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Ten years ago we moved from Tucson to the Twin Cities in Minnesota.  Ten years ago I quit playing baseball with the TOTS:  the Tucson Old Timers.

 You had to be at least sixty to be voted into the Club.  When I left, Clarence was already eighty-two, and as I was told, had been one of the founders of the team, years earlier.  A Wisconsin dairy farmer, he had been told to move to the desert, somewhere, for the sake of his daughters' asthma, and had done so, getting a job with the University agriculture department's dairy farm.  But whenever Clarence said "home", he still meant Wisconsin.  

 Today I drove out to Udall Park, to see the team on one of its three days of baseball a week.  
There is a new bench outside the backstop.  Clarence Fieber died a year or so ago, having gotten to ninety, and more, still catching a baseball.  

 I sat on his bench, and fell in love with Clarence all over again, and with playing baseball in the summer sun during one's late autumn years.  I watched Floyd, who had a recent hip replacement, bend down, not quite far enough to reach a scorching grounder past first base.  "Well," another player explained to me, "a lot of us have that problem, even without hip surgery."  

 But it is baseball, not softball, and although once it was called, "fast pitch", there was precious little evidence of that.  There was, as there ought to be, good-humored outrage at a pitch called a strike that almost reached home plate while still air-borne.  The batter howled in protest, so the player calling balls and strikes, called the next pitch a strike, too, at about eyeball level.  It all worked out, when the batter laced the next pitch somewhat into the outfield grass.  

 "Are you coming back to stay?" they asked.  "Are you coming back to play?"  

 I laughed, and they laughed, too, even the three or four of them who are older than I.  I knew, and they knew, that if I had not thrown a baseball for ten years, that I would have trouble standing at home plate and hitting the backstop, even if I aimed at it.  The years transform what used to be muscles into brittle pain systems that send shooting pains to whatever in the body is still resilient enough to react to a stimulus.  

 But there is a warm glory in being sixty or seventy or eighty, reacting to a ground ball, or a pitched ball, and to still be able to catch or hit it somewhat in the way one used to be able to do it, and to be surrounded by two dozen other old guys who are not home sitting in a chair.  

 "I am going to retire from the TOTS," Brad said again, as he says every time he comes to play.  "My son is going to be sixty this month, and has been admitted to the Club, and he has been playing alongside me.  Now I can retire."  

 Brad played baseball for the U, a long time ago.  Some of the guys played minor league ball.  And Clarence milked cows in Wisconsin and at the U.  Most of us were more like Clarence.  

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