There are disadvantages in being an advanced septuagenarian, such as requiring a consultation with your knees as to whether they plan to assist when trying to rise after a couple of hours in a favored TV-watching chair.
There are also times when you feel blessed, and Friday was one of those, as a "new era" of Twins baseball was launched before noon on the floor of the Mall of America's rotunda.
Imagine, as a baseball-loving lad just turned 15 on the prairie of southwest Minnesota, to hear the news on Oct. 26, 1960, that Major League Baseball was on the way to Bloomington in the form of Calvin Griffith's Washington Senators.
Precisely one month later, it was announced the team would be named the Minnesota Twins, in an effort to make Minneapolis and St. Paul compatriots rather than the rivals they had been in trying to land a major league team in the second half of the 1950s.
And now here was that baseball lover, thanks to a regimen based on the healing powers of Diet Coke, able to be there 62 years later to watch the Twins start all over again.
That's what the emcee for Friday's proceedings asked us to honor with cheers, the "New Era of Twins baseball," and if you can't take Juice Sutton's word on such a thing, isn't that an indictment of our entire American society, and we weren't going to sit there on our hands and bad-mouth the United States of America.
So we cheered, first those sitting up the middle, then those residing to the left side, then those to right — although the 1,500 or so assembled widely around the stage and on three levels of balconies weren't exactly sure yet as to what it was we were cheering.
It could have been that a fair number of us were enthused that DJ Matty Matt had toned down his warmup music when Juice took over the stage.
