I’ve been writing about my kid all along.

I wrote in 2014:

When my daughter Scout was three, we saw a dead fish on the shore of Green Bay. “He’s going to miss us,” she said.

“Is it okay not to believe in skeletons?” she once asked me. (Also: “Could a coconut kill you?” “Why don’t motorcycles have seat belts?” And, after a muscle-bound, shirtless African-American jogger ran past us on the sidewalk, “Dad, do white people ever have muscles?”)

In kindergarten, Scout was asked to write a sentence about a feeling. “I am mad that I have lice.” (We’d been trying to keep that on the DL.)

Riding past a Chicago cemetery, she saw that some grave markers were taller than others. “Dad, were those people bigger than everybody else?”

“Dad—did you know that Helen Keller was a trickster?”

“Dad! There was this guy who was totally poor, lonely and drunk. He was peeing between our trash cans!”

At eight, urging her cousin, two, up the stairs: “Come on, Parker! While we’re young!”

She was always saying cute stuff like that.

Now she’s 11, and her experience includes events such as Lollapalooza. And she observes that she knows when she needs a shower when her body smells “kind of like pot smoke.”

I wrote in 2017:

She’s 15 now. One day this summer she took the bus up north to visit a friend who lives in the Chicago suburb Skokie.

“How was it?” I asked her brightly.

“A long walk for a short beer,” she grumbled as she disappeared into her room.

And that took me back the time when she was about eight, and I was telling her how to dispose of her tray at a local cafeteria. “Dad, this isn’t my first rodeo,” she said. “Wait. What is a rodeo?”

I’m writing today:

Scout turned 21 today. Now, when she’s funny it’s on purpose. And she does know what a rodeo is: In her short life she’s seen life and death, watched Barack Obama be elected president when she was in preschool and then Donald Trump when she was in middle school. Been through a kid-crushing pandemic, navigated the height of teenage social media madness and #cancelculture. And, unlike most people at her or any age, has put her body, her mind and her soul on the line in an arena where everyone else is doing the same.

The first thing that ever happened to her was nurses plunging needles into her heels, on a table in the delivery room. Her mother had had a caesarean, so I was in charge—the only person in the world to protect her. I told the nurses to knock it off, that this was no way to introduce a person into the world. They insisted the jabs were necessary, to protect her from the world’s germs. It wasn’t long before I came to agree with them. My instinct wasn’t to protect her, it was to put her in situations that might help to make her tough, for a tough world. Luckily, she was tough to begin with.

She sat on my lap, watching Cassius Clay beat Sonny Listen on YouTube. On our earliest adventures, long trips to downtown Chicago and back, we used to count the crashes, she on training wheels, me running alongside—and rate their violence. A tragically lost home video from a road trip she and I took to Glacier National Park in Montana when she was 10, showed me urging her to do things she found dangerous or worried were illegal: putting coins on lonely railroad tracks, inching up to cows, tripping along a cliff in the Badlands. We once ran a half marathon in Des Moines, Iowa, and she scored the winning goal in a soccer game in Rockford, Illinois that same afternoon. (When I asked her if she needed help figuring out how to draw an epsom-salt bath after, she said, “Dad, this isn’t a group project.”) Another time, we were lost together in a primeval forest in Alabama at night—on motorcycles.

At the end of every sortie we’ve ever been on since she’s been little, I’ve said, “Well Scout,” and she’s responded (occasionally ironically, on our return from the local burrito shack), “We cheated death again.”

As much nostalgia as I clearly feel for my daughter’s childhood—on the way back from the Montana trip, I looked over at her, her little hand riding out the window on the wind with Joni Mitchel playing, and ached—you’ll never hear me saying bullshit like, “You’ll always be Daddy’s little girl.” Nor do I position myself as paternal gatekeeper to boyfriends. You like my kid? Lad, we have a lot in common. I don’t like to say that I’m “proud” of her, because that sounds like I’m taking credit, when she was who she is, all along. Really, all she actually inherited from me are the yams. (And my wife’s family even disputes that.)

I admire her, is much more like it.

But one thing’s still the same as it ever was:

When Scout was a baby, I remember telling people with astonishment that every single morning when I walked into her bedroom and found her smiling in her crib, it felt exactly like getting a Christmas gift—and brand-new and different Christmas gift, every single time.

And I feel the very same way every time my phone lights up with this.

Scout, the best present I can give you today, and every day, is a dad who loves you. Hard.

Happy 21st, Babe. I’ll see you very soon.

If you want to get in touch with your sense of gratitude in the run-up to Thanksgiving, find people with troubles worse than your own. A medical office is a good place to start. For instance, a dozen years ago, I wrote this little Nelson Algren short-short, about a trip to the dentist.

On rainy days, the dentist says, everybody turns up at the dentist.

My crown took four hours because of people turning up at the dentist.

Like Roman and his wife. Roman has a rotten tooth that needs to be rebuilt, or pulled.

Rebuilt is $2,500, pulled is $340, says the dentist.

Roman’s wife says, “If our circumstances were different—”

“Of course, I understand,” the dentist says, adding, “How long have you two been married?”

“Forty-five years,” she says, before telling Roman in Polish that he’s going to have his tooth pulled.

He is skeptical, in Polish. She is insistent, in English. “You have to trust me to do what is best for you, Roman!”

Yes, it is bad not to have enough. When I pay a tax bill, I try to remember to say a little prayer of thanks, that I am able. The bigger the bill, the bigger the prayer.

It is also bad to have too much—maybe, even worse. I’ve known the too-rich since I was pretty young. They’re never quite sure why people are being nice to them. Also: They don’t have to work, so they don’t get to work. Worst of all—at some point, they cease to understand their fellow human being.

This week, I accompanied my wife to a doctor’s appointment, and my waiting-room reading was interrupted by a high-thread-count older woman, a Hispanic assistant at her side, sniping indignantly to the scheduler who told her it would be another three weeks until she could get in for a nerve treatment.

Now, I am sympathetic to people with nerve pain—by my wife and my oldest sister have chronic versions, and another three weeks is a long time. (As is another three hours.) Still, I thought this woman was a little over the top when she told the scheduler she hoped she and all the other schedulers at Northwestern Memorial Hospital would “rot in hell.” And then I thought she was downright amusing, when she told the beleaguered scheduler that she hoped Northwestern wouldn’t have the temerity to ask her for “another contribution” this year, because they wouldn’t get it. And then I saw the assistant finding ways to maneuver herself behind her boss’s back in order to, with her hands, make the heart sign to the scheduler.

(Proof that I am not making this shit up: this recording is a little muddled, but you can make out the scheduler, and the assistant, and the woman, who in her rich woman’s accent, is asking the scheduler to “please call Dr. [Inaudlble] and tell him that I’ll be down now, instead of twelve, and can he see me.”)

When the rich woman and her assistant left, I turned to the scheduler and said, “That was excellent. I bet it’s not every day that you are told to ‘rot in hell.'” I was pleased to see her tension turn to laughter as she said, “I don’t want to rot in hell. Not me!” For good measure, she laughed again on her way back into her cubicle, “Never a dull moment!”

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to have enough to get a rotten tooth rebuilt … and not so much that I can’t laugh, along with a regular person, at the miserable fucking rich.