Swing, Batter

Swing, Batter

They ought to install seatbelts in the stands for parents who attend alumni softball games.  It would help with the whiplash caused by jumping from memory to memory.

I’m sitting in the bleachers on a Sunday afternoon the way we did for four years when Clare played her home games at Elmhurst.  The field looked the same as it always did, and, according to my daughter, it was doing the same as usual after a week of heavy rain.  “Right field is a swamp,” reported the onetime right fielder (2011-2014) for the Elmhurst Bluejays.

The only thing off was the weather, way too warm and sunny.  So, that made me think of Florida instead of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin in spring.  No, check that.  Everyone around me was off, too.  Or was it me?

Even though I was sitting with alumni parents, I had no idea who they were; it had to be mutual, I’m sure.  Clare knew three of her alumni teammates, all of them freshmen her senior year.  Which means even those players are more than two years graduated.  As for players from seven or ten years ago, they were ghosts, left to wander along the foul lines.

I felt the same anxiety I always did when Clare stepped into the batter’s box, along with the same irritation at the umps when blue at first base called Clare out on a bang-bang play.  No homeruns, but a walk and a nice play in the outfield.  The current players won, sure of their superiority over ex-players, unaware of what will happen to them come graduation.

They might come to a few alumni games, probably without their parents in tow.  Only a few dads will keep on coming, to bear witness to what their daughters did and how they filled up so many springs and summers in an ever-receding past.