Behind Closed Doors
This is a long one. Just a warning.
I walked into her room today without thinking.
It's been exactly a month since I took her to the airport, and I've only been in there a couple of times, and those with a specific mission. In and out.
Today I was looking for the DVD remote, though, so I had to do a survey. And I saw things. A CD of a Brahms concerto. Pictures of her friends. Some videos. Jewelry.
So I had to back out sort of quickly. I've got a cold and my immune system is a little weak, susceptible to an invasion of nostalgia.
It was her bedroom for 15 years almost to the day. I remember when the door was always open, no little brothers to get into her stuff and no dog to chew up bras. No bras, either.
We talk online a lot. Sometimes on the phone. She has a new room now, in the Lone Star state. It sounds like it's the showplace of the dorm. "I tell them it's all in the lighting," she said. She knows how to do a room.
The Preacher wrote the other day of his eldest starting high school and how he sensed something, something about the future, something about inevitability. I know the feeling. You start to lose them there, when the world opens up a bit.
I wouldn't mind having some of that back. I wouldn't mind RJ coming over at night to have movie marathons in her room, really I wouldn't. I wouldn't mind Cindy making fun of my old dirty Alaska cap I always wear. I wouldn't mind seeing Chelsea or Mallory or Mitchell. I wouldn't mind listening from the other room as Robert has long talks with my wife. Wouldn't be an issue for me, nope. Wouldn't mind at all.
Maybe it's a fathers and daughters thing, as some have told me. Maybe it's just that she was the first to leave. Maybe it's this cold.
It's just that today I see it sitting on my desk and I really wish I'd given her my Alaska cap to take to Texas. You can always get another cap.
This is for Beth, then. To remind her. To remind me. From a December 2001 column:
Life With Father
This year, December 14th falls on a Friday. It does that every once in a while. You'd think it would be every seven years, but you'd be wrong. This has to do with Leap Year or Daylight Savings Time or something.
It fell on a Friday in 1984, too. I remember. I was in the kitchen preparing my favorite dinner, tacos and beer, which was about the extent of my cooking skills. I was browning ground beef and opening can #2, when my wife came out of the bathroom with an odd look on her face and said, "Don't drink any more beer."
She says this all the time, of course, but, again, she had an odd look on her face. She would actually make a lot of faces over the next 12 hours, many of which I hesitate to describe, but the next morning I watched the sun rise over downtown Seattle from a window in Swedish Hospital, holding in my arms my newborn daughter. A few weeks earlier than expected, but healthy and beautiful. I was 26 years old. It was the best day of my life.
A couple of minutes after Beth was born, I ran and grabbed the video camera and pretty much didn't put it down for about five years. I began to organize the tapes: Beth Volume I, Volume II, etc. And this was in the first week. I had a three-tape set entitled "Beth Sleeping." One afternoon I turned the camera on and a few minutes later she haltingly walked from one chair to another on her own; her first steps. I'm pretty sure I made tacos that night.
My wife and I were opposed to day care, based on the sound principle that we couldn't afford it, so we worked a lot of odd shifts to balance the parenting. I usually got the late mornings and early afternoons. For several years of my life, then, I spent most of my non-working time with a little girl.
I had a tendency to play Mr. Rogers. I took her to the library. I used apples and oranges to demonstrate how the earth moves around the sun. I taught her about syllogisms and syntax. We spent hours playing "Answer Girl," a game we made up in which I'd quiz her on numbers and colors and TV show theme songs.
She was bright and curious and only occasionally cynical, as when she saw "Peter Pan" for the first time. "No one can lose their shadow," she said disdainfully, and turned off the TV. This was pure Beth.
Not that I want to be too sentimental about a time of very little sleep and endless hours of Big Bird. I wasn't all that far removed from the freedom of my college days not to realize I had been pretty neatly tied around a little finger.
If there was a song on the radio she particularly liked, Beth would instruct me to get down on one knee and she would jump and wrap her arms around my neck, and I'd lift her up and we'd dance around the living room. Who am I, Bojangles?, I'd think, wondering whether I should have closed the shades first.
Then, of course, one day I drove her to school and she flipped down the visor to check her hair in the mirror, and that was pretty much that. The little girl whose highlight of the day used to be watching me shave had other things to do. My duties had been reduced to handing over cash and jump starting her car.
Beth will spend her 17th birthday following in her mother's musical footsteps, earning a few bucks playing the cello with her group, Trionfare Trio, at a holiday gig (there's your plug, guys). My cooking skills have improved, but maybe I'll make tacos anyway. Just to feel useful; for it suddenly occurs to me that out of all the things I know how to do, after all the childhood fantasies of becoming a wide receiver or a movie star, it turns out the thing that came most naturally to me was being the father of a little girl. And now my time is up.
So maybe I can be excused a moment or two of nostalgia. Maybe I can be forgiven for wondering when that very last game of Answer Girl was. Maybe you can understand how, from time to time, I have the oddest feeling that I've somehow lost my shadow.
It's there, though, somewhere. It lingers on lazy afternoons in a small apartment with a red-haired 3-year-old girl. She holds on tightly and we dance around the living room, and for a few hours I am her entire universe, and she is mine.
2:22:38 PM 
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