Our daughter had been talking about her end-of-year concert for almost a month. From time to time, she’d remind us about the concert and ask us again if we were going.
“You guys are coming to my concert, aren’t you?”
“Wait, what?” I said, fucking with her a little bit. “What concert?”
“Daddy! You know the one!”
“I thought you didn’t want us there!”
“You’re kidding!” she said. “I know that face. I know you’re joking when you make that face.”
I leaned hard into my gap-toothed smile, “But this is the only face I have.”
“Are you coming to my concert or not?”
“Well,” I said. “It’s hard to say, isn’t it? I might need to stay home and clip my fingernails.”
“OMG STOPPITT!!!”
When she saw Jaclyn and me at her school, she was standing in line with her class, waiting to file into the gymnasium. And she was jumping and waving at us, just beaming, fit to bursting. She grabbed a friend standing next to her and said something in her ear, pointing at us. Her friend looked at us and waved and our daughter jumped in place, clapping wildly.
Casting a pall over this joyous scene was this nagging detail in the back of everyone’s mind: the mass shooting last week, in Uvalde, TX. Of the many reports from the incident, one particularly grizzly detail has stuck with me and won’t leave me alone. Many of the children—shot in their 4th grade classroom—their small bodies had been so blown-up and mangled by this AR-15 rifle, they were only identifiable with a DNA test.
So it was particularly overwhelming to behold this rag-tag group of sticky-fingered kids getting ready to perform songs they’d been rehearsing for months, to sing their tiny hearts out.
At first, our daughter didn’t see where we’d taken our seats. Her class filed in and she was only ten feet away when she walked past us, but her eyes were frantically scanning the crowd beyond us. She almost tripped walking up the bleachers because she wasn’t looking where she was stepping. She scanned the crowd wide-eyed and nervous until finally, she locked onto us. Even from across the gym I could hear her little yelp.
There she was—that kid! Just effervescent.
The kindergarteners kind-of sang their way through several songs with accompanying hand movements. I don’t understand Spanish very well, but I got the gist. There was a song about five mischievous monkeys being eaten by an alligator. And a song about various aquatic animals swimming through the water, starting with a guppy, which was eaten by a bigger fish, which was eaten by an even larger fish and so on, up the food chain until the whole lot was swallowed by an enormous whale—una ballena.
“GULP!”
Usually, I find the sound of children singing to be extraordinarily creepy. Just the right mix of cute and deadly to curdle my blood. But inside me, my guts were tying up in knots—I don’t mind saying the concert was fucking emotional.
Normally, I would have brought a camera. I’d have taken several shots or videos of the kids singing. But today, I left the camera at home. I just wanted to be in the moment. Because these moments won’t (and cannot possibly) last.
It won't be long until our daughter’s excitement to see us at her school will turn to embarrassment, and not long after that, mortification.
At least for now, I wanted to watch and listen and soak up as much as possible. Even though I know I cannot, I am desperate to hold onto this moment, to gulp it down, all of it, like a gigantic blue whale and hold it inside of me forever.