I thought of condensing this snippet, that I ripped and saved from the Sunday NY Times 2 months ago, as a part of a toast at our wedding, but I think it’d get lost in the cupcakes and champagne.
I told Hana that a new present from her grandfather would arrive in a few days, and she, being at the age where the idea of any gift or surprise is the finest thing in the world, began her anticipatory questions. “Is it here, Daddy?” she would ask me ad infinitum, until its arrival.
For me, the best part of waiting for the gift is asking Hana what she thinks it might be. “An elephant?” she guessed. “A macaroni bowl without macaroni?”
Nothing else gives me such a sense of how astonishing desire is. Desire gives equal weight to things of radically different worth. Hana cycled through the possibilities at every meal. “A piece of glass?” “Crayons?” “A cloud?”
Desire erases boundaries by easing through them. Desire is wonder in motion. Desire finds that reality’s border is loosely guarded; someone — “reason’s viceroy” — is always asleep at his post. My 3-year-old girl knows already what many poets would do well to learn: desire pushes through the limit of what is possible; it does not recognize it and retreat.
A cloud in a box would blow my mind, would knock my socks off. I hoped the gift was a cloud in a box. I had my doubts.
- Dan Beachy-Quick, from “Dissembling My Childhood“
