Lamp on

The July 4 holiday always sends me back to Richard Ford, whose 1995 novel Independence Day has a special place in memory because my first reading of it coincided with the happy occasion of the birth of Older Daughter. 

 

There it is, peeking from under her bouncer (isn't that what we called it?) out on the deck at our place on River Road. His Frank Bascombe's reflections on freedom, independence, self-reliance, parenting etc. all registered as the most timely and trenchant information I could absorb at the outset of the mysterious adventure called fatherhood. (And his father-son trek to Cooperstown offered an exciting prospect.) 

Only later would I learn, to my great surprise, that Ford and his wife Kristina were childless. Could have fooled me, with observations like

A parent's view of what's wrong or right with his kid is probably less accurate than even the next-door neighbor's, who sees the child's life perfectly through a gap in the curtain. I of course would like to tell him [her] how to live life and do better in a hundred engaging ways, just as I tell myself: that nothing ever neatly "fits," that mistakes must be made, bad things forgotten...

The worst of being a parent is my fate, then: being an adult. Not owning the right language; not dreading the same dreads and contingencies and missed chances; the fate of knowing much yet having to stand like a lamppost with its lamp lit, hoping my child will see the glow and venture closer for the illumination and warmth it mutely offers.

And I can just hear Older and Younger Daughter now, in chorus: since when were you ever mute?

Fair enough. Nonetheless, I'm leaving the lamp on.