daddy's little girl

once, when i was seven, my family and i were in an outdoor shopping mall. it was a saturday and very crowded. i was walking behind my father, a roundish bald man (at the time with a very bad comb-over which we all talked him out of a few years later), while looking in all the windows of the small shops we passed. i was doing that seven year old thing ... thinking of all the things i could buy with the four dollars and eighty cents i had in my small, pink, leather purse while trying to hop between cement sidewalk tiles. i was holding my father's hand, and he was walking briskly in front of me. my arm was outstretched to lengthen my glimpses over my shoulder at the storefronts. our fingers drifted apart .. a couple of inches, i thought. i went to grab his hand, and he was just a foot in front of me. i smiled and looked up at my dad, the roundish bald man with a light green polo shirt ...

but it wasn't my dad.

i was holding the hand of a complete stranger.

tears welled up in my eyes, i stopped cold in the middle of the sidewalk with people rushing by me ... all of them taller, all of them bigger... still holding the index finger of the man who didn't belong to me ... and i couldn't see my dad anywhere. the man stared down at me, perplexed ... i don't think he knew what to do. i stepped back, staring hard back at him.

a few feet ahead of me and the man who was not my father, my dad turned around and smiled. he leaned forward and binked my nose. he crouched down on one knee and said, "you've got to hold on tighter. we can't lose you now."