Feeling Like a Dad

Baby and daddy went for their first neighborhood walk this evening with both of their feet touching the ground. Baby’s bare feet carried her eight or ten houses farther up the street, along the warm, but not hot, sidewalk. Mostly I held one or both of her hands, but she did a little of the walking on her own. (I would have let her do all of it, but concrete is hard.) There was a lot to see along the way: birds, insects, flowers, grass, a stone wall, and tiny hills running down to the sidewalk from a couple of houses along the way. When we came to our last driveway, a dark-gray cat with green eyes slowly walked in our direction. Baby was smiling and wanted to pet the cat, who seemed amenable, but I chose not to take any risks – having never seen the animal before and knowing nothing. I picked baby up and let her look down at her would-be friend from a height of about two feet. And then I headed us home, sad not to have allowed a probably benign moment of kinship between innocent creatures, and feeling like a dad.