Just For One Day

David Bowie had it right that we can all be heroes just for one day.  Anything longer is gravy.

I don’t like heroes so much as I need them as role models.  John Glenn always exhibited a unique balance of ambition, duty and humility while Ted Williams overcame his inner punk to serve his country in not one but two wars.  I also like how my daughter handled things the summer between her junior and senior years of high school.  Talk about grace under pressure.

Clare batted .425 that spring, which we hoped would catch the attention of a couple of area D-I schools.  In fact, two coaches spent the summer torturing us with vague promises of coming to her travel tournaments.  I very much would’ve liked it had they shown up for the one where she hit five homeruns, but they didn’t.  Trust me, it was their loss.   

For reasons neither of us could ever figure out, the two new coaches for Clare’s team didn’t particularly like her.  I mean, they kept in the sixth-spot for all but one of the games that weekend, and one game they benched her because we were late; still, she pinch hit a home run.  The next weekend, she batted seventh, and, by the time we were at nationals, Clare was batting even lower, when the let her hit.  By the end of the season, my daughter was pretty sure her softball career would never make it to college.

The thing is, Clare didn’t mope or howl at the moon.  Instead, she sucked it up, told me—quite incorrectly, I might add—that it would probably all be over next spring and went about running for homecoming queen in the fall of senior year.  You have no idea how surprised we all were when colleges started contacting us about playing for them.  I guess that was her reward.

For Cindy Stowell, it was just the chance to appear on Jeopardy! this year; she said it was a lifelong dream, and I can relate to that, wanting to and in fact appearing on the game show back when Clare was three.  Only I lost the farm in Final Jeopardy (What is the Rhodesian ridgeback?) while Stowell went on to win six times.  Only she didn’t live to see her appearances broadcast.  Stowell died of colon cancer early this month at the age of 41.      

Incredibly, she knew she was dying when stood there, signaling button in hand, intent on beating challengers intent on dethroning her.  According to reports, she competed while dealing with a fever and taking pain medication; all I had to worry about was the damn’ button.  Seven times, host Alex Trebek chit-chatted with Stowell in that period after the first commercial break, the two of them pulling it off brilliantly, that here was just another goofy Jeopardy! nerd; Trebek was one of the few people to know about Stowell’s condition.  The champ won over just over $103,000, all of which she donated to cancer research.

This is how you compete, on the field, on a game show, in life, in the shadow of death.  Stowell’s memory deserves to last far longer than just one day.