Perspective: Memories of love and happiness

Our child does not remember any of the happiness that surrounded her arrival in our house. And yet, it is this happiness for which she yearns. It is the security of two doting parents, adoringly attentive, adoringly present, that is the quality of comfort she misses. She has become angry at us over the years because no matter what she has tried, this quality of being completely loved by both of us, together, has remained beyond her reach. I feel sad for her. I see the little girl running to the door at the sound of her father's car, a huge brown and black Toronado that was always, because of its incongruous stylishness, comical for a civil rights lawyer. I see her father fly out from around the car, running to meet her wet and openhearted kisses, her widespread, chubby arms. I see him down on one knee, lifting her against his chest, his wide face transparent with love. I see myself standing, smiling, in the doorway. In his eagerness to embrace and kiss me as well, his thin lips are already stuck out. He is the only white person in the neighborhood at this hour of the day, but even if I think of this it is with amusement. The three of us collide in the doorway, laughing to think we have outwitted racism and racist laws one more time and lived to love another day.

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