Thank Heaven
I forget sometimes that they can be so small. They were tiny, hobbits, brownies, baby Girl Scouts and they had cookies to sell and they had me at hello.
I bought Thin Mints. For my wife. I’m not a cookie person.
But they give me pause, these little girls. I tread very carefully. “I would love to buy some cookies,” I say, but that’s the extent of my personality. I’m polite but I don’t joke with them and I certainly don’t touch them, although I want to. I want to pat their heads and hold their hands, but I am a very appropriate person, so I just hand over my money and say thanks and they’ll never know what I was thinking.
I used to have a little girl, just like you.
I’m not whining or getting sappy here, by the way. It was just a moment, and it passed. Just another day in this purgatory that passes for the lives of fathers whose girls grow up. We get thoughtful and watch from a distance, remembering and wondering how it can be that our best days, of all of them, were not spent in high school or college or in wooing our wives or building careers but in being daddies to little girls. Not fair.
Like anything is.
So I’m not sad, or even sentimental at the moment. No need to worry. And my girl is home next week, a quick trip for spring break, and then six weeks later she settles in for the summer, finds a job and learns how to drive all over again and complains that there is no food in the house (“There is NO FOOD IN THIS HOUSE!”), and then she really will be gone. They love her in Texas, apparently, love her talent and her brains and her spirit, and they will keep her and so will the world. And I will buy more cookies.
It’s just that you think you know us.
You make your jokes. We can’t cook or dress ourselves or pick our underwear off the floor. These are sexist stereotypes but stereotypes come from somewhere. There is truth here, and fairness. We got our way for a long time. We screwed up. You can make fun of us now, it’s only fair and right. We got good at killing deer for dinner but over millennia we forgot to go to graduate school, so now you can make fun and put up with us and love us and accept us and you still don’t know.
You sigh and roll your eyes. You think we are channel hopping, searching for naked bodies or blood or adventure. You think we are looking for the perfect Playmate or soulmate or helpmate.
And some of us are creeps, or freaks, and worse. In all fairness.
But some of us are just searching for our daughters.
We don’t know. Do you? Really?
We want to teach them, tell them all we know, all we’ve learned in locker rooms. Teach them about bad and indifferent and all in between, and then make them sloppy Joes for dinner and watch “Sleeping Beauty” for the umpteenth time and remember that it only takes a kiss to wake.
My girl has been gone for a long time. We communicate through email and IMs and free long distance, but it’s not the same. It’s not like it used to be, when she’d hold my hand and we’d walk. Now she walks by herself and that’s cool, that’s appropriate. And I’m left here, and you can make your jokes.
I cook better than most of you, by the way.
But I saw a little girl today, and I realized I have always seen her. She sells cookies, she giggles, she wonders about life, she is wary, and she is my love, oh that she knew she were.
2:08:16 PM 
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