Almost a Conversation

Today I drove across the Richmond Bridge and down 580 toward Oakland. It was late afternoon and I remembered a moment I shared with my daughter Sophia about 3 years ago in the car on that same freeway. I was driving and she was in the backseat. It was twilight, the time of day sometimes called “the golden hour.” We were singing along to the soundtrack of The Greatest Showman, to the song “A Million Dreams.” “I close my eyes and I can see the world that’s waiting up for me, that I call my own. Through the dark, through the door, through where no one’s been before, but it feels like home.”

There was something about that day, that hour, that golden light, that song, that shared experience of a dad and a daughter singing together. It felt precious. There was nowhere in the world I would rather be than in that car with that girl singing that song in that moment. Then I looked into the rearview mirror. She had stopped singing. Tears were falling down her cheeks. I turned down the music.

“Are you okay, baby?,” I asked.

“Yeah. I’m okay,” she said, looking out the window at the city and the cars and the bay, all bathed in a glistening glow. Then she said, “It’s all just so beautiful.”

I breathed in quickly, a silent gasp, and realized my own cheeks were wet. We weren’t even looking at each other, but we had shared a moment, together had caught a glimpse of the extraordinary beauty of the world, a fleeting perception of what is always true and seldom beheld.

“Every night I lie in bed, the brightest colors fill my head. A million dreams are keeping me awake. I think of what the world could be, a vision of the one I see…”