By: Timothy Kays
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
Almost 60 years ago, Malvina Reynolds penned a song about watching a daughter growing up. She captured the essence of the passage of time with eloquence, saying…
Where are you going, my little one, little one,
Where are you going, my baby, my own?
Turn around and you’re two,
Turn around and you’re four,
Turn around and you’re a young girl going out of my door.
Although it is the wish of every parent to be able to make time stand still, just to preserve their child in a specific age, time indeed waits for no one, and the only real preservative ever to be discovered is the making of memories. On the evening of April 1, The Stage in the Stryker School provided the setting where several of those life-long memories were created amongst a backdrop of music and laser lighting. This was the evening of the Stryker Daddy – Daughter Dance.
For a little girl, her first male role model, her first boyfriend, and her life-long knight in shining armor is found in her father. On this night, there were times when these beautifully dressed young ladies wanted to go out and bust a few moves with their peers. At some point though, they all turned to their dates for the evening to fill up their dance cards, and whether or not their fathers noticed it, you could see the admiration in the faces of these girls as they danced the night away with, in their opinions, the greatest man on earth…daddy. Memories that will last a lifetime were made…and more.
For the fathers who would love to freeze time, but cannot, the time invested with their daughters will pay dividends in precious memories for them as well. As the second verse of the Malvina Reynolds song noted, time with a daughter is painfully brief, and before a father realizes it, he finds himself asking…
Where are you going, my little one, little one,
Little dirndls and petticoats, where have you gone?
Turn around and you’re tiny,
Turn around and you’re grown,
Turn around and you’re a young wife with babes of your own.
That is a few years down the road for the daddy and daughter teams attending the dance this evening. Tonight though, for a brief moment under the laser lights upon The Stage in Stryker, time indeed stood still…and smiled.
Timothy Kays can be reached at
tim@thevillagereporter.com