Living with Quiggles: Life Lessons from Baseball

Stigma:
1) The recognition of difference based on some distinguishing characteristic or mark
2) A consequent devaluation of the person

Quiggles: A made-up term (by famous sociologist, Erving Goffman) to identify all of the variations and difference of the human body which occur either from birth, daily wear and tear, accident, or illness which can be, and will be stigmatized.

Most of us vividly remember our very first jobs even though they weren't likely to have been in the proverbial mail room.  My first was walking beans, unless of course you count the Christmas when I was five and started wrapping Christmas purchases sold in my father's small town men's clothing store.  The pay at the time was a daily trip to see Santa in his special little house which was set up each Christmastime on the lawn of the court house.  Since no dollars changed hands, I think that walking beans really qualifies as my first job. 

For you city folk, walking beans means being up long before the sun, rushing to a designated pick-up spot in town, riding in the back of an old pick-up farm truck to the fields where you then spend 14-hour days walking acres and acres of rows of beans cultivating the soil and removing the invading corn plants.  "Blazing sun" and "dog days of August" took on an entirely new meaning within a day of starting my first job.  The compensation was bragging rights at school in the fall that you hadn't whimped out and, if memory serves,50 cents an hour.

I felt no shame or embarrassment starting at the bottom of the job ladder and you probably didn't either; it is expected at your first job.  But what if you'd  been a professional ball player, career cut short by injury,  and found yourself washing dishes and bussing tables at an upscale store such as Nordstroms, well aware of the stares and whispered comments as people recognized you and said to their friends, "My gosh, isn't that Bob Love?" as if somehow it was inappropriate that you should be doing an honest day's work. That would be an entirely different vantage point for a "mailroom" start at employment, wouldn't it?

If you, like me, do not follow sports closely, then you have probably missed the story of one of the greatest comebacks of all times, the Bob Love saga.  Mr. Love grew up poorer than most of us can imagine, in fact so poor that when he took ill while playing high school basketball, the diagnosis turned out to be malnutrition.  His coaches stepped in, sending him for lunch at their expense -- often to a local diner -- then taking turns carting him home with them at night to their own family dinner tables, where they not only fed him food, but accepted him for who he was; for Love lived with a very debilitating Quiggle -- stuttering.  
   

In order to avoid the teasing and embarrassment of this Quiggle, Love basically closed his mouth, perfected his game, and went on to college to major in nutrition, an early sign that here was an individual who wanted others not to suffer the same fate he had.