Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more