A Sunday. Just Chloe and her Dad. Her mom is in California doing stories about the upcoming presidential primary. I sometimes feel we aren’t creative enough about what we do together. That we lapse into routines. That there is always something better, more enjoyable, more fun. Then I think that anything we do together is fun. We bike around the neighborhood, me on foot and she on training wheels, suddenly fast enough to race far enough ahead that she can’t hear me when I call, but always stops at the corner. We ice skate, outdoors on the National Mall. We drive to Carderock or Great Falls, where Chloe starts her life list with a great blue heron, an Eastern bluebird, a chickadee, and a turkey vulture. We drive a half hour to a suburban swim complex bigger than a megachurch and whiz down side-by-side slides, let cascades of water from faux mountainsides envelop us. I watch her hoist herself out of the pool on her belly and force herself to walk and not run back up the stairs to the curved slide that deposits her, shrieking and then swimming, into my arms. “This is UN-be-LIEV-able!” she exclaims, and I feel as if my urban liberalism has deprived her of the simple joys of suburbia.
I’m feeling this now because I’m reading “Beautiful Boy,” David Sheff’s devastating memoir of his son’s drug addiction edited by my own editor, Eamon. The first fifty pages are a detailed portrait of the childhood of his son, Nic, the silly and the sublime. The effect is a wrenchingly powerful set-up for the incomprehensible horror to come: There was this. Now there is this. Sheff obviously was doing what we have failed to do for the last couple of years, that is, to record the minutiae of daily life, the moments that will be lost to memory so soon.
So this Sunday I suggest a visit to the Phillips Collection, where Chloe has been once before with her mom, and lunch in the neighborhood. It’s a wonderful late-January day, brilliantly sunny, cold enough for coats, not cold enough for discomfort. (Not that Chloe minds; she’s like her dad, she doesn’t complain about the cold.) Almost as an afterthought, I decide to bring the camera. She’s five and a half now, and we don’t take nearly as many pictures as we used to. We emerge from the impossibly long escalator at Dupont Circle—which blows Chloe away, being that it feels as if we’re emerging from Earth’s core; she counted the seconds on all three escalators so far, and this one checks in an 114, the high. We walk the two blocks to the Phillips, and in a moment of inspiration, I ask Chloe if she wants to take some pictures. “Really?”
She loves this idea. I hand over the simple digital camera, make her slip the strap over her wrist, turn on the screen so she can see what she’s shooting—she still can’t close one eye to peer into a kaleidoscope—and hand it over. She is giddy with joy and, I suspect, empowerment.
She photographs me sitting on a stoop. Then me in front of some banners outside the museum. Then a sculpture outside it. The inside of the Phillips can wait. I suggest walking around the corner to shoot the statue of Gandhi in a sheet holding a walking stick on Massachusetts Avenue. “My life is my message,’’ the inscription on the plaque reads. Chloe photographs me standing in front of the Mahatma. Two women light up when they see Chloe taking my picture and offer to photograph the two of us. I hoist a laughing Chloe onto my shoulders,
I make faces for the camera, hide behind parking meters. She photographs a gnarly bush, another statue, our shadows, an evergreen, our reflections in the museum’s front doors.
Finally, we go inside. An immediate trip to the museum store, a pleasant lunch—seafood bisque for me, a bagel and pasta and fruit salads for her—much art, including her favorites, the three Georgia O’Keeffe’s in the museum’s old wing. A long trip to the bathroom. Some boredom. A little more art. Finally a longer trip to the store, where we buy some small note pads, another book about Charlotte, the daughter of an American artist in Giverny in the 1890s, and some presents for a classmate’s birthday.
When we leave, Chloe asks immediately to take more pictures. There’s a bright yellow car across the street from the museum, so she tilts the camera (like her dad) and photographs it from a funny angle. She spots an embassy flag high atop a pole. “I want to take a picture of that flag.’’ We walk down the street toward the subway. It’s turned colder. A dogwood with a spotty bark. A white rock in a garden, which I hold in my hand. My sneakers. A closeup of another dogwood that looks like camouflage. A leftover Christmas wreath.
Then it’s homeward. The walk from the Metro takes us past Chloe’s school, and I suggest taking some pictures there. It might be my best idea yet. Chloe takes the mosaic atop the red doors, the school’s name above that. There’s a map of the United States painted on the playground. I suggest shooting that. As with every suggestion, it’s met with instant acceptance. I shoot her standing on Wyoming. She grabs the camera and runs over to the East Coast. “I’m going to take a picture of Wellfleet!” A white dog on the playground. I tilt the camera to photograph her tilting her head, her blond hair hanging in the air like willow branches. The swings. A jungle gym. My sneakers again.
Our shadows.
Home.
