Daddy's Girl

In my experience, the undivided affection of a girl is almost like nothing else. But when that girl is your daughter, wow—that is in a class by itself.

Lucy has become my little sweetheart in recent months. She loves the days I am able to take her to school. She revels in my stories of when I was her age. Nearly every day she tells me something fun she did at school, and then asks me if I did the same thing when I was in elementary school (it helps that she goes to the same school I went to).

Most fascinating to me is the interest she has taken in my long-time favorite sport: high school and college football (the NFL is too sterile, too predictable, too uninspiring). Every Saturday I turn on the tube to see who is playing, and I leave it on for an entire game. I may or may not actually watch the entire game, but having it on is soothing, kind of like hymns playing on Sunday as you walk into church.

Two or three weekends ago, she and I had a football binge. I took her to my high school homecoming game, followed by watching my favorite college on TV the next afternoon. She looked forward to it all week, asking me all about the marching band, if we would see the cheerleaders, if our team would win. The morning of the game, she told me she dreamed that our team won, 100 to 3.

We went to the homecoming game, which, incidentally, happened to be my first homecoming with a date (we skipped the dance, but it still counts as my first homecoming date). We were decked out in the appropriate colors, and I even brought my letterman’s jacket, which, I might add, still fits.

She was overjoyed to be there, and paid better attention to the game than I could possibly expect from a six year old. She was full of questions: “Is our band better than their band? Are our cheerleaders better than theirs? Is number 9 (her number in first grade) the fastest player on the team? Did we tackle them? Did we get points for running that far?”

She doesn’t quite grasp the notion of getting first downs, punting, and field position, but she knows that if our boys catch the ball that they get another turn. She knows a touchdown is six points, that you get to kick the ball through the uprights for one more point after a touchdown, and that a kick through the uprights any other time is called a field goal and is worth three points.

She only got up once during the whole game, to answer nature’s call. She spent the rest of the game eagerly by my side, commenting on every play and every cheer routine and every band number. She cheered every time our team scored and wanted to run onto the field and greet the players after the game ended.

I knew I had a real football fan the next day when we flipped back and forth between our game and a few other games. Each time we hit another game, she would ask who each team was and who we were rooting for. At the end of our game, I turned off the TV before we could see the final scores of the other two games we were following, Notre Dame vs. Navy and LSU vs. Alabama.

That night, several hours after all the games were over and we had finished all our remaining Saturday tasks, the following exchange took place as I tucked her into bed:

“Daddy, who won—Alabama or LSU?”

“I think LSU won, sweetheart.”

“Oh,... Daddy, who won the other game—Notre Dame or Navy?”

I smiled, “Navy won.”

“Oh good,” she said. “Uncle Rick’s team won.” (Uncle Rick is in the Navy)

“Yes, Uncle Rick’s team won,” I replied, marveling to myself that she remembered these relatively meaningless games so many hours later.

That’s my girl!

H-J