There is a lull in these months of the year, a gentle sway between the tug and the rush, when my daughter is at her halfway spot, the sweet, round stillness of equilibrium. I’ve noticed this each year with the mid-season: her momentary certitude of being right in her own place, secure that she’s earned all of her years and a half. These extra six months after a birthday and we begin to beam in wonder again at how much she’s grown and how fast she runs, how well she reads and how clever and fun she is, how light and amazing her grace, how charming, how funny, how much of everything she is becoming and then she turns and buries her face in my waist and says,
Mommy, I don’t want to grow up.
And I know she’s heard the dim roar of the river, the whitewater rumble, the current of life beneath us that only flows one way.
The other night when her dad was gone she settled into my bed and took into her hands the photograph we keep on his bed stand like a shrine, the school photo of her at age three at the idyllic Pacific Oaks preschool. She had a kind of glamour then, a barefaced beauty and twinkle that foretold her marvelous future. She studied the photo for awhile and then says,
I really like this girl.
She gazed for a long time, disbelieving that the little tousle-haired blonde with the baby teeth grin was her from five years ago, five years being an unfathomable breach of time the way thirty years is to me, the me who isn’t brave enough to look at photos of the past after it has disappeared for good. I snuggled her to me that night, I swallowed her warm breath, her weightless slumber.
Lately since I’ve surpassed my own irretrievable threshold in age I wake most mornings to the feeling that there is no time. Ah yes, there really is no time and in that way there is infinite time but the feeling I have is that there is no time left. There is no time to wonder how much time or how little time, where to go or when, what to do after, how to end up, what it’s all about, what better or best or next great thing I should or could or why not do. There is no time to waste but only to appreciate the precious and, yes, parting gift my daughter brings when she steps out of the tub and into a towel, leans into my arms and says,
I want you to be my Mommy forever.
That I can do.
***
A student comes to a teacher and asks, “What is the way?” You might wonder this yourself from time to time. What do I do? Where do I go? Is it this way or that? What next? What if? Did I miss the turn? If you don’t see the way, you don’t see it even as you walk on it.
Somewhere in the deep trench of what I call my “first life,” a friend gave me the book, A Year in Provence. The happy misadventures of an English novelist and his wife in the French countryside was a megaseller. It went on to spawn a TV miniseries, several sequels and the undying flattery of imitators—an entire genre of nonfiction pretenders that persists to this day. You know, books like A Year of Doing This, A Year of Doing That. They appeal to us because we all want to ditch our lives and end up somewhere other than a ditch. Makes for pleasant tripping, if only in our dreams.
friend: no one you know
I drank two Dr. Peppers last week. I just might have another before today is through. When I reach for one on the lower shelf of the refrigerator case of Happy’s corner convenience store, I think of my mother. My mother drank Dr. Pepper. It’s one of the things I couldn’t stand about her, so when I do it now, it’s the atonement of a fully grown daughter. It tastes pretty damn good.
