When my daughter Cassie was 2 years old, I would hold her with one hand over the stoop outside our front door in Palau and call for Kilulei. Kilulei, our dog, would come and lick at her feet, as I lowered her like a human crane...down...down...until Kilulei made contact and Cassie squirmed and yelped. A daughter’s lesson
for Father's DayWatch out for the day
when the child switches roles
with the parent ... it's a gemLater, when we moved to Hilo, I gave her a crash course in critical English before her first day of kindergarten. With those big, wide eyes of hers, she watched as I acted out having to take a pee and said, "I have to go to the bathroom." Cosmic justice that after all those years of learning Palauan from Palauan children, I was teaching English to my own Palauan child.
Of all the "small kid" stories I remember most about my daughter Cassie, one stands out, like it was yesterday. Not quite "Scarlet Ribbons," but the first day Cassie came to Hilo, everything was new to her. She was 5, in an exciting environment, very different from Palau, and all things seemed possible. Her own room. Her own bed. New red rubber slippers. The Hilo Petting Zoo right around the corner from our apartment. She touched a donkey. And when her batteries ran dead at the end of the day, I found her, turned to stone (the Pa-lauan idiom for "gone to sleep") on her brand new bed, still wearing the brand new red slippers.
I highly recommend daughters, based on the one I have. There's no question that girls are better than boys. And they are very forgiving of their dads, cutting us slack which wives and sons would never yield.
The single most mind-blowing important moment you can have with your child is the day that the parent-and-child roles begin to reverse. Don't let it get by you, because it's what having a family is all about.
When Cassie was 15, she told me she was going to join the girls' junior varsity cross-country team at Kalani High School. This came as no small surprise. Cassie is a petite person, who had shown no prior athletic interest or proclivity.
"The team needs a fifth person in order to compete and qualify individual runners for the finals. My friends are running, but there are only four of them. I told them I'd run and finish, so that they could qualify. All I have to do is finish," she explained.
I asked her when the meet was. She said in two weeks. This from a young lady who would not even run for a bus. I signed the school permission form, and her cross-country career began.
The day of the meet, she asked if I would come and watch her. "Actually, Dad, I don't think I'm going to have the strength to catch the bus home."
When the starter's gun went off, I could not see Cassie. She was somewhere in a sea of Amazons. These girls were, well, women. No, they were fillies. Lanky, fired up, nostrils flaring and, yes, off in a cloud of dust. I thought I saw one of them throw a shoe.
As one apparently does at cross-country meets, the spectators moved to the appropriate viewing points. After the first half mile, a dozen of the competitors strided by, followed by stragglers. Had I missed Cassie? Or had she collapsed out there on the field of battle? Damn that permission slip! And then I saw her, already hundreds of yards behind the next-to-the-last runner. My daughter. Her engine was working with piston-like precision, just at very low combustion levels. This wasn't really gliding or striding. This wasn't exactly even running. But it was progress.
By the next viewing point, Cassie was in her own race. I clapped as she went by. I was there almost by myself, since the spectators were moving at a more rapid clip than my daughter. But I will never forget that three boys stayed there, one saying to the others, "Let's clap for that last girl." They didn't even know her. I blessed them then. I bless them now.
When the race ended, I did not yell out, "That's my daughter!" But I watched as her friends, who had finished several epochs before Cass, hugged and squeezed her and did the jumpy-screamy-thing, which we might best refer to here as "female-bonding." (It is, by the way, less idiotic than the shoulder-punching-ass-slapping "male-bonding," just so no suits will be filed against me.)
She found me after a while and asked if I'd wait around until the medals ceremony was over. I didn't figure she was going to get one, but I was the dad and nodded yes.
The sun was going down as we both got into the Datsun and drove home. She said to me, with nothing but control and conviction in her voice, "I did what I said I would, Dad. I started the race and I finished."
In that one moment, I realized that after all these years, she was teaching me something. Our relationship was changing in a big way. The little potato with the red slippers was coming into her own. Not as the world's greatest athlete, but as a full person, connected to herself, her friends and her environment. If ever "last was first," it was then. I could only see it because of her. My daughter, my teacher, my champion.
Chuck Freedman, vice president of
Hawaiian Electric Co., is the proud father of Cassie,
who is now a teacher at Hickam Elementary School.