My daughter is pretty amazing. I know every daughter everywhere is amazing, but in this case I mean pretty specifically amazing. When she was still very small, I used to take her for short drives on the gravel roads through the state park around our house to help her fall asleep, and for some reason (she was born on Shakespeare’s birthday) I taught her the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet. She memorized up to “and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” and could recite it on her own with decent inflection, somehow, despite the deadpan delivery of my recitals. To die. To sleep. No more. She was a year old.
That same year the only babysitter we ever had who smoked (and always left the butts floating in the toilet) was taking my daughter on a walk on the dirt roads by our home and asked who lived in one of the neighbor’s houses.
“I don’t know,” my daughter told her, looking at little wooden sign in front of the house. “Says ‘Meyers.'”
On the phone the other day she told me that the teachers in pre-school used to annoy her a little, because they had these books you could look at while listening to headphones that read you the story, and the teachers would keep telling her to put the headphones back on making her turn the page when the beep went off, even though she hadn’t finished reading the page yet.
When you read that much, you end up a little precocious, a little wonderfully unique.
It’s been almost two months since I’ve seen my daughter, and I know moving here will be a big change for her, but the Northwest keeps doing things to cheer me up. Things that remind me of her.
About a week ago I was washing what’s left of my car when I noticed a potato, still in perfectly good shape, positioned with almost mathematical precision in the corner of the car wash bay–in the photo above, I’ve moved it a little to get enough light on it for the photo. I don’t know what about a perfectly good potato carefully positioned in a car wash bay should make me think of my daughter, but it did. She’d turned twelve a week after I left home, and she’s particularly intrigued by Portland’s “weird” factor.
Imagiine how overjoyed I was, then, to be putting my phone away after taking the potato photo to find a full-grown person riding into the same car wash bay on one of those tiny superbikes, like this:
Despite a bunch of obvious other ways around, including not going into a bay at all, which would have been quicker, he chose to ride right past me and then, worried he might’ve been intruding, stopped, flipped open the visor of his helmet, and said, “Is it OK to come through here?”
Absolutely.
How could I explain how happy I was to see him?
Daughter, it really is pretty weird here, and pretty wonderful.
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