On My Daughter’s Road to Fame

“Salisbury From A Moving Car”

Credit: My Daughter

November brings with it such early darkness, and as we move quickly along Interstate 85, my boys have already succumbed to it. It is not yet eight o'clock, and they rest in peaceful slumber in their seats.  There is little traffic now. The night covers us completely.

My eleven-year-old daughter rides shotgun. This is the first trip of any appreciable distance that we have traveled in such a manner, and I am finding her to be an excellent traveling companion. She kindly and in such an orderly fashion handed her brothers their Chick-Fil-A meals earlier, and now she has taken to playing DJ. She scrolls through the songs on my iPhone to find the ones she knows from bedtimes gone by, and we sing them together. Vertical Horizon's "Sunrays and Saturdays." Tom Jones' "Green, Green Grass of Home." Loudon Wainwright III's "Daughter." 

That's my daughter in the water,
Every time she fell I caught her.
Every time she fell.
That's my daughter in the water,
I lost every time I fought her.
Yea, I lost every time.

During the breaks in songs we discuss school. Sixth grade, middle school, seems to be going well for her. I remember that's when everything changed for me. Our childhood group of friends got reshuffled. It wasn't despite our best intentions. We had no intentions about it.  It just seemed to happen.  
Paul Simon's "Father and Daughter."

I'm gonna watch you shine,
Gonna watch you grow,
Gonna paint a sign
So you'll always know:
As long as one and one is two
There could never be a father 
Who loved his daughter more than I love you.

During another break, with only the gentle hum of the interstate as our soundtrack, and sincerity in her voice, she asks me this:

"Do you think I'll be famous?"

I'm not sure how to answer, as I have forgotten what it is like to be this age and what it is like for the real world to have started creeping in. We all have. We think we remember, but everything we see is through lenses that are tinted by our own experiences and colored by time. It is our job as parents to guide our kids safely into adulthood, and we do our best, calling to them from where we stand. But we still fashion their mile markers out of the lessons we have learned.  

And we still stand here, on this side. We rarely, if ever, take time to think of what it is really like for them. Cast off, if you can, the benefit of age. Remember what it was like to stand on their side, with such an unfamiliar road before you. 

At that spot when the ignorance of youth begins to wear off. When make-believe lands are deserted.  

When we begin to realize the world, the real world, is out there, and we are going to have to make our way into it.

When I was in sixth grade, someone in a land I'd never heard of drove a truck loaded with explosives into a barracks full of American soldiers. More than two hundred of them were killed. 

Think what it must be like to see these things at that very moment when you're wondering what will my place be among this.

I search for the right words to answer her question. I contemplate my own definition of what it means to be famous and to be successful. I want to tell her that she will unquestionably touch people’s lives, that she will make the world, even if just one small corner of it, a better place, and that she will always be remembered by someone for her kindness, her intellect, and her friendship.  

But this measure of fame comes from the knowledge gained after many more years on this road than she, so I keep it to myself.  

She is at the start of her own road, wondering where it will take her.  

“It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if you were,” I tell her, and that seems to please her, for she returns to the music.

We will eventually roll into Burlington, our stop for the weekend. It will, because of traffic, be well past our estimated arrival, but it will also be too soon. With my beautiful daughter beside me, growing way too quickly, I will wish for this road with her to last a little longer.

(originally published November 21, 2013, but published again here in anticipation of our daughter’s leaving for college)