An Uncomplicated Life Read online

  “Go to school,” I’d mumble. “Learn something.”

  Jillian Time was slower. It allowed for discovery.

  “Who are you eating lunch with these days?” I’d ask.

  “My friends.”

  We might have heard from one of her teachers that Jillian was eating lunch alone. Her gregariousness kept her popular among her peers, but her disability could keep them distant. By the time Jillian reached intermediate school, the other kids were becoming arm’s-length friendly. We worried that Jillian was lonely.

  “What friends?” I’d ask.

  Jillian would reel off half a dozen names. Well, okay.

  “Everything good at school?”

  “I love my school.”

  We’d leave the house for the bus stop, where we’d be joined by other kids from the neighborhood and their moms. Where we lived, everyone seemed to have children about the same age. Loveland was Mayfield, but without June Cleaver’s pearls. Five or six kids from our block would be waiting for the bus at the same time. We parents would drink coffee and converse until it came. Just me and the other moms.

  On the morning of her first day of sixth grade, it occurred to Jillian that walking with her father to the bus stop was no longer cool. It had occurred to me earlier than that, but being a selfish dolt, I waited for Jillian to bring it up. Jillian, being Jillian, resisted as long as she could.

  She broached the subject at breakfast. “Dad, we need talk ’bout something.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know how I always be your little girl?”

  Uh-oh.

  Every time Jillian achieved some new bit of independence, whether it was tying her shoes or dressing herself or roaming the wilds of the neighborhood unassisted, she would suggest that she wouldn’t always be my little girl. My reply always had something to do with even if she became the king of England, she’d still be my little girl.

  “Yes, Jills. You will always be my little girl.”

  “Well, your little girl is growing up.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said.

  “You won’t. What’s up?”

  “Well, I in sixth grade now.”

  “Yes. Very proud of you.”

  “I know you like to walk to the bus stop with me, and I like it, too,” she said. “I know you’re my best father, and you’re in my heart.” Her lip started to bounce. Maybe mine did, too. “I know you love me, Dad, but I have to say something.”

  Okay.

  “I think I want to go to the bus stop by myself now.”

  She was a big girl, she said, almost 13 years old. Maybe it was “not ’propriate” that a dad be seen at the bus stop with his entering-sixth-grade, almost-teenaged daughter.

  After I took a second to digest the new vocabulary—“Jillian, you said ‘appropriate,’ that’s awesome”—I agreed that, sigh, a father doesn’t need to be walking his blooming teenager to the school bus stop.

  The first day I didn’t walk her to the bus stop was the most melancholy of days. Mortality hit me like a brick. After years of it, I should have been a pro, accustomed to the ritual of her leaving home and coming back. It should have been a comforting era of “Have-a-Good-Day,” followed later by “How-Was-Your-Day.” My kids left every day, but they always came back.

  But I wasn’t a pro, and I never got used to it. Every year was a little harder. My melancholia danced in lockstep with my advancing years. Overnight, I’d go from school’s out and a houseful of people around me to the deafening silence of nothing but the dog at my feet. That first day of school was always the ultimate evidence that things would never be the same.

  As a sports writer, I’ve written lots of swan songs for retiring athletes, some graceful, all sad. Each time I do one, I’m struck with the notion that the reader and I are grieving more for ourselves than for the subject of the story. We are remembering when. We were younger then. I watched Jack Nicklaus win the Masters at age 46. He seemed impossibly old at the time. As I write this, I am ten months short of my 55th birthday.

  On this latest first day of school, Jillian is 12 years old, almost 13. It’s a half-here, half-there age, too old for dolls and Disney, yet too young for makeup. On the cusp of . . . something.

  “Sixth grade, Dad,” she says. “I almost a teenager.”

  “Don’t remind me,” I say.

  I brush her hair. The radio is on. Bob Dylan is singing “Just Like a Woman.” Something about ribbons and bows. Dylan wasn’t talking about the first day of school or how the separation was again going to slay the father of a daughter on the cusp. At least, I didn’t think he was. But that’s how I took it.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap.

  “Wanna hear the Coffee Song?” I suggest lamely.

  “Da-a-a-d.”

  Each year, the spool unravels a little more, extending the distance between Jillian and me. She isn’t my little girl anymore—even though she will always be my little girl. I get my game face on.

  Jillian doesn’t know it. But I worry about the ribbons and the bows. I always worry about the ribbons and the bows. “C’mon, sweets,” I say. She has gotten dressed and finished her breakfast. She puts the finishing touches on tying her shoes. I send her to the door. Jillian runs alone to the corner to wait for the bus to take her to her first day of sixth grade. It was raining a fine mist. I thought that was ’propriate.

  “Have a good day, Dad,” Jillian yelled back at me.

  Father Time is a thief. He gets better at his work as the years accumulate. Sixth grade becomes seventh, and I am with Jillian at the father-daughter dance, spiraling around a middle school cafeteria. Hopeless again, in the grip of melancholia or wonder, or whatever sort of love makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. She is wearing a dress. I’m in a sport coat and slacks. “We’re a lovely couple,” Jillian observes.

  It was just last week, I’m sure of it, that six-pound Jillian and I toured the family room to the simple poignancy of “Goodnight, My Love.”

  In a few years, she will extend the separation. By high school, she’d ride with Kerry. She’d get her own breakfast in the helter-skelter way her brother had. She won’t need me. I’ll pretend to be asleep as I hear the opening of the garage door. Usually, I’ll get up right after Kerry and Jillian leave. After a summer of full throats, the house became perfectly silent and brooding, a fine stage for my proud sadness. The letting go was tough for all of our kids. It was tougher with this kid.

  We measure our mortality in any number of ways: The never-before pain in the lower back after a day hauling mulch around the yard. The time it takes to fall asleep. The things we can no longer recall. We used to find our car and lose our keys. Now, we lose both. Life starts to hold more past than future. Even as we do our best to look ahead.

  And now my little girl wouldn’t be holding my hand.

  “Have a good day,” Jillian yells back to me, on the first day of sixth grade.

  “Okay. I will,” I say. “You have a great day, too.” Jillian doesn’t hear the last part. She’s off to the corner, to catch the bus without me.

  Bye, sweetie. See you this afternoon.

  In the new version of the movie Father of the Bride, Steve Martin lies in bed awake the night before his daughter Annie’s wedding. A montage of Annie moments follows: Annie as a baby, Annie riding a bike, wearing braces, playing basketball in the driveway. Annie sliding down the banister, wearing her high school cap and gown. Annie with her fiancé.

  The scene lasts maybe a minute. Nowadays, I see Jillian’s life that way too. A highlight reel. Two decades in sixty seconds. Soon enough, she’ll be dancing at her high school graduation: Seals and Crofts singing “We May Never Pass This Way Again.” I’ll be standing speechless at the beauty and lightspeed of it all. A familiar well of entirely conflicting emotions will take hold, and I will be walking again in the rain, through the sunshine.

  “That’s the thing about life,” Steve Martin says in the m
ovie. “The surprises. The little things that sneak up on you and grab a hold of you.” He continues: “I remember you were four. You had a red ribbon tied in your hair.”

  I remember that, too. All fathers remember. It’s what guides us and propels us, even as we wish we could slow down, stop, rewind. Just for a day. You can’t know where you’re going without understanding where you’ve been. Today, I sing the Coffee Song. Tomorrow, I’ll say, “Remember that?”

  Tap-tap-tap-tap.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Two-Wheeler

  Life is what happens to you while you’re

  busy making other plans.

  —JOHN LENNON

  We always had plans. There were tee-ball games to attend, homework to attempt, grass to be cut, the whole suburban catalog. Days, weeks, months passed, full and fulfilling. But rarely remembered. Whenever Kerry asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said, “Time.”

  Time to linger, to savor, to remember why we came. To remember the little wins. If we’re too busy to tend to those, we lose the foundation for our larger successes.

  Jillian was 12 years old when she decided she would ride a two-wheeled bike. She saw other kids riding and assumed she would too.

  “I do that,” she said. Kelly was motoring down the drive, the pedals of his ten-speed bike whirring frantically.

  “What?”

  “I wide bike,” she proclaimed.

  This was a big step. We’d always allowed her to try everything. We wanted to keep with our belief that Jillian would do everything that every other kid did so we encouraged her to try bike riding as soon as she was able. But in keeping with her personality, Jillian decided she was ready for the two-wheeler before we’d had a chance to give it a lot of thought.

  This was serious. This was a calamity in waiting.

  “We’ll see,” I gulped.

  “ ’Bout what?” Jillian shot back.

  “About riding a two-wheeler.”

  “I can do it, Dad.”

  That spring we bought Jillian a two-wheeler. It was comically small. The seat barely reached my knees. I am only five foot nine. It also had training wheels. That was a deal breaker: No training wheels, no two-wheeler.

  “I don’t need those,” Jillian noted as I attached them to the bike frame.

  “Oh yes you do, superstar,” I said.

  “I wanna wide like Kelly,” she insisted.

  “And you will. Just not right away.” That seemed to satisfy her.

  A considerable degree of balance and coordination is involved in keeping a human body aligned with the frame and skinny tires of a bicycle. So much so that riding a bike wasn’t seen as entirely within the grasp of someone like Jillian. On the day she was born, we heard an impressive catalog of Down syndrome Can’t Do’s, and one I clearly remember was: “Jillian probably will never be able to ride a bicycle.”

  We didn’t believe that, of course. We didn’t spend all these years wheeling our daughter to this therapy and that to then deny her a chance to put it all into impressive play. If Jillian couldn’t ride a big-girl bike, fair enough. She would get the chance.

  We got her a helmet, the smallest we could find. It slid around her head like the tan skin of a white onion. Even after we pulled the chinstrap as tight as we could, the helmet wobbled. What were we getting ourselves into?

  We started in early spring. Jillian had no problem pedaling the bike. Steering and turning took a while longer. So did getting off the bike. Jillian’s first attempts at this meant stopping the bike and falling over.

  The training wheels didn’t always stay flat on the driveway, which caused the bike to shimmy, like the helmet. This wasn’t all bad. It forced Jillian to use her gross motor skills for balance. It also alerted our fearless kid to the possibility that caution was not a bad option.

  Not that she noticed much.

  “I like this,” Jillian decided. “I like this a lot.”

  As with most things, Jillian took a long time to master a two-wheeled bicycle. This provoked a few competing emotions: Frustration and impatience, at which I was already quite skilled. And lingering, a talent I’d lacked completely before Jillian’s arrival, and only now was beginning to appreciate.

  Twenty-first-century humans aren’t good at lingering. Our moments don’t build so much as simply appear and vanish, like a fence viewed from the window of a moving train. So much is lost in the motion.

  I don’t remember when Kelly first laughed, for example. I try, but I can’t recall when he tied his shoes or made his bed or managed a set of steps by putting one foot in front of the other. “What was Kelly’s first word?” I asked Kerry, not long ago.

  She didn’t know, exactly. She thought it might have been “Deja.” Deja-Vu was our shepherd-collie. But Kerry wasn’t sure.

  We might have made note the first time Kelly used a fork or spelled his name. It might have provoked a smile or a hug or a high five. Something worthy of the win. I don’t know. We were always on to the next thing.

  We did a lot of running in place, and it was exhausting at times. The suburban bargain can be one-sided if all you’re doing is swimming manically to keep it afloat. Between tending to Jillian’s unique needs, Kelly’s typical wants, going to work and maintaining a house, the best Kerry and I managed most weekends was a rented movie and a pizza on Friday night before collapsing into bed.

  Jillian slowed us down. We had no choice. All her firsts might have been seconds in our house: First steps, first words, first time going to the bathroom solo and diaper free. But because she was Jillian, we noticed. So much with her, we were told, would take longer. Just as much might never happen.

  We preferred to see it as lingering over the Christmas presents, or a drive on what the author William Least Heat-Moon has called the “blue highways.” Backroads traveling, on two-lane roads—the blue squiggles on a standard road map—gains in moments what it loses in hours. Jillian’s progress wasn’t the whoosh of a typical child’s. It was a breeze through the screen-porch windows.

  More than anything, the letting go of our bus-stop ritual reminded me of the need to savor moments. So much of Jillian’s life had made that point plain. Still, I tended to forget. Savoring is easy to say and hard to do. Take the time. Make the time, I told myself.

  “Dad, come here quickly,” she said to me one morning, not long after she turned ten. Getting over the initial pleasure-shock of Jillian’s using the word “quickly,” I got up from the breakfast table and found her in the family room. I watched as she tied her shoes for the first time.

  Jillian took the strings to her sneakers, crossed them and pulled. She made two loops and crossed them, high enough in the loop to leave a hole underneath big enough to pull a loop through. Jillian nimbly stuffed one of the loops through the hole and pulled it tight. “See?” she asked.

  It wouldn’t have been an occasion if we hadn’t been working on it for months. Every morning before school, Jillian would slip on her sneakers, then look at me. The look was her request: “Tie my shoes.” And every morning, I would look at her and shake my head: “No. Do it yourself.”

  The tug-of-wills always ended when Jillian’s dexterity didn’t match her effort. I’d tie the shoes, the way her occupational therapist had instructed. I’d talk Jillian through it.

  “Cross the laces like this, okay?” I’d say. She’d nod.

  “Make the two loops, one for each lace. Cross them like this. Stuff one under the other and pull.” Every day, she’d try. Every day, I’d finish. Every day, Jillian would get a little sadder but no less determined. And every day, I wondered when my beautiful, little ten-year-old girl would perform this simplest of routines.

  It was this way with just about everything. Spelling to shoelaces. With Jillian, you straightened your resolve and opened up a ten-pound can of patience. I’m not a fisherman, but I imagine fishing is similar to getting a 12-year-old Jillian to spell a two-syllable word. You have to enjoy the sunrise, not itch for the catch.

  �
��I did it!” Jillian squealed with delight. “Just like a big girl.”

  Duly noted. You don’t have to coax joy from the ordinary. You just have to invest in it.

  Jillian went to school that day. She made her teacher watch her tie her shoes. She asked the teacher to stop class briefly so every kid in the class could watch her tie her shoes. “Listen up,” Jillian announced. “I gonna do something here.”

  When Kerry got home that afternoon, Jillian was waiting in the kitchen. “Mom, I need to show you something,” Jillian said. When Kelly got home, she repeated the performance.

  She called both sets of grandparents. “I a big girl,” she announced, still not so big, however, that she could include a verb in the declaration. Her rites of passage were no different from Kelly’s, yet there was more to savor. The wonder was in the striving

  She was 11 years old when she first wrote her name in cursive. Her J-I-L-L-I-A-N was curvy and swirling and took a full minute to achieve. She held the pencil so tightly, the tips of her fingers went white. “Now,” she proclaimed immediately upon finishing, “time for Daugherty.”

  Six weeks into the bike experiment, Jillian announced, “Dad, time to take the t’aining wheels off.”

  “Not yet. You’re not ready,” I replied.

  “When?”

  “When you show me you’re ready.”

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  By late spring, I removed the training wheels. “There you go,” I said.

  Jillian was scared. Without the crutch of the added wheels, she became reluctant to test the common drive. Kerry and I had to force her, which was entirely unlike our child, who didn’t usually need to be pushed into things.

  “I don’t know if I do it,” she said to me one day.

  “You won’t know unless we try.”

  We started by helping her onto the bike and simply standing there with her. I’d straddle the front of the bike, a leg on either side of the front tire, keeping her perfectly upright. I held her around her waist. After a few days of that, I took my hands away and simply straddled the front tire.