the dance

I looked across the darkened car to where she sat next to me—the silhouette of her face clear against the bright lights of traffic outside. For a moment it wasn’t my eight-year-old daughter there, but someone else—someone I couldn’t quite recognize—certainly not a child. We were on the way to the elementary school father-daughter dance. It was an annual ritual, but something felt different this time—my date was taller, her features more like a young lady than a young girl. There was that almost imperceptible hesitation when I reached out my hand to hold hers as we walked toward the restaurant—for a moment my mind carried me to some other place and time.

Boisterous laughing and joking punctuated dinner with two other dads and their not-so-young daughters. Then it was off to the darkened dance floor, pounding with strangely out-of-date recorded music intended to bridge the gap between the generations there assembled. We danced, we swung each other. During the slow songs we embraced more gently. I was aware that she had somehow grown tall enough to stand comfortably with me, and now and then her head would rest on my arm. Who was this partner?

A few minutes later I began to understand the other place that haunted my memory. As the beat quickened, she looked up at me, and then at a circle of her friends beckoning across the room. There was hesitation—some calculation of the cost of staying with the would-be partner, and then, like a pony, she kicked up her heels and fled into the dark crowd, laughing as she disappeared. I stood alone. I looked around me, feeling a strange pang I hadn’t felt for many years. How long had it been since those nights when a different school girl had dashed away across the dance floor, signaling the all-too-sudden end of an imaginary romance. Those feelings had become strangers—they had long since been left behind, lost somewhere during the 15 years of married life. Two flashing blue eyes framed by blonde hair and that look of indecision called them back to me. Heaven help me when she’s 16.


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