Lunchtime

I had lunch with Clare’s high school coach yesterday.  Euks still insists on thinking of himself as Clare’s second father.  Anyone else my age texting my daughter I might worry about, but not Euks.

He was Clare’s first baseball coach out of t-ball, a bunch of 8- and 9-year olds playing in the fall.  Of course, Clare was the only girl on the team, but Euks treated her just like everyone else.  She threw hard, ran hard and was already swinging for the fences.  Every summer for the next five years we’d cross paths at Berwyn’s Baseball Alley, Euks always enthusiastic and encouraging.  When he became the softball coach at Morton, he let Clare play on his summer team, starting two years before she graduated from grade school.  Need I say what high school our daughter had her heart set on?

We reminisced over players and games, like the regional playoff against Riverside-Brookfield freshman year when Clare singled to start a four-run rally in the top of the seventh or the regionals’ game senior year against St. Ignatius when she homered in the bottom of the seventh to tie the game we’d go on to win; the home run, possibly still going, came off the daughter of a certain big-name local D-I coach.  Euks also loves to tell the story of the time he was at the Elmhurst-North Central game two years ago when I tossed the score book away in disgust after we lost on a walk-off  home run.  This was our time machine, fueled by soup, salad and sandwich.  There’s never enough food for as long as we’d like to visit back then.