Daughter Dearest

My sandy-haired, gap-toothed 6-year-old daughter got a pair of cleated black shoes and shin guards so that she could attend soccer camp this month, which she wants to do because her pal Charlie Hooley is going, and that is how the twig is bent around here. The dad has little to say about it. Fate is everything. Thanks to a dog that jumped on her when she was 3, she is terrified of dogs, and thus are we spared the curse of dog ownership.

Almost every day my little girl climbs into her old man's lap and puts her little arms around his neck and lays her head against his chest and melts his heart like cheese under the broiler. She comes home from soccer and bursts into the house and cries "Daddy!" and runs and clasps his knees for perhaps four seconds, or three, and this is the Hallelujah Chorus and the Water Lilies at Giverny of parenthood. And sometimes she says, "I love you so much." This is so indescribably lovely that the old man feels dread in his heart: When will this Golden Age end, and what comes after it?

A little girl could be given a pony ride by her aunt Kay, and the virus of horsewomanship enters her blood, and thereafter, every Saturday morning for the next 12 years, I must drive her to Foxcroft Stables and watch Emmett, the chain-smoking, bourbon-soaked stableman, help my child up onto Crimson Blaze, who gallops away, leaping over hedges and fences, and after 15 minutes, I need a powerful tranquilizer, the kind they'd administer to a horse. Or a little girl could pick up a hockey stick and sense its potential for violence, and thus 10 years later, I have a 6-ft., 180-lb. defensewoman under my roof who loves to bang into people and knock their molars loose. My daughter is no shrinking violet. The other day I saw the little darling try to throttle a 6-year-old boy. She threw him down and was about to kick him in the pancreas. I called her name from the kitchen window, and she smiled a cherubic smile and poked him with her toe, just so he'd know what was on her mind. The old man shudders to see this.

My little girl is not into Sharing. She is a zealous guardian of her vast inventory of toys and games, her collection of more than 14,000 stuffed animals, even her handcrafted-from-natural-material playthings, given to her by liberals, which of course she never plays with. When another child ventures onto her turf and shows an interest in, say, one tiny stuffed llama made by Peruvian peasants from organic wool, the darling snatches it away, and her parents have to browbeat her into civility. The old man worries about this. I can visualize her as a selfish, overbearing snot--visions of the Bush daughter in the limo, her tongue stuck out--a royal pain in the ass. I brood about this.