Daughter’s Gifts
Part 1
Each time I pick up the one-pound chunk of coral that my daughter gave me from its place at the back corner of my writing desk, another grain of sand falls out. If I turn the coral in my hand, I usually dislodge more than one. As they tumble out and hit the open page of my notebook, the grains make tiny, papery sounds.
The coral fits my hand as though it was made for that very purpose, for the specific way my fingers soften and curl around it and for the way my ring finger kisses my thumb. Eggshell white, striated, hundreds of grooves and tiny elongated caverns stretch out across the surface in divine orderliness. An infinitesimal city of tunnels and columns and secret rooms. In the largest crevice a small mollusk burrowed its way in long ago, now entombed, its hinged bivalve mouth still open, fossilized in relaxed repose, its days of clenching long past. Singular grains of sand nestle in the recesses like tiny boulders held in cathedral niches. Architecture built from accumulations of calcium carbonate and the pure force of life. In each particle, unseen riches. In each grain of sand, a world.
Last year, when she was ten, my daughter dredged it up from the shallow shell and rock basin from the Miami shoreline where the surf lapped at our legs, where she spent her youngest years and where we were visiting to remember what it was like to be in places of beginning.
The coral feels right in my hands, the way her body did in the flat on Manchester Street where it all began, where she touched down into the world, where for a moment I held her wet body in my hands before easing her down onto the floor, onto the softness of the receiving blanket.
During that first year, she slept like a marsupial with her cheek smooshed against me, snug in her cotton sling, her tiny body nestled into my chest as we walked down the Manchester Street hill, past Precita Park, down Folsom and into the Mission District. With each exhale, her slightly open mouth gradually soaked the fabric of my shirt and dampened my skin with her warm breath and drool. The rhythms of my steps and our heartbeats and her close tether to the subtle undulations of life kept her asleep.
Her early gifts were small sticks, pebbles, flowers, found toys, bits of colored string, plastic debris—a bird collecting shiny materials, substance and decoration for the nest walls of her imagination. She would hand them to me to pocket, some for me to keep and some for me to keep for her for later. I learned over time that there was no later, and that keeping wasn’t yet part of her worldview—each small object forgotten as quickly as the next drew her attention. Young children are lookers, finders, gift-givers, giver-awayers—gifts. Keeping comes later.
Later, we stand a few feet apart from each other and search for shells at the water’s edge. The small waves break in somersaults of rock and shell and sand and seaweed. A spin cycle. A churn. She scoops her loot by the fistful and unloads it on me. I lift the flap of my cargo shorts pocket and drop everything in for safekeeping. She will add it all to her collection back home. I am her container.
She yelps and raises her head, holding a large specimen in her hand.
Daddy, look! She thrusts it at me—a big white rock, wet and gleaming in the sun.
Whoa! I was awed by its size. Is that coral??
You can have it if you want, she says casually in her pre-adolescent it-doesn’t-matter-either-way kind of way, as she drops the large treasure into my hand.
She turns her head down to continue collecting, and so do I, although I am occupied with wanting to apprehend the gift. I see her watching me, for half a second, out of the corner of her eye. And in that small moment, the world became much, much larger.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
As a fundraiser for the nonprofit Ultimate Peace, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be performing a new version of Good Pain: The Art of Being Hurt at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, OR on May 22 (Monday eve).
Get tickets here: https://event.etix.com/ticket/online/performanceSale.do?method=restoreToken&performance_id=2197578
You may already know Ultimate Peace for the work they've done for the past decade in the Middle East where they've run groundbreaking ultimate / leadership / community-building camps for Jewish and Palestinian youth in Israel and the West Bank. This July, they're launching their first US camp, and the model is the same—to address the social inequities of our world via the level-playing field of team sports and to develop a new generation of youth to become our next leaders of social change. I am honored to be there on staff where I’ll be coaching ultimate and teaching performance art.
If you can't make the fundraiser performance but would like to contribute to the mission of Ultimate Peace, you can do so here.
Finally, if you are interested in a men’s group focused on creative expression (or if you know someone who is), I have a few spots left in my 6-week Men's Writing Group which starts May 17th. https://www.michaelnamkung.com/mens-writing-group.
Beautiful, truly.