Changes

I won’t lie.  Clare seems to be taking her retirement from softball better than I am.  It’s like what Rutger Hauer told Harrison Ford at the end of “Blade Runner”—I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.  No, not attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, but balls hit so far they brushed by those ships on their way past the stars.  And now, everything is over.

There was a pitcher on Elmhurst two years older than Clare, good enough to be considered one of if not the best pitcher in school history.  Her father refused to sit with us.  It had nothing to do with any of the other parents; he just couldn’t handle being that close to his daughter when she was pitching.  Instead, every game he went to the outfield and stood behind the fence.  Sometimes, he said a few words to Clare between outs.

I asked him at the alumni game last autumn if he misses it, and he gave me that look; you have to have seen burning attack ships to recognize it.  Miserable though he was out there in exile, he misses it more than anyone could ever know, though I think I have a clue how much.

His daughter is married now and coaching in the suburbs.  The pitcher from Clare’s high school team got married earlier this year, and in two weeks Clare will be off to Freeport for the wedding of the Elmhurst shortstop, who wants to start married life in Colorado.  My daughter also rides the train into work partway with the Elmhurst second baseman.  She’ll be starting law school in the fall.

Things change, and people, too.  Fathers are left to remember those times off of Orion.