The Happiest Man in the World

Tonight I drove home feeling sorry for everybody in the world who isn't me.

South on Clairmont Road, right on North Decatur, past Emory University, left onto Lullwater, through Little Five Points and Inman Park before going toward downtown, south onto I-75 toward Clayton County. I started home shortly before 9:00.

Decatur is beautiful after dark. Those cozy old-Atlanta neighborhoods are so pretty in the daytime; but after dark, when you can't see the outsides so well, and all you can see is hints of the insides, somehow they are more intimate, as if they all were asking me in, a little.

I love Little Five Points all the time. It's like most college communities: you can see all kinds of people, all the time.

But at night, people walking the streets, crowded parking lots, restaurants, theaters, clubs full, people enjoying each other, laughing, forgetting their problems, embracing good times and good company. The magic must be a hundred-fold

I felt so happy it seemed impossible that it wasn't spilling out all over everyone I passed. I could have hugged everyone I saw.

Finally came the time to turn off Euclid Avenue onto Edgewood. There, ahead of me, the majestic spectacle of the jeweled towers of Atlanta, something that never ceases to amaze me, especially at night; but this time somehow it seemed as if I were leaving a magic kingdom for something still lovely, but somehow ordinary, mundane.

What made this night more magical than any other?

I had just spent about five hours with my daughter, that's what!

I picked her up at school at about 4:00, took her to the grocery store, back to her dorm; then dinner, where we sat and talked and talked and talked. When I finally took her home, neither of us wanted to go. We took a walk around her dorm area, just procrastinating, putting off the time I had to drive home.

My Emily has a mind full of magic and wonder. Talking with her can be like visiting a wonderful country; and tonight I had the best visit I had had in a long time.

You can have the most enjoyable conversations with her! She is almost violently opinionated! Keenly intelligent, delightfully articulate, so learned while still so young, yet she has a child's sense of wonder.

Her favorite thing in life is a good story. I'm the same way. But she composes worlds in her mind and tries to write them down to share with the world. When she starts being published, you can find out what I have known for the past several years--what a marvelous, marvelous place Emily's mind is!

So I drove home feeling like the happiest, most blessed man in the history of the world. No man ever deserved such a daughter! And I'm the only one who gets to be her daddy!

When she was a little girl, we would tell her how sorry we felt for other parents, because they didn't have the most wonderful daughter in history. She would protest, "But they think their children are wonderful too!" We would say, "That's what's so sad! They're all WRONG!"

She'll be 21 next month, and I'm still fully convinced my daughter is the most wonderful daughter ever born to the human race.

Prejudiced? Sure, I am!

But that doesn't mean I'm wrong!