My Favorite Linebacker

My daughter comes out the bathroom half naked.  Her hair is all over her head.  Right now, her head is light brown but it’s too early to say that because she’s only 8 and it will change again and again, and of course later in life she will change it again and again.  I know this because I’m her dad and I know things.

I say to her ‘Gurl, get back in there and put on yo clothes!’  She, being part me, laughs and turns her backside to me, shakes it, then turns her head to me and sticks out her tongue, and runs.  I’m supposed to chase her, but I don’t, so she just keeps screaming taunts from her room, mostly of the ‘na na NE na nah’ flavor.  I ignore this completely, as if I can’t hear her.  So, of course, she comes streaking out of the room, fully dressed but hair still messed up, tackles me in my seat at the kitchen counter and kisses my cheek. Meanwhile, mom, also known as my wife, comes after the child because she ran to me from her hair appointment (ergo, mom and big sister trying to get her hair in shape for picture day).  I look down at my favorite linebacker in nappy curls and say “You know you’re getting us both in trouble, right?” She smiles, hugs me, and says “That’s what we do, Pops!” and she kisses me again and runs back to her captors singing “High On Emotion,” a song she shouldn’t know but were it not for me and her brothers singing it after the Cubs beat… man, who was that they beat that night?  Anyway, I know at this point that my daughter, God love her, will be an awful girlfriend but a phenomenal wife and mother, if we can just get her past stupid stereotypes and give her a life abundant in love.

It’s 10 years later.  My daughter comes out of the bathroom half naked, wrapped in a bath towel. It’s prom night, but she’s not the date:  she’s the photographer.  God knows how that happened - my family doesn’t keep pictures and selfies are considered an affront to good manners.  But this child of mine is an artist.  She could care less about the pomp and circumstance - she’s getting paid to do what she loves and it’s magical in her eyes, and that’s all I care about.  Still, I complain about her half-naked-ness, which I always do when she walks around in-between outfits, and she responds by licking her tongue out at me and shaking her rear end.  She ducks in her room, jumps into jeans and a t-shirt and emerges looking like me with a pony tail.  

Still, it’s her prom, and she wants to take photos with the family, so me and mom and big sis and bis sis' kids and the boys all gather around the front door to take a photo.  I’m wondering why mom is all dressed up.  Then a limo pulls up.  I’m still stupid; I’m thinking ‘why did they send a limo for the photographer?’  and the boys of course are in on it and they can’t stop laughing and they have no capacity to keep a secret so then of course I realize, just as the surprise is sprung on me, that I’m the one going to the prom, and that mom is my date, or rather, I’m mom’s date.  She missed prom because she was pregnant with our oldest, so of course the youngest (with some help from my mom) arranged for us to go to her prom.  They even got me a tux - an 80’s style tux, no less.  So there’s me and my wife, looking like extras in a Jamie Lee Curtis movie, taking more pictures in front of the house.  When my daughter came close and gave me a hug, she said “Now don’t you go spoiling this.  Just go with it.  She wants this night to be perfect.  That means you don’t say much.  Ok?”  I didn’t argue.  What could I say?  She was my child, being me in a way that reflected a certain kindness I no longer possessed.   I just nodded, and a tear fell, which I attributed to the change in seasons.  She agreed.

30 years have passed.  I come out of the bathroom totally naked.  My youngest daughter and her kids are all at the breakfast nook.  My daughter was trying to drink coffee but I ruined that.  “Dad!” she screamed.  Her daughter, my grannie poo, laughing, grabbed a kitchen towel and handed it to me.  “Grandpa you need to keep that covered; we talked about this!”  She says this in real earnest, just like I would, just like her mom would.  Of course, being the mature gentleman I am, I lick out my tongue at all of them and run into the room, singing “High On Emotion”.  When I get to the chorus, the grandkids and my daughter all join in:

“I am high on emotion,
High again!
High on emotion
Your love will find the way”