No Politics Today
(Mandatory Musical Accompaniment)
Walking Nina
By Barry Friedman
My daughter got married last week.
And I wasn’t there.
Nothing dramatic, no estrangement—just couldn’t be worked out. It was a last minute decision on their part and American and United Airlines decided, inexplicably, to make Tulsa, Oklahoma to Medford, Oregon the most expense roundtrip in the history of air travel. Nina’s boyfriend, Auri, good kid with dark, thick hair, from France is a winemaker. They met when Nina studied in Bordeaux years back. He’s now in Oregon tending to grapes and permanent residency applications.
They’re good together. It’s funny. When they argue, they do so in French, so it never really sounds like they’re angry. It’s like they’re in a movie. I almost expect to hear Maurice Chevalier in the background singing “Thank heaven for little girls.”
Auri humors me and eats bagels and pizza and black and white cookies, which is not why I like him, but it helps. He puts up with the seven words I know in French and says Sacribleu when I’m around because he knows it’s one of the seven. He does something else, too. I don’t know if I can explain it, but he knows, senses, the connection between Nina and me.
He lets her be my daughter when I’m around.
Ever since she was a little girl, ever since she used to sit in the backyard in shorts, beads, a wool hat, and sunglasses--she must have been two or three--I wanted to walk her down the aisle when she got married. I knew what I would wear, the jokes I’d whisper to her as we walked arm and arm, how she’d tell me to stop making her laugh, and then, after the ceremony, we would dance—I had the song picked out … Paul Simon’s “Father and Daughter”—you know, in case Nina let me choose—and then she’d throw her arms around my neck and tell me she loves me and call me Daddy and then we’d eat cake … ice cream cake—on the off chance she’d let me choose the cake.
Thing is, her mother and I divorced, her brother died, and all of a sudden those things in life I counted on, looked forward to, changed—or maybe I was afraid they would.
There was an immensely forgettable movie called LAST CHANCE HARVEY where the daughter actually chooses her stepfather over her father to walk her down the aisle. The moment has stayed with me, however implausible the notion of anyone picking James Brolin over Dustin Hoffman.
As it turns out, Nina got married in a park in Ashland, Oregon, in a dress she bought from Kohl’s—there was no aisle. I’m not even sure there was a place to sit.
And, anyway, at that moment, I was 2,000 miles away watching a rerun of Family Guy.
I wrote her a letter, sent her two rings from her grandmother, put them in a box, and signed it Daddypoo. She’s Ninapooooo.
It’s a joke between us.
Auri is not Auripoooo. Some things are just between fathers and daughters.
So now I have married daughter, a son-in-law. Someday there will be grandkids who will have thick hair and speak French and wonder why their grandfather keeps yelling Sacrebleu every four seconds.
About an hour before the wedding, Nina sent me a text to tell me how they were planning, though nothing was certain, another ceremony in Oklahoma.
And then this.
“I promise,” she wrote, “to let you walk me down the aisle someday."