Now I'm a Believer

I was pulling into the driveway with my girls. It was bright and sunny, the car windows were open, the Monkees were blaring, and I was singing along. I turned back as we parked and I hadn't even been paying attention to the lyrics I was belting out.

I've only been a father for three years, but already these strange pangs of worry surface from time to time when I realize that each of my children will one day fall irrationally in love with someone else. In that moment in the car, I caught a glimpse of my little one's infectious smile. She's fourteen months with a permanent glimmer in her eye, and she just beams with joy over the littlest things. In mid refrain, I suddenly realized: one day someone else is going to fall hopelessly in love with her.

The whole thing brought to mind Gary Soto's "Oranges." It's this wonderful little narrative of a boy going on something of a date -- he calls it a walk -- with a girl. He's obviously smitten. It's cold outside and they head to the drugstore. He offers to buy her something, and thanks to the compassion of the shop-owner winds up quietly trading a nickel and an orange for the ten-cent candy she wants.

Soto closes with this wonderful image of the boy and girl outside, "fog hanging like old / coats between the trees." Then he closes:

I took my girl’s hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

The whole thing is a telling of the alchemy of love, and though I'm madly in love with my girls, it was an astonishing thought for me to realize that my children are likely to elicit that pitch of feeling in someone else one day.