Dear Friend,

November 15, 2013

Dear friend, 

     It's starting to get cold and frosty here. The pretty fall weather is pretty much gone. The good news is that there will be a snow day.  which I love especially now because i can spend it with Jenny and Ben.  Snowman building should be a sport i think.

      I always wanted to be on a sports team. I'm not exactly sure why, but I always thought it would be fun to have "glory days." Then, I would have stories to tell my children. I guess I could tell people about Jenny and Ben and walking home from school and things like that. Maybe these are my glory days, and I'm not even realizing it because they don't involve a ball. I used to play sports when I was little, but the problem was that it used to make me have a nervous breakdown because the other kids were too aggressive, so the doctors told my dad I would have to stop. My dad had glory days once. I've seen pictures of him when he was young. He was a very handsome man. I don't know any other way to put it. He looked like all old pictures look. Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photograph always seem a lot happier than you are. My mother looks beautiful in old pictures too. She actually looks more beautiful than anyone except maybe Jenny .

     When my father was still here he would tell a story sometimes. It is a great story. It has to do with the state championship for baseball when he was in high school. It was the bottom of the ninth inning, and there was a runner on first. There were two outs, and my dad's team was behind by one run. My dad was younger than most of the team, and I think the team thought he was going to blow the game. 

     He had all this pressure on him. He was really nervous. And really scared. But after a few pitches, he said he started feeling "in the zone." When the pitcher wound up and threw the next ball, he knew exactly where that ball was going to be. He hit it harder than any other ball he ever hit in his whole life. And he made a home run, and his team won the state championship. 

     The greatest thing about this story is that every time my dad use to tell it, it never changed. He was not one to exaggerate. 

     I think about all this sometimes when I'm watching a soccer game with Ben and Jenny. I look at the field, and I think about the boy who just made the touchdown. I think that these are the glory days for that boy, and this moment will just be another story someday because all the people who make touchdowns and home runs will become somebody's dad. And when his children look at his yearbook photograph, they will think that their dad was rugged and handsome and looked a lot happier than they are. I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.

     Love always,

     Daniel