ice I go to the freezer.

And all this reminds me that men can't make their own sandwiches.

In general, American boys and men are settling into their baseball watching and listening patterns on radio, television, cable contracts or MLB.com.   Women, those dutiful partners of God, know that they “get” this life better than men but pretty much keep the truth to them because we men can’t handle too much veracity. 

Women basically know that baseball is a game, not a contract with life itself.  They also know how to craft and create pleasant and delicious platters of grub and beverages that men require—sure as men compare belches in certain rites of passage—while men gaze upon The Game.

Women, who give birth, and who suffer the Oedipal issues, the cosmic insecurities of men, our absolute standoff with the specter of mortality, will carry on through the season, endure our pennant-related moods and vanities, and just deal.

Over the course of some 30 years in the business of human life, I have been an observer and participant in what somebody else once aptly termed “the war between men and women.”  The best thing for a man to do is turn his head in favor of wisdom; his hyper-focus on his personal utensils always trumps the gray matter with which he was possibly gifted.  As a fabulous older lady from Richmond who knew the Clinton family once told me when we happened to discuss the confounding contradictions of President Bill Clinton:  “When a man was once a hillbilly, he’s always a hillbilly.”

And so in this verdant new season, in a lighter vein, but still in the lode of men’s ultimate helplessness:  I recall a baseball gathering around the television years ago with some of the male relatives in the family.  The Game was starting up and so were our appetites.  Problem:  The women were still out shopping for sundries, enjoying some time with one another, away from servitude.  They had little or no interest in the baseball game and our hee-haw obsession with it.  There was food in the refrigerator, cold cuts, condiments, cold drinks, potato chips and pretzels in the cupboards.  We fellows were strapped to our big chairs, recliners, couches, the Opening Pitch was thrown; we were enthralled and began to ask one another, “So, when do you think the girls will get back?”

Nobody particularly missed “the girls.”  We were just hungry.  Or the requirement of appetite just kicked in with the infield play.  And it seemed physically impossible for any of us sons, uncles, or fathers to actually get up, go into the kitchen adjacent and prepare some sandwiches.

So we didn't.  We knew we just couldn't do it like the women.  The first four innings came and went.  Somebody had the wherewithal to retrieve some beverages and to rip open a bag of chips (as only a man can do, sans a bowl, any napkins, or even a pleasantly prepared dip).  Maybe we just knew we were Neanderthals. 

But it was the bottom of the fifth before “the girls” got home, with warm fresh bagels and, laughing to themselves at our complete ineptitude, prepared the most succulent and delectable platters of sandwiches, salads, and side dishes.

“God has endowed women with a special sense of wisdom which man lacks.” –The Talmud

Ben Kamin is one of America's best known rabbis, a multicultural spiritualist, NYT Op-ed contributor and author of seven books, including his latest, "NOTHING LIKE SUNSHINE: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination."  He is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist.

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