Disappointment What compares to the sickly feeling of disappointment? What if it is you who is disappointing someone you love? Throughout life we strive to be the superhero to your children or the perfect angel child for your parents; when something goes wrong it cuts so close because they fail to live up to the lofty expectations placed for them. In the poem “Catch,” by George Bilgere, he tells a story of a boy who becomes discouraged when his above average father fails in his eyes at a crucial part of their family dynamic: baseball. This poem portrays a relatable situation from when the boy is young to when he becomes a father himself with humiliation and disgrace learned through ageing. In the beginning of the poem the father, from the eyes when the boy is young, is portrayed as an admirable dad to people looking from the outside but to the young boy he is a disgrace because he is a failure at baseball. The father let him “stay up late/ talk about baseball at dinner/ watch the fights unfold like grainy nightmares in Gillette’s Cavalcade of Sports…” He was all into baseball yet he was poor at the sport. The father gave baseball so much hype in the house hold that the expectation left for the son was so high that he felt humiliated to be seen with the father. Of course this disappointed the boy because he expected everything to be perfect and the best part of life to this boy was ruined because the father was unsatisfactory. At the end, the tables have turned because it is now 30 years later and the young boy is now the father. Instead of him being scared to see his father fail, he is scared to be in that position. He is terrified to be the disappointment to his son. Sometimes when things are given so much hype, there is no room to go up only room to fail. Because the relationship between father and son is so fragile, situations like this can scar for a lifetime which is why the son is hesitant when he acquires the role of father in the historic game of catch. No one wants to disappoint and it is downright humiliating but at the same time, no one is perfect but in the eyes of that child, his father was his superhero; he was his God and the little boy was left disappointed.