Standing in line under the stands at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Florida last week, I felt hungry for a hot dog. While waiting my turn at the counter, I turned around to talk with the woman behind me who turned out to be a native of Woburn, Massachusetts, Dottie Craft. She is both a reader of this column and , like me, an  old-time baseball fan.

When Dottie was a girl, she told me, her mother used to put her on the train for Boston and her father would pick her up at North Station. Then father and daughter would go to Braves Field on ladies’ day.  It’s one of the sweet memories of her early life that a baseball game in Florida’s Grapefruit League brings back.

Also in line were the Smiths from Connecticut, Gene and Ellen. “She’s the fan,” Gene said of his wife. As his cap indicated, he is a navy veteran of World War II, having served on the USS Rochester.

Somehow the name of John Rocker came up in our conversation. He’s the mou-thy Atlanta Braves relief pitcher whose punishment for outrageous remarks about New Yorkers had just been reduced. Ellen Smith told me: “I guess he should be banned. We’re telling our kids you can’t do drugs, then they let him go. That’s not right.”

After getting the hot dog, I returned to the stands for the start of the game between the host St. Louis Cardinals and the visiting Los Angeles Dodgers. Of course, both teams are visiting Florida as they prepare for the official season to start back home. The games in March don’t count in the official standings but they give the veterans a chance to get ready and the rookies an opportunity to show their stuff.

For me, this game was filled with beauty and atmosphere. It was the baseball of my dreams: temperatures around 75, a warm sun shielded at times by friendly clouds, fans amiable and ready to chat, and players wearing classic uniforms. The Cardinals, in particular, looked handsome in their pressed clean white jerseys and pants, featuring red letters along with hats and shoes of the same color.

Even before he came to bat, Mark McGwire, greater than Babe Ruth in a single season, was the center of fans’ attention. When at the plate, however, the slugger did not deliver on this day. Three times, he failed to put his bat on the ball solidly. Clearly, his timing has not yet approached mid-season form. Still, to see the mighty Mac take his swings excited awe, as always.

As the game proceeds I make it my business to engage nearby fans in conversation. Meyer Foss, 86 years old, recalls his boyhood when he used to pass the hat for his double A hometown team, the Wilkes-Barre Barons in Pennsylvania.

Another fan, a New Yorker sitting in the row in front of me, is much distracted by a disastrous day on Wall Street. “The Dow is down 300 points,” he breezily informs us all.

The left fielder is not having a much of a day either. We have just heard him call “I got it” for a fly ball that misses his glove and bounces off his chest.

Another fan is overheard to report: “I called his grandfather and told him that his grandson was a Republican – he didn’t handle it very well.”

Between innings, I amble over to the next section of the boxes where the professional scouts are sitting. Among them is Tommy Lasorda, Mr. Los Angeles Dodgers, since 1997, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was Dodger manager for twenty years and steered the team to two World Series victories. Now he brings his experience to evaluating talent.

In a brief interview, I ask Tommy Lasorda how he feels about the game as he gets older. “You keep on loving it more and more every day,” says the man who clearly seems to be enjoying himself that afternoon. “But I miss managing very much,” he adds rueful-ly.

Meanwhile play continues much like a regular season game except that substitutions of players are frequent. The starters are removed after a few innings to give unproven players a chance. I relish the lack of a designated hitter in this game between National League teams since I have always felt that the DH spoils the purity of the game.

Nothing very exciting happens in this game; even a clutch hit by a Cardinal rookie to drive in the winning hit in the last of the eighth inning stirs only scattered applause. But the afternoon continues balmy and the conversation goes on and we fans find quiet enjoyment in the proceedings.

Six thousand fans exit at game’s end having spent the kind of afternoon worth remembering.

Richard Griffin

When I was a boy, my favorite artist was Norman Rockwell. His “Satur-day Evening Post” covers used to amuse and move me. I remember one in partic-ular that showed a barber cutting a boy’s hair. He had got so distracted by the magazine the boy was reading that he cut a swathe right up his head, like a ski run clearing up a forested mountain.

Rockwell’s images of small-town America seemed to me charming and I admired the artist’s skill at depicting real people. To me, he got the citizens of this nation right, along with the places where they worked and the things they used. The warm colors that this artist preferred added to his allure for me.

Later, I discovered that I should not have liked Rockwell all that much. He was merely sentimental, critics said, hardly a serious artist. Instead, he was a populist, someone who did the easy stuff rather than the work of a real artist. Yes, he had a certain technique and surface gloss, but he should never be classed among the real painters of our time.

This past autumn, however, I discovered that Norman Rockwell was being celebrated as a serious artist after all. Suddenly, it seemed, the critical judgment of the past was overturned and he was now being recognized as an imposing fig-ure with talent, worthy of being taken seriously.

Museums across America were now taking part in a national tour of his works that would end at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. In a lead article featured in the New York Times, critic Michael Kimmelman even called him “a good artist,” and praised him because “Rockwell gave us a people’s history of America during the first half of the century.”

Something of the same turn-around in critical opinion took place much earlier with one of my favorite artists in another sphere – classical music. Sir Ed-ward Elgar loomed large for me way back in my teenage years. He had won my affection especially with his “Dream of Gerontius,” a grand-scale oratorio that used to thrill me from adolescence on.

Elgar, however, I later discovered, did not rate with critics. In the middle decades of the century now past, the Boston Symphony and other leading musical ensembles would not perform his major works. Everyone who ever attended a high school graduation, of course, knew his “Pomp and Circumstance” march but music lovers were unlikely to hear his symphonies, concertos, or songs.

Some three decades ago, however, critics discovered that Elgar was not so bad after all. Since that recognition, he has come to enjoy great popularity. No-wadays his compositions are performed regularly to great acclaim by orchestras, soloists, and singers. Not only is it allowed to like Elgar now, but you can claim him as a favorite composer as I still do.

I cite Rockwell and Elgar simply to indicate how much, as we age, re-ceived opinion changes. If you live long enough, you come to see, not only huge changes in inventions, such as the arrival of computers, but also more subtle transformations of thought and opinion. Nothing stands still, not even the way we approach works of art.

Relativity marks our lives much more than we ever imagined it would. As the ancient Greek philosopher saw it, the stream moves on and you can never dip your toe into the same water twice. Critical opinion is always fickle. The spirit of the time, what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, determines outlook much more widely than we would have thought possible.

Some people among us manage to hold on to cherished tastes their whole lives. Others of us tack our sails to winds prevailing at the moment. Most people, I suspect, do both. We hang on to some of our tastes while exchanging other favo-rites, swapping the old for the new.

This ebb and flow helps to make the world more interesting. It gives us material to reflect on and to talk about with friends. New enthusiasms feed our souls as do changed appraisals of figures we have known for a long time.

We can also take pleasure when others swing around to recognize our good taste and uphold what we judge excellent. I feel glad about critics having arrived at the point of sharing my own sound judgements. Whatever took them so long?

My prejudices in the area of culture have also held up and withstood much pressure to change. Sinatra, for example, I have never much liked. Nor do I have any feeling for Barbra Streisand. In so-called higher culture, I still do not like De-bussy, no matter his greatness in musical history.

Given time, however, these dislikes may break down. Meantime, I cherish both likes and dislikes and wait for changes inevitably to arrive.

Richard Griffin

What a pleasure it was, in the week straddling February and March, to re-visit two favorite pieces of music! Both recall the second decade of the twentieth century.

Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” which builds on a poetic text by James Agee, never fails to move me with its bittersweet memory of child-hood. As sung by soprano Jayne West and played by the Boston Philharmonic under Benjamin Zander’s direction, this work stirred up the vision of a different America, yet one where the familiar deepest questions about life arise.

An autobiographical fragment from Agee, the text, as set to music by Barber, conveys the feeling of a summer evening and the varied noises of a neighborhood. People sit on their porches rocking back and forth; both people and things go by. This peaceful atmosphere is interrupted by a streetcar “raising its iron moan.”

The child, his parents, uncle, and aunt lie on quilts spread in the back yard. They talk quietly while under the stars that seem very near. Among the voices the child hears are those of his mother “who is good to me” and his father of whom the child uses the same words.

And, yet, “who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,” the narra-tor asks himself. Thinking of his parents, he asks God to “remember them kindly in their time of trouble and in their hour of taking away.”

Finally, he is put to bed and “soft, smiling sleep” approaches. But he wonders about those who love and care for him “but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”

The life-long quest for self-identity is a theme many of us older people re-flect upon. We think back to our childhood and evoke scenes like that drawn by James Agee. The sounds of our early years form part of this recollection, those noises characteristic of the places where we grew up.

Though Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” recalls the same historical era, it differs sharply from “Knoxville.” Britten chooses texts from the Latin Requiem Mass and from the anti-war poet Wilfred Owen. He weaves the two in and out, using the poet’s words as a commentary (often ironic) on the liturgical text.

The oratorio was written to mark the consecration in 1962 of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry, England. The original building had been largely demolished by German bombers in1940.

As performed by the Boston Symphony with outstanding soloists Chris-tine Goerke, Ian Bostridge, and Thomas Quasthoff, and both adult and children’s choruses, the work received a fervently appreciative response from audience members. Its skillful mix of so many musical and linguistic forces stirred us listeners to admiration.

For critic Michael Steinberg, the collision between innocence and corruption runs through all of Britten’s work including the “War Requiem.” In the Of-fertory of the requiem, for instance, after the chorus sings of God’s promise to “Abraham and his seed,” the words of Wilfred Owen come as a shock. In Owen’s text, as in the Bible, Abraham is told to sacrifice a ram in place of his son Isaac: “But the old man would not do so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

In the liturgical poem Dies Irae, the sinner asks Jesus for mercy and ap-peals to his forgiveness of Mary Magdalen and the Good Thief. In response Wil-fred Owens pessimistically prays for deliverance from the arrogance that causes war: “Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm / Great gun towering toward Hea-ven, about to curse; / Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm, / And beat it down before its sins grow worse; / But when thy spell be cast complete and whole, / May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!”

The bitter catastrophe that was the first world war polluted the first part of the century just finished. The memory of how it destroyed a civilization and prepared for the horrors of the second world war only thirty years later must have impressed itself deeply on the parents and grandparents of today’s old people.

If, as a Swedish scholar has observed, it is a mark of later life to experience an “increasing sense of connection to earlier generations,” artistic works like the two cited here enhance that connection. They remind us both of a different world that existed before America’s entrance into the Great War and of the loss of innocence brought on by that war.

The musical artists, Britten and Barber, and the poetic artists, Owen and Agee, enable us to enter into both experiences. The one set of events, taking place on a world stage, was epic in its effects. The other, a domestic scene that focuses on the microcosm of one man’s life, raises deep questions about who each one of us is.

Richard Griffin

A poem, parts of which are quoted here, spoke movingly to a group of older people recently gathered together to think about spirituality. Written by Sis-ter Margaret Ringe, this poem seemed to touch the hearts of those who listened to it. Perhaps it will have something of the same effect on you as you apply its verses to yourself or to an older person important to you.

“I’m old now and much is new / I can’t do what I used to do.

I can’t do what I used to do / I’m doing what, for me, is new.”

The poet has discovered that later life brings her many new experiences. Though part of this newness is inability to perform certain physical tasks, she makes a more important discovery. She has learned more about her own emotional life, drawing nearer to her own heart.

This woman has also discovered new kinds of thinking, a luxury that her previous lifestyle did not allow enough of. As a religious person, she has also found a new contemplative life. Her prayer now has more of a mystical quality to it than before: instead of doing all the talking, she allows space for God to speak.

She spends time assembling the wide variety of emotional, mental, and in-stinctual inner events that now pass through her mind and heart. With her the prophecy of the Hebrew Bible has come true: she dreams dreams. Perhaps she dreamed earlier in her life, but now she takes note of this mysterious activity.

The poet goes on the lookout for people to listen to her story. Everyone has that need but she acknowledges it openly, her desire to find those able to pro-vide sympathetic listening. Similarly, she searches for some sort of repository where her new-found wisdom can be placed. Yes, she has some wisdom, though one can imagine her wary of counting on it.

Growing in confidence, the poet dares recognize that now she can actually do a whole lot of things. This recognition takes her by surprise perhaps because of her awareness of what she cannot any longer do.

She takes on some difficult tasks: listening, learning, and, especially, changing long embedded opinions. Perhaps it’s because she makes a point of talk-ing to other people, maybe new friends. Who would have thought it possible to make such radical changes so late in life?

New capacities for giving continue to surprise her. That she can comfort others instead of focusing on her own problems counts as one such surprise. Another is the strength – spiritual, moral, emotional perhaps – that she finds to share with other people. Even what she calls loveliness flows out of her, much to her astonishment.

She may have underestimated her juniors. Some young people now seem to look upon her with high regard. Yes, many Americans may still discount the aged, but at least these know better.

Unknown to themselves, these young people may even be looking for models of later life. They may want to study their own future selves in order to draw hope for the distant future.

In concluding this part of the poem, the author repeats the refrain but this time with the subtle change “I’m doing what, for me, is new.” For her, the possi-bilities of later life have been revealed and she feels much the better for being older.

The beauty of the poem, for me, is its revelation of how mind and heart can flourish in advanced maturity. At least, it serves as a corrective to the pessim-ism that can oppress us all when we think about the approach of old age. But the sentiments expressed here do not amount to mere optimism. Rather, they are grounded in a hopefulness about life.

Time after time life surprises us. We think we have it all plotted out, our futures easy to chart. But being human can never be entirely predictable. Vitality, spirit, and heart have a way of breaking in upon our complacency. The last stages of our lives can, after all, turn out to be the ones richest in reality.

Richard Griffin