A Beautiful Passenger
If you happen to be a fan of bleary-eyed mornings, brought about by sleepless nights spent staring at your plastered ceiling, awaiting the slam of a car door; if you rather enjoy the anguished feelings of helplessness which accompany the experience of feeling someone's pain, but being unable to alleviate it in any meaningful way; if you positively revel in the errant second-guesses, wrong assumptions and miscommunicated intentions that are part and parcel of speaking to someone in a language that is not your native tongue;
may I suggest having a daughter.
Mine is seventeen. She's a beautiful, golden-haired thing, with striking green eyes, an infectious laugh, and a wicked-sharp sense of humor. She doesn't miss much. She's one of those people who sense the subtleties in conversation and place that make things really funny. And she senses the subtleties in emotion and meaning that impart to her a wisdom beyond her years.
Lots of people tell me she looks like me. I resist those comments on her behalf with the fierce protection of a father; I'm overweight, bald, middle-aged. And I'm only listing my best physical attributes. Her beauty is in spite of me.
She's wanted to be a cosmetologist, or a counselor, or a veterinarian, dependent upon her age and her interests at any given moment. She's gifted enough to succeed at all three, simultaneously, while making sandwiches and riding a unicycle. At least that's how I see it.
My daughter and I have shared a trip in an open-cockpit biplane over a south Georgia beach, and trips to the mall in a Ford pickup. First drives behind the wheel, and midnight excursions to get ice cream and notebook paper. We built a wooden house together - with a hinged door and second-story windows - for a long-haired tan cat. We hung big glittery letters, spelling the wonderfully-authentic portrait, 'Dreamer', in her room, set off by strings of white lights in tiny clear globes. She's descended our stairway in flowing formal dresses, and ascended the same with tears staining her cheeks. I once received a set of fake eyelashes, applied over the top of my own thinning pair, by her slender fingers adorned with polished nails, for the sole purpose of having my picture taken for her friends. That the picture has since been lost, is a particular hope of mine.
Among all of the memories of her, though, one sits readily at the edge of awareness, showing itself at unexpected times, and lived again and again in my mind's eye as an unequivocal reminder that her confidence, perception and desire to help began at a very young age, and had little, if anything, to do with me.
When Josie was two, our family undertook our first pilgrimage to Yellowstone. Too young, probably, to derive any real pleasure from the roiling mineral pools and steaming geysers, she nevertheless happily enjoyed the short hikes we'd take, her slight weight on my shoulders, as she rode in a backpack designed for the purpose. Tiny hands on my back, and earnestly-delivered burbles and chirps from her newly-developing vocabulary close by my ear.
We hiked every afternoon over the week we were there. Enough time for us to learn where we could see huge elk lazily grazing, pulling the occasional leaves from a stray low-hanging branch. As we approached, I'd make a gentle attempt to slow the stream of exclamations coming from my curly-headed passenger: "Shhhh...elk". She'd make a brave effort toward silence, but erupt in excited chatter and joyful shrieks when we'd spot the beautiful animals lingering in the bright mountain sunshine. On the third or fourth day of such hikes, my wife and I were absentmindedly talking, distractedly unaware we had arrived in the area where we'd see the graceful beasts. From over my shoulder and inches away, came the warning - a sloshing approximation of the words, but their clarity and meaning, to our ears, unmistakeable: "Shhh...elk."
These days, Josie's trips to the mall are most often taken with chattering friends in bright-colored cars. Her tan cat with the long hair is a close friend to all of us, but he loves her best. She's still a dreamer, and her bedroom wall still proclaims as much. We're as excited to see where her kindness and courage and vitality and her love of people and experiences will take her, as we are aware of the massive void we'll face when her life begins to cross paths with others, in other places, more often than it crosses ours.
My wife and I have two sons, too, and I love all three of my kids equally and beyond measure. But - and if you're a dad of daughters, you already know this - there is a combination of fierce love, a perfunct willingness to do anything, speakable or less-so, to protect her, and a knee-weakening softness of heart toward her trials and sufferings, that combine to make having a daughter a journey of rawness, fraught with an awareness of being too-small-of-courage, and a sheer feeling of exposure. It is indeed a pursuit for the intrepid of spirit.
But you don't need that going in. It'll come, because once a daughter is tasked to your care, it's the only choice. And it's worth every price, every worry, every misplaced word or misunderstood intention a thousand times over, and a thousand times more.
If you happen to be a fan of the kind of joy uncommon in these hours or any other; if you rather enjoy experiencing a love so deep and profound that mere words are insufficient in description; if you positively revel in the idea that from your own house and bearing your own name, comes a person who shines with an ethereal beauty of spirit and a resolution of character that belies the inadequacy of her father;
may I suggest having a daughter.