A Moment

Today, I had a moment. It was one of those unexpected moments that breathes spirit into my nostrils, adding liveliness to existence. I had spent most of the day painting what will be our apartment. I had just finished painting the parts of the upstairs we were going to use - bare essentials for us to unpack and move in. The last paint job, at least in those upper rooms, had been during the Vietnam War, so it was a dirty, paint-for-survival type of work where those brown splotches you thought you painted over would resurrect and beg for more. Nonetheless, I painted the rooms a satisfactory white and declared I was done, just before dinnertime.

The moment occurred when I was washed and sitting in my in-law's kitchen, decompressing from labor by reading interesting things on the Internet. My father-in-law came in and brought my daughter with him. He sat all of her one-and-a-half years in the high chair and left the room, but not before giving her a fat chunk of soft pretzel (in the States, babies eat Cheerios all the time, in Germany, soft pretzels). For the first time that day, father and daughter were alone.

I continued to read, but she wanted me attention. She smiled at me with a playful flicker in her dark eyes. She inherited my brown eyes, which also belong to my mom and two of my sisters. But there's something about those eyes that make them unique, something in the way that there's still so much to learn or to experience that give them a depth my aged eyes lack. Or perhaps its something built in to make a father's heart melt. Either way.

She wanted me to sing, so I sang. "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" is her current favorite, and she can do the hand motions in her own swinging baby way. Her hair used to be so short, but now playful curls spread out from her round head like a bush in the spring time. She wanted more food, so I went and got a Kiwi. "Wee wee!" she squealed when she saw it. I cut it in half and fed her slivers of green fruit with a spoon.

The Kiwi was reduced to two half-shells, and I wanted to empty the dish washer, but I needed a distraction. The solution was "la la." La la is what she calls my in-laws' CD player. I turned it on, wondering which old rock album from my father-in-law's collection was in it. It was an old Rolling Stones record with mostly songs I didn't recognize. No matter. My daughter and I danced to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger while I put the plates and coffee cups away.

During this moment, I savored one of the good parts of life. It's the part that feels as if this little girl is a piece of hope and love dancing in my arms. The part that knows when she looks at me through those deep brown eyes, she sees me as someone important.