Status: Fine

it only took an hour and a half, enough time for me to grab a latte and cinnamon roll at the coffee cart, read kurt cobain’s journal entries in last week’s newsweek and begin this week’s list of good things. i also made friends with a 2-year-old girl with pigtails tied with yellow pom-poms. i have no idea what she was saying, but she seemed to understand me fine.

when i pulled my car around to the front of the medical center, dad emerged from the sliding doors with the same old goofy grin that he always has. the nurse was pushing another patient in a wheelchair. dad was strolling beside them.

“that chair was supposed to be for me,” he told me as we drove away, “but i told her i didn’t need it. i feel fine!”

this is where i get it from, i thought, the cheery disposition, the glass-half-full optimism, the mile-a-minute chatterboxiness.

i asked how he felt and he said hungry. relieved, too, he added. the past few weeks have been filled with anxiety.

the test results come in two weeks, and i wonder if he is more afraid than he is willing to admit to me, because i am still his Little Girl. dads don’t cry or hurt or fear in front of us. they’re the ones who protect us when we feel that way.

but i think part of him really does feel fine and really does believe that everything will be okay and who am i to argue with that?

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