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Rites of Spring
The Father-Daughter Bond By Jay Sauls
Those first stirrings of spring have appeared in my neighborhood. Green grass shoots are pushing through the patches of dead grass, cars are being washed and kids are donning their bikes with baseball gloves and bats. Ah, spring time! Warm days, cool nights, looking forward to baseball season.
I sit on my porch and watch the kids in the neighborhood tossing baseballs back and forth, playing pick-up basketball games on driveways turned into NBA arenas. My memories fly back to my youth and I see myself out in left field chasing down a fly ball or driving down the lane to score a game-winning basket. And as I dream I visualize how my child will be better than me. I will be the local referee for the basketball games or umpire for baseball games. My kid is going to be better than these kids. My child will be faster, quicker and always the first one picked. My boy will be the star of the neighborhood. But that can't be, I have a girl! All she can do is cheerlead from the sidelines and play kickball.
Those were my first thoughts when our little girl was born. All dreams of attending the sports banquet squashed. No sitting back with the guys, bragging how my kid struck out his kid or how my child's hook shot over his boy won the big game. Even if my kids were as lousy at sports as I am, there would still be the old car we would to fix up together. Not to mention fishing and hunting trips into the mountains. Bonding, they call it. Father, son, an overly excitable dog and a campfire. Those are the staples of a boy's final ascension into manhood. Boy becomes husband, who becomes father, and then finally man. Or so I believed. But, what now? The great plan I had followed was now void of an ending. No more dreams of rooms filled with cigar smoke and boisterous laughter. No testosterone driven encounters between father and son. Little League, after 27 years, had played the final inning. The bases long removed and the paths over-grown. The bleachers empty except for the wind that whistled through them.
