Good Gifts for His Children

This essay was originally written shortly after my older daughter was born. I am republishing it here for Father’s Day.

“Let’s go for a walk,” my father said.

I was five; my brother Marcus, not yet three. We never walked anywhere. Whenever we went beyond our yard, bounded in back by a chain-link fence overgrown with honeysuckle vine, in front by the crumbling berm of Missouri Street, we went in the car—to church, to the shopping center, to visit family.

Yet in the fall, when the maples in the front yard turned fiery and the weather turned cool, my father turned to Marcus and me and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

We walked to where our street dead-ended at the elementary school, and across the broad parking lot. Heedlessly we trampled the yellow lines marking kickball courts and four-square games. At the far end we dallied in the kindergarten playground, climbing up the slide backwards and hanging from the monkey bars. We never looked beyond the playground; only the void lay there. That is how the world seems, when you always travel by car: a cluster of discrete locations linked by thin threads of roads, with only the void between. So we did not realize that Daddy meant to go on.

He took our hands and led us to the edge of the playground. Beyond were woods, brushy and trackless, where no car could go.

We balked. “We’ll get lost!”

“No, we won’t,” my father said.

“We’ll get in trouble!”                                                   

“We’re not hurting anything,” he replied, unperturbed.

It wasn’t a large wood, and before we could get properly lost it ended in a gravel parking lot, across from a weathered barn. Tiers of hay bales edged the lot, grandstand for a rowdy crowd of pumpkins. To the north, neat rows of gnarled trees marched toward the horizon. In front of us, the door to the barn was drawn back. The smell of earth and trees and apples caught us like a spell. At the street stood an apple-shaped sign that Marcus and I both recognized.

“It’s Adrian’s!” we sang, dancing around my father. “We walked to Adrian’s!” I had been to Adrian’s Orchard many times. Adrian’s was far away from my house—down our street to Thompson Road, turn right; right again on Meridian Street, a four-lane highway; right on Shelby Street and a long way down to Adrian’s. An impossible distance through the void, for pumpkins and apple cider. But we had walked to Adrian’s! And it wasn’t a void at all—it was a school yard, a playground, and a wood lot. It was practically next door! I couldn’t believe it.

That was the day my father gave me the world.

#

In the middle of the night, my father woke us. I remember, and perhaps that’s why—it was always such trouble to get us to sleep; for Daddy to wake us was momentous. He carried Marcus, drowsing against his shoulder. I padded after them, barefoot, through the house.

Beyond the sliding glass doors, on a narrow slab of concrete, my father’s telescope stood on three spindly legs. Its long black cylinder opened like a cannon toward the sky. Marcus and I danced from foot to foot on the chilly concrete. Daddy hunched over the eyepiece, his glasses in one hand while the other adjusted the focus.

Daddy turned and picked Marcus up. “Look through here, but don’t touch,” he said. Marcus peered through the eyepiece and breathed a little sigh of awe.

Then my father lifted me, his hands encircling my rib cage. He repeated his admonition not to touch. I closed one eye and squinted through the pupil-sized hole.

I saw Saturn, perfect in watercolor yellows and browns, its rings jutting out to either side of the circle of the planet.

That was the night my father gave me the sky.

#

My parents knew the family who visited our church one summer Sunday. Their daughter was eight years old, like me, and had red hair tucked up underneath a fine hat. We hit it off immediately, and were allowed to sit together during worship.

I noticed, when communion was served, that she participated. It shocked me. Communion was something adults did. After church I asked my mother about it.

“She must have been baptized,” my mother said.

“But she’s not any older than me!” I protested. Our church doesn’t baptize infants; only those who are capable, like the Ethiopian treasurer, of making a confession of faith. So baptism, like communion, was generally something adults did.

“She had a little brother who died,” my mother said. “Maybe it made her grow up kind of fast.”

It made me grow up quickly, too. Suddenly things that had never been relevant to me were of the utmost importance. I told my mother I wanted to be baptized.

My mother, who typically believed me when I was serious, told the elders on my behalf.

Bro. Wolfgang and bro. Heaton took me aside and questioned me—not the usual procedure, but I was not the usual supplicant. They asked me what baptism was, what communion meant, why Jesus died. I knew these things, of course—I had learned them since birth—but now they had an urgency beyond memory-verses and Bible songs. Bro. Wolfgang and bro. Heaton concluded that I understood what I wanted to do, and that there was no reason to make me wait.

Our church has no ordained clergy; the membership is more or less egalitarian. In addition, believer’s baptisms tend to come at unforeseen moments, and to have an air of roadside-stream informality, despite the seriousness of the occasion. Perhaps that’s why I was asked who I wanted to baptize me. I think I was meant to choose between bro. Heaton, bro. Wolfgang, or the preacher, bro. Hardin. But I did not realize that until later.

I asked for my father.

He was not much more than a new convert himself. My father was an agnostic until I was seven years old. So the thought of baptizing someone else made him understandably nervous. But he put on waterproof overalls over his clothes, and I put on the plain white garments provided for baptism. We both rolled up our sleeves, and I met him in the water behind the pulpit. The straight-sided baptistry was so deep that I had to stand on a stool.

My father pressed a folded white washcloth into my cupped hands. He asked me “Jennifer, do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

“I do,” I said.

He stumbled over the next words, but the sense was there: Based upon your confession of faith, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

He lifted my hands to my face, covering my nose and mouth with the cloth, and tipped me back into the water. It closed over my face. My feet came off the stool. No matter; my father held me. He stood me up again, and steadied me.

That was the day my father gave me eternity.

#

Eventually, my father gave me away—the most difficult gift of all. In the manner of such great gifts, his returned tenfold—ten fingers, that is, ten toes, two blue eyes and the toothless grin of a granddaughter. He doesn’t see her as often as he would like, I know, but I hung his picture in her bedroom and she listens to him on the telephone.

I am saving up gifts to give her, heirlooms my father passed down to me. She will be ready for them soon. Just the other night while I was holding her, she turned her head to look at the moon hanging luminous and low over the mountains.

“Do you see the moon?” I asked her, and she looked up and me and smiled, as if we shared some private joke.

“Someday it will be yours,” I told her. “Someday this will all be yours.” But not just yet. For now, the mountains, the Milky Way, the whole bright expanse of sky, belongs exclusively to me.

It was a gift from my father.