Monday, August 28, 2017

Baseball in the Absence of Our Intrepid Reporter



Our newest citizen came right back to work,
and had a big day, both hitting and fielding.
















If you hit it over the fence,
you have to run all the way around.







And when the inning is over,
someone else has to figure out
where it went, and bring it back.

















Not everything that ends well
began well.










Mine!  Yours!  His!  Whose?











Ballet lesson.






Diamond Dancing.


Fred Astaire at 88.













Job
well
done.















"Did you see that?"












Friday, August 25, 2017

On the Day When Miguel Became a Citizen


Friday, August 25, 2017


Today we took down part of the wall
that wants its way across the Americas.
Today, Miguel became an American citizen.
He was already a part of the Americas;
part of North America, in fact, as Mexico is,
but today he and his wife--I think her name is Maria--
became citizens of the United States.

Miguel was not at the Tucson Old Timers' game today.  He has important things to do:  looking his best, for instance, on his first day as a naturalized citizen of the United States.

The Old Timers signed a card on the scorer's desk,
for Miguel and Elda, so while the game went on, as usual, everyone knew that something wonderfully important was going to happen in downtown Tucson, not long after the game ended.

It is a wonderful place--this Tucson, this place with water at the foot of a black hill, where for thousands of years people have left their marks in the soil at the river, and their tracks up toward the hills.

Long after it was home to its first immigrants--probably form Asia across the Bering Straits, we live in what once was a territory of Spain.  Miguel's forbears walked this land hundreds of years ago, probably thinking there was more gold here, up north from where they found shiploads of it to fund Spain.

A little more than 160 years ago, the United States bought this part of North America from Mexico--it was called the Gadsden Purchase--and at a stroke, everyone here became part of the United States of America.  And today Miguel and Elda and a lot of other people, meeting in the Federal Courthouse in downtown Tucson, became citizens of the place they have more-or-less lived in for a long time.  And today, we became a better place for it.

Denny was there, too.  Denny is a TOT, too, and like Miguel was before 1:30 or so today, Denny is not a citizen of the United States.  He is from Canada, often marked on the maps of the United States as "Terra Incognita".

The Tucson Old Timers are--they may blush to deny it, but it is true--a kind of family, or if not a family exactly, a kinship of friends gathered around a way to experience life together even when, sometimes, the politics of human beings bumping together from all around the world, get confusing.  So they play ball together.

Our new citizens in Tucson today, came from many places.  They introduced themselves, and they looked like the world.  The judge in charge was superb, telling how he, too, carried family parts from . . . from all over the world, as most of us do.  He urged our newest citizens not to forget or to deny the cultures they carried with them, that they were, as they became what we are.

Miguel and Elda  were stunning.  Their pride, and our pride, were evident.

The sound system in the courtroom was a challenge to intelligibility, as courtroom sound systems usually are, and the battery of officials doing their best to make everything work mumbled mumbly things every now and then, and we looked at each other and finally stopped bothering to ask each other what that was, because we all knew that whatever the words were, Miguel was becoming a citizen.
















Many of the Old Timers dusted themselves off after the game at Udall Park, and drove downtown to be there for one of the guys; that kinship.  That friendship.  That pride.




 It was a fine day, here in the Southwest, where so much of what we are as a nation is happening every day.


Old Timer baseball is not all about baseball; not exactly.

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Overcast and Downcast

 As if to compensate
for staring at the eclipsed sky
during Monday's game,
Wednesday brought
barely sufficient cloud cover
to filter the sun.





More notably,
more seriously and worryingly,
Dan Price, a runner at third,
was forced to hot-foot it toward home.

He did not make it all the way,
but nosedived short of home;
hurt, hurting a lot.




Billy,  not a medical doctor,
'though with a career as a dentist,
was quick to offer help,
together with everyone near,
and it soon became the consensus
that Dan had torn a hamstring,
high up on his leg.

It was not the first rip heard
when the Tucson Old Timers
were on the field.
A posse of torn hamstring veterans
provided analogies.




Stouter, younger TOTs,
one at each arm,
helped Dan to a comfy bucket
at the dugout.

It was agreed
that Dan would be taken,
at game's end,
to a doctor doctor,
and someone else
would drive his car home.



Joe O., recalled that,
in his first game as a TOT,
he experienced almost
the same injury.

His backside, he said,
was streaked for days
with something like bruises and,
searching for a comparison,
looked at me and said that
"his butt looked like my shirt".

I . . .

I suppose I ought to care more
how I dress.

The game went on.  Who cares who won?
We all wish Dan well.

































Monday, August 21, 2017

Playing in the Dark

 August 21, 2017:  the day
of the Great Eclipse across America.

We, here in Tucson, were off
the darkened track, but the Tucson
Old Timers were ready to play
in the 57% dark, if dark it was.

Billy, who did not have a paper box
with a hole in it, did next best,
and brought binoculars
and a sheet of paper for projection.









Brad Tolson, of the clan, Tolson, Tolson, and More Tolsons,
showed up and settled into a seat in the shaded stands next to the dugout.
"Huh!", I heard Dennis call to him in his cultured Bostonian accent,
"Don't you know you can't see the eclipse in the dahk?"

"What is, 'dahk'?", Brad replied.






Miguel was ready:

Miguel is always ready.






The game went on as usual . . .




 . . . with its usual grace.








None the worse for the wear.












"It don't mean a thing,
if it ain't got that swing"
Encouragement
Communication



Nexus
On Second Thought
































The eclipse passed
leaving no trace
of otherworldly drama.

We have sun to spare,
here in Tucson:
sun to share.