Hank Aaron surely would have remembered a day when he was just a ballplayer or, better still, just playing ball.
Before the burdens were set upon him, because he was a ballplayer and he was him, here.
He died Friday, two weeks short of his 87th birthday. What came then was a national eulogy for a career, a life and an effort. Oh, the effort. Those words reflected the best of what we can be, what we’d hope for ourselves if opposed by the same antagonists, if gifted by the same game, and exposed a darkness we convince ourselves lifted with Rosa or Jackie or in Selma or on an inauguration Tuesday a dozen years ago or in the linked elbows on Main Streets last summer.