Bring Your Blue Jersey!

The notice came by e-mail: "Bring your blue jerseys to the game on Monday". Not because they were to be worn during the game, but because the funeral for a TOT--a Tucson Old Timer baseball player--would be soon after the game.

That is what they do. When one of the Old Timers dies, the team tries to be at the funeral, together, wearing their jerseys, to show that playing baseball together is not just about playing baseball: it is about being together. It is about not being alone, even when the most lonely time of all has come.

It is not because the TOTs are the closest of friends: most of the Old Timers who play baseball together see each other only when the come to play ball together. And sometimes at a lunch together, just so they can see what everybody looks like without a billed cap. And every once in a while, at a game they have agreed to attend together--maybe a University of Arizona game, and sometimes at a funeral when they sit together, and think together about why they meet to play ball three times a week, all year around.

It is baseball they come for, of course. Of course it is about baseball! Why else would a sixty or seventy or eighty year-old come and stand in front of a thrown or batted baseball, if it were not about baseball? It is about the long, lovely arc of the ball. It is about running as hard as one can to reach out and catch that ball, and trying to anticipate where the cutoff man might be, or ought to be, and sometimes is. It is about hurting in the same places. It is about having seen the Diamondbacks, or the Giants, the Red Sox on TV yesterday, and talking about it in the dugout. It is about those damned Yankees.

And it is about getting older together. It is about not giving in to old age any faster than is necessary.

It is about knowing that there are twenty or thirty guys who are going to say Hi! to you when you show up on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and wishing you a good weekend. It is about not being alone. Not really alone.

It is not really, as St. Paul said, about fighting the good fight. It is a lot more fun than that. It is about playing a good game, or maybe just about playing the game as well as you can, and enjoying it. It is about saying, "Hi!", and finally, "Goodbye!".

It is not, as Dylan Thomas put it, a raging against the dying of the light, although it is a determination not to go gently into that good night. It is an agreement to make it a game, to play it as well and as long as one might, and to enjoy it, together.

And sometimes, to bring a clean, blue Jersey.

Comments

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