The stroller isn’t meant for real babies. The model she’s taken to is a miniature one intended for baby dolls with small wheels to carry light loads around a living room or to be pushed up and down a sidewalk, gently – not to carry the enormous weight that results from her collecting sprees. She loads the seat and its undercarriage with stuffed animals, puzzle pieces, pinecones, marbles, synthetic flower stems with the blossoms cut or fallen off, potato chip bags, a backpack and a hippo figurine.

Her stroller goes with her everywhere: to the swimming pool, across the house’s three stories, to the bedroom when she falls to sleep. The neighborhood pool is a quarter mile away and she insists that it go with her though nothing in it is going to come in handy later or be valuable to her in any way. But she insists it go along by showing real concern and disappointment for it. She turns up her bottom lip and her eyes widen and turn damp, and she asks in her best Shirley Temple voice, “Ah, why can’t I take my stroh-lah?” And she says it just like that.

So the stroller is in for the trip. About 100 yards along the way, her father – I – am pushing it across the smooth blacktop past the beach houses and the tree shadows. It’s an easy push with a reward at the end. If it gets too hot, you can jump in the pool. But a few feet is all she can stand and then it’s my turn to fill in.

Her treasures are the innocent kind and so is her flightiness. But the junk she collects is insight into her mind.

She has no idea what is important. She has left everything up to her parents in shaping her life. Her concern lies in the little things. They are more important than where her parents live, what color the house is, what street it’s on, where her father sleeps, what school she goes to, who her neighbors are and all those real questions that adults concern themselves with.

My daughter – three years old – has slept with me the last two nights. She is consistently the most difficult one, the one that is often the toughest to fall asleep, so when she asks that I tickle her to sleep every night, I do it. Beginning with her back, she lays face down and pulls her nightgown up to her shoulder blades and tells me to tickle her. So I do. After a few minutes, she slips an arm around behind her and I tickle it, too. She shifts her head from side to side, moving it in the pillow softness and breathing softly. She opens one eye to me to see if my eyes are closed, if I am about to sleep, which of course I would be if wasn’t for her demands. And we smile. She knows. This happens in the nightlight’s orange glow.

Earlier in the day, she found some old glasses lying on the countertop and put them on. She looked so much like her mother. This beautiful girl, it reminded me, is part of two people. One face, depending on which parent’s perspective is taken, is now a disappointment to the other. In the beginning, when two people are in love, neither can do any wrong. In the ending, you can’t stand to see each other. When there are children, it’s no so easily resolved.

Here is what I know that my daughter doesn’t: The only way that value should be attributed to everything in life is if you live every day from that viewpoint … if you count everything as a blessing, completely wondorous about it’s value and impact on your life, no matter how miniscule it might seem to be. And here is what else I know that she doesn’t: her parents didn’t live that way, together.

My little girl collects random things because they are all beautiful to her, wherever she finds them, whatever condition they are in. She’ll live through this divorce. Her parents aren’t going to change in her eyes. They are like seashell-shaped soap, another priceless item for her collection.

On the west side, the houses hadn’t given in to their sighs of mid-summer. Mostly everyone’s house was well kept and the ones that weren’t, even their families mowed the lawns under the sagging eaves and drug out ladders with cob-webbed rungs to add fresh paint. The kids played in the streets making makeshift ramps from phone books and leftover boards, setting fireworks off at the edges of driveways in July, and in August, sitting on basketballs under shady overhangs just staring at the baskets and never breaking the heat more than two or three times to take a shot. One lawn was perfectly manicured – poisoned evergreen bluegrass, thick and Catholic lawn mowed and raked and the lawn mower and driveway washed extensively afterward by the holy man of sorts, the caretaker, Mr. Crandski, who’d waste gallons rinsing the dirty blade and clearing pavement. He’d smoke when he was finished with the yard and had the hose in hand, post coital almost, or maybe like he would after a big meal, the high-pitch and thudding all the same spray sound wash, wash, washing down the drive. We kids used to love him smoke and wash his driveway. His sons were good boys, older than us by just enough grade levels to separate our groups. They’d end up in the loudest, filthiest fucking arguments you’d ever heard in the middle of the day, the boys walking out in the summer sun on the clean driveway, yelling in adolescent voices right into their dad’s big sound, almost a roar. Crandski was a big man, with big lungs and good sized pants. His sons would walk off on him after they’d drawn the neighbors to the windows.

These fights were among the more interesting events of the summer. The others generally happened in the same place, down the street and up a hill, past the trees and chain-link fence to an old graveyard. The headstones were perfectly looped by a gravel road, and some more headstones were outside the circle, on the edges. The loop made a perfect race track for kids on bicycles, about 1 and 8 of a mile around. The races always started at the far end, the northeast corner. Someone would yell go, usually someone in the race and looking for a head start. Smooshed socks and worn shoes would kick the pedals down and after the first long, slow pushes, the feet would move faster, the pedals lighter, around the first corner and full speed down the straightaway. The first corner was the toughest. Some riders would lose it there, take it too hard. Their expressions would change. Smiles would turn to “oh shit” circles, like guppies, then the bike frames would waver, then a scream an actual oh shit, and that rider would go careening off into spaces between headstones.

The others still in the race never looked back. They kept on, pedaling fast, the third curve on a glide, then and all out break for the finish, the long strides suddenly back, the bicycle chains tearing through the teeth like loud coats being unzipped. Zuh-oom. Zuh-oom. The sound coming after every step. Zuh-oom. And there were almost always two bikes neck and neck. There was never a lone winner. But anyone could win there. I won a few times, but I don’t remember it. My friends did, too, and I would guess they don’t remember either. I was always the thoughtful one, who didn’t want to let go of the moment, even then, so it’s surprising I’d forget who won the race. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t win.

There was a place on the cemetery’s edge, a clearing overhung with 60-foot trees, where the older boys would take girls. We’d hide there on occasion, too, when it was clear, and throw rocks at the mailman who’d stop at the box through the trees at the bottom of the hill. I remember one girl, older, she lived a street over which might as well been a foreign country, which is why don’t remember her name, she was gorgeous, a perfect blonde with a tan and preppy clothes and the teasy feathered hair – could have been pretty in any era – she went up the hill with a boy her age, a plain boy like us, nothing special about him at all, and they laid down in the tall weeds in the shimmering light let into the bottom of the fishbowl by the tree arms, and nobody bothered them there. They were safe, it was private. No one wanted to spoil it for a boy like us. There was hope on the west side. We could be like this boy in the hope summer. We could dream and imagine, we could make the houses better than what they were and the neighbors into celebrities. No one made us into anything.

Funny, this might be one of the most personal additions I’ve made to this blog … but personal in a different way. I was actually hoping to get away from the extremely personal nature of what I’ve been writing lately, and by looking a little deeper, this did the trick. Sometimes I pretend I am participating in a junior college creative writing course and the instructor has written some opening words or a concept on the dry erase board – in this case, “Write about the place you grew using words as your map”. As the room fills with marker smell, I roll over the cover to a beaten spiral notebook and write in a flourish for 10 or more protected minutes (unprotected minutes must be the on-deadline words written for publication, exposed, like these, with thigh bruises and knobby, skin-scraped knees). Is there any time more sincere than the 10 or so minutes spent writing in class? Everyone has their head down and the most amateur writer can come up with something brilliant – the plain English that everyone is striving for – the perfect description of something, not poetry but exactly how it is. Beginners can do this because they aren’t trying to impress anyone. They are just trying to write from memory.
My junior year at Park University, a soccer player who had taken creative writing as an elective wrote a genuine piece about where he grew up during a morning free-writing exercise. He wrote a passage about a beach in the Bahamas. He described the long palm trees like straws stuck in the sand, the wind lifting up their arms so the sun could shine on the abandoned, imperceptible seashells on the slanted shoreline. He wrote something actually beautiful, though, that he lived, that wasn’t derived from a Corona commercial, a magazine ad or my own limited experience on beaches. Living it is the key. I’ve done more living than writing the last few weeks. But you can’t do one without the other. I’m starting to think that’s why I chose this profession. The living comes easy. Your work is only as interesting as you live, so it’s best in the few moments you have to write about it, you’ve done something worthwhile. I had a fun childhood. This piece was the beginning of a roadmap to the square mile where I once knew every unlevel sidewalk block, cut through and tree that could be climbed. Those were the best days of my life.

She came in late after sending a polite message to my handheld device that I’ve taken to carrying with me after pledging not to. The light fell slanted on her the whole time. Off-balanced, she shifted in the light, kept up the conversation and kept interested. But still, I couldn’t give anything of me away. We talked about the light-hearted topics that you talk about on a first meeting after some time has passed. Then, once you’ve asked about the last few years, their career, their family – once the first few drinks are down and the table has been cleared, the meaningful material comes out, or it doesn’t.

The truth was this: She was beautiful, intelligent, well dressed, polite, seemed to be listening, she cared for the moment. We were both there because we were supposed to be. But my mind analyzes in a different way than hers. Or maybe it’s the same. I can’t decide. This was tremendous effort … just to be there. To be dressed, finished driving on the highway, seated and eating, listening and paying the bill. This is how it would be with anyone, not just her. I am swimming out here in all this freedom, meeting new people.

So it begins now, this magnificent life I have chosen as a writer. The drink, the damaged relationships, the liasons, the promiscuity with bodies and ideas. This life some have told me I was born to live and that others tried to stiffle with red pens dragged through sentences and disparaging remarks in columns … is here. Here is the interesting life I always wanted, the city streets and the beautiful people in cafes mixed in with the art crowd, only a few talented and the others looking for style and identity, drugs and free sex with the hippie chicks in low cut jeans.

I write this and feel a mixture: depression and something like a smile. I have always wanted it, but I’d exchange all the words in a heartbeat for a real soul. The unrequited love is the real gift, the fire, what makes us good lovers, that makes us sense a woman’s neck and skin.

At the table, nothing like this occurs to me, but it occurs to me that it will amount to something later – the regulars, the poor service, beer-ringed tabletop, naked bodies painted in blue on the walls contorted and reaching for each other and finding only drywall. This one next to me … on this particular day … I wish only that she take me home and that I expend as little effort talking as possible. We both would be happier, I know, and I’d have the rest of my day free to write about what she’s keeping secret under the table lip.