The basket is much farther away than you remember, so to the Biddy Ball players, the rim might as well be the Matterhorn. Still, occasionally, one manages to get off a shot that actually goes in. Even more occasionally, in the right basket.
You know who you are. Soccer Mom. Diver Dad. Your calendar goes by the sport, not the season. Your refrigerator door is plastered with Post-its: If it's Wednesday it's softball; Thursday, crew. The pace is manic. Camps and clinics, wedged in between doubleheaders and travel squads. And, of course, equipment. Pads and shorts, shirts and sweats, tees . . . oh my, yes, tees. Mountains of them. You need a second mortgage, and then a third, just to keep up.
So, are we having fun yet?
If you live in the Strauss house, the answer appears to be in the affirmative. It's a wonder the family members have time to exhale, but there isn't much they haven't sampled. The roll call: Robert, the patriarch; Sue, the matriarch; Ella and Sylvia, the daughters. A good portion of their peripatetic lives is chronicled, with loving care, in Daddy's Little Goalie: A Father, His Daughters, and Sports.
It is a love letter of sorts, but without the syrup and sap. And the tears. What separates it from the well-worn genre of fathers and offspring bonding is gender. The book sprang from one of those "Aha!" moments, this one when father and then 5-year-old daughter were watching a 76ers game, and Ella asked: "Daddy, why is it that only boys play sports?"
Ella was soon asleep. Daddy was haunted by what was an innocent-enough question, his generation having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, when "girls really didn't play sports - at least not with us."
