STROLL BETWEEN US

Dear Spike:

There was a time when I was convinced you'd be walking before you'd even learned to crawl. That happens sometimes, I've heard. Kids just figure out how to put one foot in front of another and off they go.

You'd been toddling about a bit, using walls and furniture to help yourself balance. At the park, you'd take one of my fingers in your left hand and one of your mother's fingers in your right, and stroll between us as though there were absolutely nothing magical going on.

"There's nothing grand to see here," I could hear your eyes saying. "I'm just on a lazy Sunday stroll with my parents."

Then, one day, you figured out how to crawl. And for quite some time, you forgot about walking altogether. After all, who needs two legs when you can have four? The dogs at the park don't seem to mind not walking upright.

In the past month, you've started to show some interest in walking the way most folks do. A step here. A step there. Sometimes you'd put two steps together. Rarely three.

Finally, just this evening, you mastered the skill that evolutionary biologists say makes humans human.

Well, maybe mastered is a relative term, although clearly it is no longer a matter of liberal interpretation to say that you have joined the ranks of we humans who stand upright and walk to get from one place to another.

You were standing between your mother and me in your room and decided, quite suddenly, that you'd like to be closer to her. You took a step. And then another. And then another. And then you lunged into her arms.

We gasped and cheered and applauded. You must have liked the attention, for when you mother turned your little body around you left her arms and walked, step after step after step, back to me.

Then back to her. Then back to me.

Then we broke, for a few minutes, so that your could scream and cry — for no particular reason, it seemed.

When you stopped, you walked back to your mother. And back to me. And back to her. More gasps. More cheers. More applause.

You wore a smile as big as your strides.

Just this morning, your mother and I were saying that we knew this day was coming. And there was a touch of sadness in our conversation.

You're growing up. Talking. Playing. Imagining.

"Our baby's not our baby anymore," your mother said.

I sighed and knew she was right.

"I know," I said, "but I still want her to walk. She'll be so proud of herself. So happy. I want that for her."

Now it's true. You are walking. You are proud of yourself.

I am proud of you and I am happy for you. And I am sad, too. Our baby's not our baby anymore.

She's figured out how to put one foot in front of another.

And off she goes.

Love,
dad