Stranger than Fiction

I told my daughter to run away. Was that a bad thing? I was just brainstorming. As usual, I was driving her to gym.

"I hate you and I hate this family," she said from the passenger side of things.

So I offered the above suggestion. I was on the High Bridge, following some asshole with a dead deer strapped to his penis.

What we have here, I said to myself, is a dead deer.

This child I'm raising -- let's call her my daughter, for the sake of argument, which is what we do -- wants to be somewhere else. Someone else. She changes her name at school, studies her face in the mirror, calls my bluff. Am I bluffing? I didn't used to think so.

Meanwhile, I look in the mirror and Shirley Booth stares back at me. Not the "Hazel" Shirley Booth, who'd fix things in a jiffy then scramble up a pie. The "Come Back, Little Sheba" Shirley Booth, who schlumps around in her housecoat all day mooning over her long lost dog.

What we have here, I said to myself, is a lost dog.

* * *

If my dog ever goes missing, I'll be right behind her.

When we first brought this dog home, my daughter was afraid of her. That was seven years ago. At the time, my daughter still looked at me with wonder. Now I know what she was wondering about.

But my daughter was afraid of the new puppy and avoided the floor for much of First Grade. I envisioned a children's book, "The Girl Who Lived on the Back of the Couch." It had possibilities, I thought, but like so much else, ended up on the slush pile.

Since then my daughter has come down from the furniture, now we're all afraid of her.

* * *

It wasn't always this...bad. It took awhile. Eighth Grade clinched the deal.

When I was in Eighth Grade, I knew my parents were utter morons, but I kept this knowledge to myself. My father's blood pressure was the reason. You don't push an ornery Finn who studied classical piano and planned to be a Forest Ranger but instead ended up in some remote suburb of Palookaville raising three daughters and selling frontend loaders to rednecks. You just don't.

My daughter would push me off the High Bridge if she could. But not before pocketing the car keys.

What we have here is a slush pile.

* * *

I have these memories of my daughter, snuggling up next to me at bedtime, surrounded by a planet of stuffed animals, sloe eyes moving across the pages of a book as I read. Of course one book was never enough, and she kept a wobbly pile of extras on the rug beside the bed.

I don't recall when it first happened. But one night during this bedtime ritual, I started making up my own stories. I'd finish a book, take another from the pile, open it and begin reading:

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived on the back of a couch...

This evolved into a sort of game: how far into a story could I get before my daughter called my bluff. At which point she'd grin with delight, grab another book, ask me to do it again. And again. Eventually I'd insert something too outlandish, even for a children's story, into the narrative (...and then the little brown bunny hopped into a phone booth and turned into Elvis...), and that was our signal for calling it a night.

My daughter's mission in this ritual was to recognize which stories were "real" and which were "made up." These were her labels. And I let her have them. At the time, she was too young to understand that all stories are made up.

Now we both know differently. Now we both know that all stories are real.