Free Bird
By Bill Stork, DVM
If I live to be a hundred, or tomorrow never comes, I pray that my last memory will be sunken in an over-stuffed chair on a cold February morning, 1997.
Paige felt medium-rare, lying across my chest. Flaccid, except for the shiver at the end of each inhale, her head lay lifeless against my neck. In her heaviest fleece footie PJ’s, zipped to the top, she was swaddled in a quilt and draped with my 20-year-old, red-checked Woolrich.
No radio, TV, or computer; I sat silent and aware of her every breath. Like Buddha meets Big Nutbrown Hare; exploring the length, breadth and depth of a father’s love for his daughter. This moment delivered by a simple cold that in due time will pass; while internalizing the anguish of families for whom the entire world was reduced to the child on their shoulder, suffering from cancer or incurable disease. Dogs, cows and accounts receivable would wait.
It could have been five minutes or four hours, but in time, the twenty-pound radiator on my chest cooled. She lifted her head, and whispered, “Bup.”
In my 32 years, I had never known a greater emotional excursion from heartache to joy. I wrestled from the chair, letting blanket and flannel fall to the carpet. Cradling her with my right arm, and pouring from gallon jug to sippy cup didn’t leave a free hand, nor did I have inclination to wipe the tear as it fell to the linoleum. I pulled the tray and lowered her into the high-chair.
For the rest of the day we watched videos and read stories: The Giving Tree, James Herriot’s Treasury for Children… and Thea.
The pages of the book about a little tomato who was not like the rest were dog-eared and tattered. Twelve years later for an English composition class in high school, she burned the message forward to the pubescent crowd, and a lawyer, electrical engineer and an insurance salesman to whom I emailed it.
She wrote an unapologetic essay demanding our society own up and not sweep literature like Huckleberry Finn under the rug, so that we can continue to move further away from where we have been. Her children and generations to follow should have the opportunity to read history in the language that it was written.
With one ear trained on a circle of adults waxing on social issues, a 6th grade Paige pulled on a tube of strawberry Gogurt.
“I think we’ll see the day when it makes no difference when a black person applies for a job,” I said. Pleased with their sensitivity, the adults paused.
"I look forward to the day when we describe people by the color of their shirt,” Paige quietly applied the exclamation point… with a velvet sledgehammer.
Paige knew the story of "The Giving Tree" by heart, and by blood. We had read it a hundred times or more; it could have been written about her grandma. Dementia would siphon her soul years before fever took her life.
In order to know her namesake grandmother better and in hopes of sparing another family the devastation of dementia, she knocked her dad from the perpetual cycle of "I oughta" and "I wish I had." Paige rallied the family. On a cold, gray, September Sunday morning we marched across Lake Monona, shoulder to shoulder and eye to eye with caretakers, victims and families in the Walk to End Alzheimer's.
Her thoughts are exponentially fewer than her words. What once appeared to be lack of motivation to an oblivious dad, we would learn years later was an excess of pride. Defined by the notion that “not all who wander are lost” and driven to see the sun rise over Machu Pichu. Paige found her own employment en route to an underserved school in Peru; in doing so, teaching her dad that faith is a powerful tool, and God isn't the only one who deserves it.
She is strong enough to play hockey with boys more concerned with hitting one-another than passing the puck.
She is the picture of contentment, reading a book at sun set over Taylor Lake Wisconsin. Her wanderlust carried her to the Fjords of Finland, shrinking the globe to her family at home, and providing experiences minimum wage could never buy. Spending summer in a country that speaks little English, has never heard of barbecue sauce, and is an easy bike ride from Mother Russia.
With two cans of Yuban on sale and a box of Corn Flakes, I waited my turn at the Cambridge Piggly Wiggly. Contemplating the tabloids: Jen’s latest break-up and J-Lo’s surgery; a hearty handshake brought back reality. Two proud dads on a Sunday morning relived a play-by-play from the “2009 Pumpkin Classic” - a cross-field pass that would have been a team gold, were it not for a driving rain and vicious cross wind that was equal to our girls' valiant effort.
In five years that feels like two ticks of the clock, our daughters are about to graduate high school. .
“What’s Paige up to?” Curt asked.
My spine jolted to army erect; and pulse accelerated to 100-meter sprint. A sensation of inflation erupted in the chest - every last alveoli stretched with 100% Oxygen, like two cool hands laid gently on my face, pulling my eyelids until they gape. I gathered myself quickly and shrugged, lifted my chin and turned my head. It was a thinly veiled attempt to hide the heart I wore on my sleeve.
“She’s graduating near the top of her class and going to the University of Vermont…” emerges from my lips, while I think of the 7-year-old girl who scored three goals in one hockey game. She could not get past the gauntlet of parents and out of the boutique rink at Madison Ice Arena fast enough.
I think, "Over-accomplished and insanely concerned about the feelings of others," but “She is doing really well, going to school in Vermont next year,” I respond.
From their cradle to our grave, we agonize over every action, reaction, and decision, hoping that our kids only have to look across the dinner table, so that when they cross that stage and turn their tassel, they are stepping from bedrock into the unknown.
Standing in the introspective crosshairs; in one moment thinking the paradigm has shifted hard, then realizing it is truly a symbiosis. The daughter for whom we walk the line, is the force that reminds us who we are.
With subtleties of family and friends, her core is uniquely and beautifully Paige. She did not invent independence, accountability, compassion or strength, but has made them her own.
Thanks to the little girl on my shoulder, I'm more aware of my carbon footprint, considerate of the person behind me, and slow to critique what I don't know. We can bold it in all caps and write in red ink on five-dollar Hallmark cards. We hug them and step away, emphasizing every superlative with clenched fist, and crescendo to a pregnant pause: we are so unbelievably, phenomenally, enormously… P-R-O-U-D.
Admiring who she is, I pray to live long enough to see who she becomes.