When Olivia Joffrey was in sixth grade, her teacher planned a Father's Day softball game — a game meant to be played by students and their dads. But Joffrey's dad couldn't be there. He had a rare early case of both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and had recently moved into a hospital for veterans an hour away.
"And my mother was heroic and did so many things to make it feel like a normal childhood," Joffrey recalled. "But when your dad lives in a VA hospital, and you go visit him every Sunday and walk down the linoleum halls to a weird room that doesn't smell like home, and you see your dad sitting in there — it wasn't him."
As the day of the softball game approached, Joffrey dreaded being the only kid without a dad there. So her mom came up with an idea: she would ask her twenty-something co-worker, Bob, to come in his place.
"He was energetic and iconoclastic, with stringy blonde hair and a big, fabulous laugh. I remember him always in a brown leather bomber jacket," Joffrey said. "You know, Bob was cool."
On the day of the game, she wasn't sure if Bob would come. But as all the parents arrived on the field, she spotted him behind the backstop, walking up the hill in his brown bomber jacket.
"And all of a sudden everything was okay," Joffrey said. "He was serving up high fives and slinging cool slang words with the other dads. I remember feeling normal and accepted and one of the gang."
It's been forty years since that softball game, and she still thinks about Bob and the way he showed up for her when her dad couldn't be there.
"He so beautifully played that part," Joffrey said. "When you're 12, you want to fit in. And it was such a generous act of Bob to realize that."
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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