IT’S UP THERE AS ONE OF MY ALL-TIME FAVORITES, IF NOT my all-time favorite photo: Almost-five-year-old you wore your pink bike helmet cocked on your head. Your little braids, accented with sky-blue bobbles, fell all around your face. You were seated on your pink-and-purple bike—yeah, we were heavy with the pink theme—in the park around the corner from your mom’s apartment, gripping your handlebars. You looked straight at me, the zealous photographer, with a smile of pure triumph. We took the picture during one of your bike-riding lessons. It ranks as one of my faves because it occurred in the midst of me chasing the impossibility of becoming a writer, a dream that risked 2,500 miles of physical distance—and no telling the size of an emotional chasm—between us, and because those lessons are my earliest memory of daddy-daughter time.
In a couple hours flat, you were pedaling long stretches sans my assistance, albeit with me warying behind you to intervene in a crash. as if nothing on this earth could harm you.
