I was thinking…
admin | 3:22 am | July 14, 2004 | Uncategorized
When I was a child my dad would pick me up and spin me around. Legs swinging wildly. Tightly gripping his hands.
Then one day, it stopped. I was too big to be flung around.
For a while after, I would often ask to be swung around, but eventually I accepted that it was not possible and I moved on to be an adult. It is probably at the moment when your father can’t pick you up to spin you around that you do become an adult. You accept gravity and somehow you accept a life of not floating effortlessly in the air.
To this day I miss that feeling, and I remember the sadness I would experience when watching other younger and lighter children being swung around by their father or mother or uncle or grandmother.
For a while, even that sadness disappeared. I didn’t think about it at all. It reappeared, though, when I started swinging my own daughter around in the air. The joy on her face is as immeasurable as the joy in my heart. But my joy is tinged ever so slightly with bittersweet reminiscences of my own lost childhood. It is not jealousy, it is more an awareness… an awareness of the unavoidable cycle that I am witnessing unfolding before my eyes each day as my daughter grows older and I, too, grow older.
Today my father has trouble moving even his own body around this earth. He grips tightly onto me as we go up or down stairs or when we walk from my house to the car. And I wish I could pick him up and carry him wherever he wants to go.
But it is not possible. It seems, somehow, that it should be. A son should be able to carry his father to pay him back for all of the times that he picked me up on a summer night and swung me through the air with fireflies whirling by while looking into his eyes, laughing, and asking for more.
It make sense to me. Maybe I will try.