Stolen time

The snow started to fall in earnest at about 7, but by that point we already knew that it would be a special day. Hopkins had announced that it would be closed, and MICA soon followed suit. Cleo's school would open at 10 - but, come on. This day had snow day written all over it.

Last night, as the snowstorm coasted over the low Appalachian mountains to our west, I read Russell Schriefer's recent essay on a day spent with his aging father. Business happened to take Schriefer to Florida, and he realized that he was only a few hours' drive from his dad, who was in poor health. So he drove to his dad's, and they spent a day together: a relatively ordinary day, in Schriefer's telling (a brief conversation about children and plans for a burial lot; some e-mailing; a dinner out), until suddenly his father's health took a serious turn for the worse. And soon enough, paramedics had crowded into his father's home, trying to restore his health - and then declaring him, all of sudden, dead. On one plane, then, the story is one of loss, of being robbed. But Schriefer cast it in a second sense: realizing that he hadn't even originally planned to spend the day with his father, he felt in retrospect that he had cheated Time, and stolen a day with his father.

That's how I feel tonight. I don't mean to be ominous - indeed, right now Cleo and L. are watching the first minutes of Pocahantas - but in a very basic sense it feels as though I stole a day with my daughter. At a time when I thought I would be teaching an essay by Alois Riegl, I was wrestling and cooking with her. At noon, when I likely would have been eating alone, I built a snowman with her, and took her sledding. And at 4, when I might have been about to pick her up from her nursery school, I was teaching her a song by Twisted Sister and then suspending her from the bed, as we pretended that she was a deep-sea diver searching for pearls.

Time passes. The snow outside is already largely melted. On Thursday, she'll be back in school, as usual (tomorrow is her day off, and we plan to spend it in part looking at the mummies currently at the Science Center). But for now, I feel as though I stole the better part of a day with my daughter.