I have somehow become the designated bath person for Annabelle. At around 8, sometime after dinner, Annabelle starts to wail plaintively, "Bath, bath!!!" I pretend I don't hear her and hope that my wife would somehow gamely tackle the task. Then Annabelle comes to me, grasps my hand tightly in hers, and pulls. And I go, because I do not have the heart to disengage her tiny hand from mine. In fact, I cannot. It seems altogether all too intimate a link to sever, more so because she initiated it. For the moment, I am a big ox, being pulled by a small peasant girl. To the field or slaughter, it does not matter.
At the same time I live in muted dread of the time, either due to some mischief and misdeeds or by mere passage of time and culmination of familiarity, I can drop her hand without a thought. Be callous and unthinking of her. Will it happen? I see her universe growing each day and by extension, my part becoming smaller. Before I can drop her hand, perhaps she will stop coming to me, face scrunched in mock distress, wailing, "Bath, bath!!!"
I understand on the intellectual level the profitlessness of this train of thought. I think back on my relationship with my parents and the one between them and their parents. Regrets and vague yearnings, contrasting with sharpness of conflicts, and raw, bleeding edges of wounds.
I will be better. I will be. Yet the pledge has the practiced ring of promise spoken often before and never quite fulfilled. But I will be better.
