I pulled a lock of hair down over my eye and turned to face my daughter Clara. “I think I need a haircut.” “Oh yeah.” She nodded gravely from her perch on the edge of the bathtub. I casually brushed at my mop of hair and sighed. “Maybe we can go to a barber next week or something. Anyway, it’s not a big deal, because I can comb it back to the side. See, it’s all better now.” She frowned, “kinda.” Then she scrunched her nose in disgust. “You see. When you comb it back it doesn’t stay there. It just falls forward again.” She had me do it several times to be sure I understood her meaning. “Okay.” she said finally. “Here’s what…
A father's struggle to capture his children's brief moment of youth in words and pictures
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The three of us lay on the bed with our toes danging over the edge into the room as if it were a warm pond. I smiled to my left and found a dark haired girl listening with eager attention to the book which I held awkawardly aloft in my crowded arms. I turned to my right and found her fair haired sister. The younger child twitched and twirled in restless circles, giggling at inopportune times and interjecting with irrelevant questions. I replied by tossling her curls and patiently repeating, “Just wait. Just wait. Let’s see if the book will tell us.” We continued. The book was not particularly interesting to me, nor was it really to the girls, but they insisted I read…
We rushed out the door of the restaurant into the chilled wind like a weary band of soldiers retreating from the shelter of the treeline. We ducked our heads and lunged forward to jump through the side door of our helicopter minivan. I was in front, with baby Gideon bundled tightly in my arms with Lydia close behind me followed by her mother and Clara. We tossed our children through the open hatchway doors, then I quickly turned to start the rotors for extraction from the combat zone. Everything was working perfectly. Every motion exactly on schedule. Every second exactly as it had happened in training. However, after buckling in Lydia we suddenly realized that Clara was not standing in her entry position behind…
“Let’s play a game!” Clara announced. “Let’s go around the room and everyone can say the one thing that they like best about Gideon. Okay, I’ll go first. I like the back of his neck.” She has started this game no less than four times in this exact same way.
For the past few months Clara has been studying piano at home. She has a keyboard that plugs into her school laptop and she has a computer program that has very impressively been walking her through the basics of music theory, posture, basic notes reading and music history. Each lesson is taught by a different cartoon composer from a different era playing different styles of music (although they all conveniently have Canadian accents). Clara loves it. I can tell immediately as I walk through the door in the evening if she has passed her exams and moved on to a new teacher. She calls me over and has me listen to their instructions and examples the whole time watching my face to see my…
While the family was sick the other night, I made a run to the store to replenish our stock of chicken soup and clear juices. While I was there I picked something up for my two exhausted daughters laying in misery on the living room couches back home. Later that night I stood in front of them with their tiny gifts hidden behind my back. The girls’ tired red nosed faces lit up with anticipation. With a flourish I produced a stuffed animal in each of my hands. Clara was given a small brown cat, and Lydia was handed a rainbow colored monkey. They both seemed happy. But I learned something a few moments later that I have been thinking about ever since. When…
There was a luminous yellow balloon that carried my family through the happiest days of the hot summer. It smiled above us as we lazily hung over the side of our porch railing and touched the clouds and then licked the sticky marshmallow frosting from the ends of our fingers. At night we would climb on the roof and press our eyes up against the stars and tell each other fantastic stories of what we saw on the other side. We swung over the heavenly expanse on imaginary sailing ships and wooden rockets and slept soundly in our beds at the end of the day filled with purple popsicles and covered in green grass stains. We convinced ourselves we were living in eternity. We…
Some of you might be wondering why my family and I haven’t been out in public for several days. Well, I guess it is about time I told everyone. See, I had this dream growing up that I would someday be like the cool engineer dads in the movies. You know, the ones who live in fun but chaotic houses full of clever gadgets and neat inventions. I wanted an alarm clock that set off my toaster and fed my dog from a can. I imagined pulling a lever downstairs that would dump my laundry into a machine that would sort my clothes and wash them, and then transfer them to a dryer that would fold them and lay them neatly in our dresser. …
The cold metal shopping cart shone silently in our waiting headlights. It sat next to the other abandoned shopping carts like a makeshift wall preventing me from pulling forward out of my parking space. We were at Walmart. The parking lot was littered with abandoned shopping carts. Millions of slowly drifting metal cages on wheels. This one stared back at me with a mocking metal toothed grin while I waited for Clara to buckle herself into the backseat. “Look, Clara. Someone didn’t take their cart back inside.” I pointed. “If they had taken their cart in someone else could have parked there, or we could have pulled out that way instead of having to back up.” She made a frustrated noise. “That’s not very…
So, I gave my body to be burned. I coiled myself on the spring mattress altar and wrapped my tired arms around the bundle of burning sticks, and held them that way for the entire night. I fought the urge to flinch away. I closed my eyes and prayed. Out of the smoldering pile of wood chips and shivering bones came the random whispers of a reply. The smoke that crawled up the wall spoke to me in the dark room, the pink night light on the far wall casting harsh shadows. “Daddy.” The voice spoke, the eyes unfocused. “I lost my airplane.” Suddenly wide awake and frantic. “I lost my plane! I want my plane I lost my plane! My paper plane!” I…
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