I’m not much of a runner, but at 42 I’m convinced that jogging the 4-mile nature trail near my home is good for me. I usually run alone, though sometimes the miniature dachshund trots along behind me on his leash, just far enough back to avoid being dragged. When I’m really lucky, one of my daughters will pedal along beside me on a bike, or glide along on roller blades, permitting an all-too-rare conversation. My sentences come out in fragments, punctuated by strained breaths—theirs come smoothly as they cruise along on wheels. Our trail is a spectacular loop of blacktop that snakes along a disintegrating stone fence, around a decaying farm, past fields of corn and beans that change their texture and palette with each season. We cross a historic bridge, dash beside a bubbling river, then cut between placid lakes. My wife and I didn’t know about the path when we purchased our home. It was one of those remarkable gifts discovered a few days after we moved in. I am perhaps most touched when my tall and lovely 14-year-old daughter accepts one of my running invitations. Her rollerblades elevate her nearly eye-to-eye with me. Her blond hair emerges from her helmet, flowing in the breeze. Something about a private conversation with my first child always makes the time seem important—well-spent—priceless. She’s a high school freshman. Her nights under my roof are suddenly numbered. The afternoons on the path without the demands of homework, friends, movies, are fewer and further between.
It wasn’t always that way. On a fall morning 14 years earlier in a metropolitan hospital, this bleary-eyed dad first held this girl. She was wrapped in a delivery room blanket—dark eyes peering at the bright lights. The hair that would eventually be beautiful blond started out damp and dark. I almost never talk about it, but something happened to me when I first held my first girl. I am not one who often experiences visions and touches from the transcendent world outside of time, though I know our lives are but shadows in a created swirl of bright universes. That morning as I first held my little girl, I was for a moment overwhelmed with the sense that I was standing with her at her wedding. She was tall and beautiful. She wore a long white dress. I saw her beside me in glowing white—just for a moment. Just long enough to notice something catch in my throat as I was given the future in her. For that moment she was arm-in-arm with me, and I was taking both my first and my last steps with my little girl.
This peculiar vision was renewed one summer day on the path when neither daughter was available to join me on my run. I didn’t see it coming. Like the path itself, the gift was unexpectedly given. I rounded a corner as I ran the trail, just where the green breeze-blown grasses give way to the shade of trees and fallen limbs along the path. There in the woods off to my left was a glorious shaft of sunlight spilling deep onto the floor of the forest, illuminating a small clearing. In the center of the dazzling sunbeams, glowing in magnificent white, stood a young woman. She posed in a wedding gown, frozen out of place and time, almost hovering. As I passed, expecting the vision to vanish like vapor, I perceived that she was centered in the lens of a photographer, capturing her beauty in that shaft of light for her future wedding. Her future wedding. I suddenly recognized this scene with the lovely young woman in glowing white, surrounded by shade. The picture had been etched in my mind long before. It was the same glow, the same tall beauty, the same mysterious image that had visited me on the day my first daughter was born. That glowing white dress remains ever for me the symbol of her birth, and the symbol of the day she will walk with me to be married.
Since then I have jogged past that hidden spot countless times, whether in spring with a carpet of blue flowers along the path, or in the heat of buzzing summer, or when the chill wind carries the sound of geese. With each passing, I gaze off across the woods to the clearing—half expecting to see the beautiful bride and the white dress. On very rare days I can slow to let a tall young woman with blond hair catch up to me on her roller blades. Then I reach out and gently take her hand for just a moment as we pass the spot. I release her again, watch her speed off, and something catches in my throat.
12.3.03
