You can put down the phone to Child Protective Services. I'm no Charles Dodgson -- if the author of "Alice in Wonderland" really was "Lewis Carroll Carroll," the epithet with which Vlad Nabokov, creator of Humbert Humbert, impaled him. I'm not a bloodsucker. I don't want to freeze Celeste at age 9. But these days, I can't shake off the feeling Carroll evoked in his famous lines: "Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies/ Never seen by waking eyes." The feeling that a world is leaving me, and I need to stop and look at it before it goes.
I'm going against the grain. Some kinds of love swim against the current of time, some kinds float with it. In "To His Coy Mistress," the 17th century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell famously paints time as the enemy of romantic love. "Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime," he begins, before going on to muse how if they were lucky enough to live in such a timeless state, his "vegetable love" should grow "vaster than empires." Alas, he and his would-be love exist in the sublunary sphere, and "at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near." Warning his beloved that if she continues to resist him she'll end up in the grave, he enjoins, "Now let us sport us while we may;/ And now, like am'rous birds of prey,/ Rather at once our time devour,/ Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power." The poet concludes by celebrating a love that lives and dies in an explosion of fireworks: "Thus, though we cannot make our sun/ Stand still, yet we will make him run."
But that's erotic love. The love of a parent for a child doesn't fight time, but keeps pace with it -- languishes in its slow-chapp'd power, if you will. Parental affection is the "vegetable love" that Marvell so weirdly invokes. There is no contest, no victory, no fading beauty, no waning of the "willing soul's" "instant fires." You start out where you end up. You're in it for the long haul. Parental love is love's tortoise -- and if we are to judge by what happens to most marriages, the fable has it right: The tortoise wins. The crawling sun beats the sprinting one.
Yet it's good to break out of the zucchini patch every now and then to feel the pangs of fatalism. It's worth it to take in your child's life as if it were fixed, to remember their childhood as if it would never come again, as if there was no tomorrow, as if you really don't have world enough, and time. Because you don't.
When you freeze the moment, when you place your child in a picture frame, when you remember, you open yourself to the sadness of time. Paradoxically, utter stillness starts the clock ticking; a vivid memory makes you aware that the sun is running toward a finish line. This paradox was brilliantly explored by the French semiotician Roland Barthes in his book about photography, "Camera Lucida": The uncanniness of photography is its simultaneous evocation of presence and loss. A memory is a kind of photograph, developed on the human nerves.
Today my memory was triggered by a trinket -- a bib with a koala on it that hangs in my garage. Thinking of it, the strangeness of life overwhelms me: How did we get from that bib to here?
The impending end of Celeste's childhood touches me because it reminds me of other endings, ones none of us can escape. It touches me because it's the last personal encounter with childhood I'm likely to have. It touches me because the Celeste I loved for all those years is changing before my eyes.
And in the end, I realize, it's really not about her at all. She'll still be Celeste, but will I still be me?
My sadness at the end of her childhood is really sadness at the end of my childhood, the wondrous second childhood she brought me. It's coming to an end. No more pushing the swing, and throwing her on the bed, and telling endless stories. No more being a protector, a provider, an everything. No more being special without having to do anything. No more magic. No more mystery. No more of the great adventure.
Ever since Celeste was born, I've watched her, thinking that if I paid enough attention, I could bottle those years. I was wrong: I paid attention, but the time flowed through my fingers and spilled onto the floor. Now it's gone.
But I didn't understand. The gift I was given was not all those moments that have passed, nor all those memories I've lost. The gift was learning how to love.
I have a bottle of the finest wine. It was given to me 11 years ago. It has every flavor in the world in it -- rose and peach and blackberry and cherry and all the others under the running sun. It's Christmas time, and I would like to propose a toast: To you, my daughter, who gave me everything.
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
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