Heroes

Clare called again yesterday afternoon from work, this time with a different sort of update:  “Did you hear?  John Glenn died.”

When our daughter was six, she had settled on becoming an astronaut.  She loved to look at the moon and the stars and must have imagined a place for herself among them.  The day she graduated kindergarten, we went down to visit my sister in Houston, which included trips to Galveston and the Johnson Space Center (along with a baseball game in the Astrodome).  At the space center, Clare was strapped into some kind of contraption that spun her around and upside down.  If she didn’t come out of that seeing Jesus, she did become aware of John Glenn, whom I’d never mentioned.

When she started Mustang ball for the Berwyn Park District in third grade, Clare found herself on the Padres; that was how she first became interested in Tony Gwynn.  (I can only imagine if she had gone on the Red Sox, which might’ve led to Clare being Clare a la Manny Ramirez.)  “I really had some strange role models,” our daughter said at dinner.

Not at all.