Through The Lense of A Daughter

I thought when we put the finishing touches on the family compound, I would enjoy more free time to write. It may be that I have a little more free time, but it doesn't feel like it--life just seems to expand. What's more, when I do get a minute, I'm finding real difficulty holding any thought in my mind at a suitable distance to comment on it. It always seemed terribly rude to write something intended for the eyes of others, if I knew it wasn't at all compelling. How presumptuous of me to assume that I would always be able to observe the interesting, think compelling thoughts and concisely illuminate them in words. My mind has been altered by fatherhood (or at least that seems the likely suspect) in such a way that, my experience of life is so compelling to me, that I'm having trouble stepping back and writing anything coherent about it.

Case in point: On the way to pick up my daughter this afternoon, I heard two back to back stories on the radio. The first was about the latest grisly murder of a hostage, at the hands of terrorists. This pilot was burned to death, in a cage. That brutality and evil is enough to give anyone pause. For me the added shame is that, the world, seems to be getting more dangerous, not less. And of course--my thoughts immediately jump to my daughter. I was afforded the opportunity to travel in my youth, and I figure it shaped my perception of the world in a positive way. I hope for this for my daughter, but in the best case she will be in greater danger than I was in my youth, or worse, she won't go. Just as I began to quietly succumb to my despair, the next story came on.

Harper Lee will publish a new novel! Perhaps she will illuminate some of the curiosities to which Scout has introduced my daughter. Quinn is not of an age where she will sit through To Kill A Mockingbird in nightly installments. That does not mean I haven't tried. She's heard enough to know that she relates to Scout, who seemingly can't mind her P's and Q's. And I know no one can enjoy failing measuring up to Atticus' patience and honor more than a man with his daughter squirming in the crook of his arm as he tries to read To Kill A Mockingbird to her.

Those two news stories took me through almost every spectrum of human emotion in less than five minutes. In my previous existence, the same thing could have happened, but lately I've found that life's volume knob seems to be stuck--at eleven. I have a dim sense of why this might be. My daughter is almost five, but she is small. She is also, in my opinion, on the ball. So you have this tiny person giving pretty concise running commentary on her life. This is mostly communicated in one liners that sound like she is channeling Mark Twain. But I maintain a memory of just four years ago, when this child was a helpless lump. The addition of a child has made each of my days pass like a second, and the whole of my years feel geologic in scale. This is pretty powerful as it is presented in my mind in an instant.

The Jordanian pilot who was burned alive, must have been an infant, and then a five year old boy, and those parents must feel devastation that I can at least imagine now. And the men who brutally took that life, they were children once, and now their evil reverberates around the globe. I feel that in a way that a man with no children might not. Harper Lee must have been a precocious five year old, and the goodness and insight that she has contributed to humanity; I can see how valuable that is, through the lense of a daughter. The value, understanding and empathy Lee captured in her story have reverberated around around the globe for over fifty years. And that is the only hope for the father of any child: Goodness has a longer shelf life than evil.