What Daddies do in their Free Time

Last Saturday Lia and the girls abandoned me to spend the afternoon and then dine with the Sorenson family, whose father--an emergency medicine resident--had gone to Haiti to help survivors. I idled away the lonely hours as I idle away most lonely hours--reading in the library. In a more novel act, moreover, I cleaned the house.

When Lia and the girls returned there was general rejoicing at a jubilant reunion. When the furor subsided, Julia asked me, "Well, Daddy, have you been coloring?"

"Coloring?"

"Yeah. Do you like coloring? When we're gone?"

"Well, I do like coloring, but this time I was cleaning."

"Oh. I thought you might have been coloring."

One can't help but be touched by the ingenuous imagination that artlessly pictures her father, contentedly coloring through a quiet afternoon until his loved ones return in the evening. Or maybe she worried I had designs on her coloring books. Perhaps Eli and I were even in league.

(Truth be told, I would surely have been happier if I had spent the afternoon basking in the security, order, and aesthetic satisfaction of coloring inside pre-furnished lines, rather than scrubbing toilets (okay, just one toilet) and slogging in a state of profound bewilderment through mammoth monograph histories of the interwar international monetary system, books that inflict emotional, as they chronicle economic, Depression.)