The Capacity For Wonder...

She was SO excited to see the cheerleaders that she nearly exploded out of her seat at the idea of walking down the stadium aisle to meet them down by the court. By the time we got close she was trembling, and then as we got nearer still, teary. She was SO excited to meet them.

It was my first Daddy-Daughter moment where it struck me, "this is nothing like a little boy. I am surrounded with girls," and I love it. She was so in love with the notion of meeting those girls, all-in, and enraptured. When the tears finally came I was speechless. I didn't know what to say to comfort her. I didn't know how to react aside from encouraging her and understanding how big of a deal it is to get that close to something that impossibly awesome.

When the girls left the arena, and slipped back to their locker room to change, the basketball game long over, and us lingering on the court talking to friends and snapping a few pictures of Daddy's old, and most favorite of places, I caught her collecting things from the ground and putting them in her pocket. What? She was gathering up all of the tiny pieces of pom-pom that had fallen free from the cheerleaders pom-poms, and tucking them away to bring home. When I finally put her in the car, and she fell almost immediately to sleep for the hour and a half long drive home, I found countless scraps of pom-pom in her pockets, some even still in her grip.

Don't imagine that it's some little thing what these small eyes see, and don't be so ignorant as to not believe or understand that one regular person, some girl from Kenosha, or Grand Rapids, a student, tumbling and laughing and cheering through a silly Big Ten basketball game, can't, for a brief moment, be absolutely perfect...be everything that those little eyes can imagine they'd ever want to be. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "something commensurate with his (her) capacity for wonder."

It was a little girls bright and shiny world for a moment and I was a witness to something so sweet as to elude comprehension. What if I just witnessed the very beginnings of a dream? Yeah, humility defined. What a staggeringly beautiful moment. I've never said that about worming my way down to the basketball court at Crisler before. Brilliant, what little hearts and minds can accomplish in an evening. She took a simple thing, and turned it profound, even for me.