On this day in 1938, against the Philadelphia Athletics, Lou Gehrig hit the 23rd grand slam of his career — a record that stood for seventy-five years, until Alex Rodriguez passed it in 2013. It was also the last one he would ever hit. He was 35 and in the middle of what looked like an ordinary slump; within ten months he would take himself out of the lineup, and the rest of us would learn the name of a disease.

I do not bring that up to be sad. I bring it up because on August 20, 1938, nobody knew, and the bases were loaded, and he did the thing he had done twenty-two times before. Play the day you are in.