Welcome to another chapter of Grateful Heart Monday, where gratitude is the only focus of the day, which for today is for a guy named Shane Loux, a retired pitcher for the major and minor leagues, who also just happened to be the very same guy who aerated my yard recently for the company I use for lawn service.
I would never have thought that a retired major league baseball player and presently a minor league baseball coach would have ever been someone to show up at my house for one of my regularly scheduled lawn services. But, that indeed is what happened early one morning at the wee hours of 7:30am when a kind gentleman showed up at my home and introduced himself as the perso who would be aerating my yard for the day.
As Shane did his assessment of the job and got his machine ready to go that does the aeration, I asked him a number of questions, including whether this was his full-time job or not. That was when I became very surprised at his answer, as his normal job was a coaching one for a minor league baseball team, the Missoula Osprey, under the Arizona Diamondbacks franchise.
I’m not sure I ever would have guessed that Shane was once a Major League Baseball player or that he was now a coach under a major franchise. I guess the idea of plugging a yard with a bulky machine, getting super muddy in the process, and then walking around with a hand-held feeder to place seed down everywhere is not something I’d ever imagine a former MLB player would do. Maybe that’s because I’ve always had this image of all professional athletes having mile-wide ego’s where doing something like aerating a yard would seem quite beneath them. But that is indeed why I’m so very grateful that Shane came into my life that day, if only to teach me how wrong I was in a long-standing silent judgment.
For the brief two hours Shane spent at my home doing the lawn service I was paying for, I truly saw a humble, egoless, kind, and spirited soul. Shane had such a soft presence about him, one that really reminded me of another guy I wrote about a few years back, a guy by the name of Nevin Martin, who was a gentle soul and the pilot on a small charter plane I flew one day.
Like Nevin, Shane carries this extremely positive energy about himself, one that makes a person feel quite uplifted by just being around him. There were never any judgments that came from his mouth and no negative comments, not even to any of the OCD behaviors I’m sure I exhibited by asking him one question after another! He exuded such a great sense of patience with me, like Nevin did, and is someone who I feel would be the type of coach I’d want to have if I was a young kid aspiring to be a baseball great one day.
I think it’s pretty awesome to see a guy like Shane doing a yard job during the summer for a company his family owns in an area that’s pretty far from his regular home in Arizona, just to lend a hand. The humility in Shane’s actions, the friendliness of his soul, and the genuineness he brings to the table by just being himself is truly something to be grateful for and why Shane Loux is a well-deserved recipient of this week’s Grateful Heart Monday.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
