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.

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.

Quote of the Day, and Some Pictures

Billy, 88 years old, had just hit a line ball
directly to a fielder.  Floyd, aged 92, and
the only TOT older than Billy, the only
TOT who could say it, said:

"I know just how you feel, Billy!"

It doesn't matter whether you ever have run  like the wind, or whether you can run like the wind, if your bat touches the ball at all, you will likely hear a Bostonian voice soar out, "Run like the wind!"

Dennis hit a triple, and the Old Timer's By-Laws clearly state that if you hit a triple you have to run to third base by way of first and second base.  So Dennis did.  And we heard that voice again:  "I need a pinch runner."

It is not whether you are good at baseball: it is that you can play it at all.

 If you are getting up in years, it is nearly impossible to visit a doctor and not be asked, "Have you had any falls lately?"

You find yourself calculating the cost and clumsiness of an aluminum walker, and whether your car will accommodate a chair lift.

The Tucson Old Timers, who cannot even join the team if they are not at least sixty years old, play hardball, not softball, not slow-pitch:  hard-ball!

If you are old enough even to imagine what it is like to be sixty or seventy or ninety-two years old, you still cannot imagine what it is like to run from first to third base, nowhere nearly as fast as you remember having done when you were young and green.  Your cardiologist would stop breathing if he or she knew what you were feeling.

If you have not picked up a baseball or a stone for years, and tried to throw it as hard as you can about a hundred feet, then you do not know what it is like to be an Old Timer playing baseball.  Your arm is likely to convince you that it weights a hundred pounds and is going to fall off.

Running as fast as you can to catch a foul tip is likely to end with a nose dive into a trench of your own digging, just because something inside you stopped telling your feet what to do.

I wonder what Ron Carlson says to his doctor when asked whether he has fallen lately. 

Maybe, "Have you ever played baseball?  Have you ever been a catcher?  Were you sixty or seventy when you did?"

Tucson Old Timers Celebrate Birthdays

 Most people celebrate birthdays once a year, at most.  The Tucson Old Timers celebrate four times a year.

Well, it isn't the same thing, really. . . .

Today was a party for all the TOTs born in July, August, and September.  About three months from now, there will be a party for members born in October, November, and December.

You get the idea.

 Players born in the designated months make the arrangements.  This time, they chose to have pizza.  Sometimes they broil brats and hot dogs, or ship in lobsters from Maine.

Actually, so far, no one has shipped in lobsters from Maine, or anywhere else.  Crawdads from. . . .   No!  Not that, either.

 As players wish, sometimes they invite family members to join them.  The power of pizza to attract young ball players is astounding.

The celebrations are adjacent to the ball field itself, at Udahl Park, in east Tucson, only the most recent of several places where the TOTs have played over the years.

Some of the kids arranged a quick pick-up game of their own, in anticipation of the day, about fifty years from now, when they will be old enough to try out for the team.

Next year, the TOTs, themselves, will celebrate their own 50th year of playing baseball.  

Opocensky and Urtaza
comparing names.

 While baseball togs are generally worn at every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday game, on days like this game uniforms are worn.  Each player brings either a blue or a white shirt to adjust to which team they will be on for the day.

The oldest player ever to play for the TOTs, Floyd Lance, buys new jerseys each year, as his birthday happens.  This year, he wore # 92.

It looks like he is not yet done buying jerseys.

The TOTs will have another birthday this year, probably in November.

The Pause that Refreshes

I get a lot of medical reports,
and they are not of interest, even to me,
so this is not a medical report.
Even if it were, it would be awkward
to find the right words.  I have been,
if not felled by, at least brutalized by
what happens when the whole digestive tract
adopts the capabilities of a serial bazooka.

We had been on a trip to Northern California
and Southern Oregon, and my first supposition--
that I had eaten something unfamiliar--proved itself
to be an inadequate analysis.  I may indeed
have done that:  that was one of the intentions
of making the trip in the first place.

This most recent Monday, I spent six or seven
hours in what might be called a very calm
and unhurried emergency room.  Finally, after
what I think was called, "a battering of tests",
as day and I were dying in the west,
a doctor handed me a stack of test results
and medical commandments:  I cannot spell
"diverticulitis", but he said I was guilty of it.

Now you know, whether you had noticed
or not, where I have been these last weeks:
introverted in the worst way.