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.