This is how you know
our daughter Clare is home from college for the summer—the television is turned
on to ESPN, with the NCAA Division I woman’s softball world series on. I’m either on the couch watching or on call, expected
to drop anything when summoned. Clare
plays Division III softball at Elmhurst College.
When you take the lump
of human coal home from the hospital for the first time, their personality is
up for grabs, or maybe not. Either Clare
was on her way to becoming a violinist had we only given her the instrument, or
she was destined to be a ballplayer. She
did spend a lot of time on my lap as a two-year old watching Frank Thomas
hit. Two years later, she was lining a wiffle
ball at my head.
And now it’s almost
eighteen years after that. My wife
Michele and I, with five college degrees between us, have raised a jock of a
child who is entering her last year of defining herself as an athlete. Unless, that is, she tries out for the women’s
professional softball league.
Personally, I’d rather she go back to baseball. She played it through seventh grade, which may
explain how she hits homeruns. No one at
Elmhurst has ever hit more.
What I’m up to here is
following my daughter’s last year in college.
The timing seems strange, I know, given how softball won’t start again until
February. But the jock in our house is
never at rest, and she’d make a decent sportswriter if only we didn’t live in such
a digital age. She has opinions, and so
do I. The mix of them might be interesting
as we count the calendar down to next year.
Anyway, she’s just come
back from nine days of playing softball in Holland, where they don’t run the
bases in wooden shoes. Who knew?
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