HERE AND THERE

Dear Spike:

I leave our home often — such is the nature of my work — but this morning marked the first time, since we learned you were coming, that I left for an overnight trip.

This isn’t a long one. Just a drive down to southern Utah, a few stops here and there, one overnight stay in a hotel, and a drive back up tomorrow afternoon. Maybe 40 hours away from the chateau, all told. I’ve been away for months before, so this shouldn’t be difficult for me.

But leaning in to kiss your mother — she was still sleeping when I departed this morning, long before sunrise — I felt the way I usually do before much longer trips to much more dangerous places.

Some feel fear when they leave home for long periods of time. Others feel the first pangs of loneliness. I feel hungry — the way you feel when you haven’t eaten in a day and know you will not be eating for some time to come.

Were I to command every word, in every language our world has ever spoken, I could not explain the greatness of my love for your mother. And yet we’ve come to be at ease with being apart — me in hotel rooms or on Army cots, your mother in our queen-sized bed, sharing space with the cats.

Yes, I feel lousy when I leave her, but it’s only on the very long trips or very dangerous ones that I usually feel the way I felt this morning. And yet I did not wonder at this hunger.

I knew.

It was your presence — so new and curious and fascinating to me — that made me want, more than anything in the world, to pull back the covers and dive back inside, to hold your mother around her waist, my cheek to her abdomen, as close to you as I can be.

You may wonder when you are young about why I will sometimes go away, just as I wondered why my father would leave us when I was a boy.

For him — a lover of sports and of words — it was baseball, football, basketball. It was the possibility of being present, even essential, to the next Shot Heard Round The World, the next running of The Play, the next Miracle on Ice.

For me it is the promise of stories untold. Of knowledge — the very breath of our democracy — unshared. And yes, of adventures unknown.

There will be times, my child, when I am away. Forgive me, please, this vice.

And know — the way I know of my love for your mother and for you — that you and I will never be far apart.

Love,
dad