I see you

So as I write this I'm in New Haven, about 266 miles from Cleo - and even further if you measure in terms of nostalgia, for I've spent the last five and half hours wandering through spaces and walking streets that I got to know long before I met L., or even imagined having a tiny little daughter. Fatherhood? Please: in 1997, I was trying to figure out Foucault; in 1999, I was the guy in the middle of the coffeehouse, pecking out paragraphs on Franciscan art.

But, then again, even if I've enjoyed this temporary jaunt down memory lane - and I have, I have: from the Dura frescoes in the Yale art gallery to the wonderful incidental conversation with a housemate of nearly two decades ago - it's also true that I don't feel very far at all from Cleo. After all, when I started chatting with the folks seated next to me at Bar's lunch counter, it was only a matter of time before I was talking about my 3-year-old. Their son goes to Skidmore, my child's a Yellowbird - but the point is that we were summoning our children, even in their absence. As I did, as well, when I shared a photo of her over dinner on Thursday, and when I described her to a curious colleague over a midtown breakfast on Friday. Wherever I happen to be, she keeps popping up - much as when, as in the photo above, we play hide-and-seek near Baltimore's old Mount Royal Station.

And just now I put my Willoughby's coffee down for a minute, and look out at the Elm City and the piles of snow that still evoke last week's storm - and I hear, on the radio, Katy Perry's 'Firework.' Well. I came to know that song in the Johns Hopkins gym, but it was also one of the first current pop songs that we shared with Cleo. And so the anthem pulls me back to her, even as I sit in a coffeehouse that I first occupied years ago, before Cleo was even a possibility.