How Sweet It Is
October 16, 2025
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Children are the manifestation of their parents' love.
The height of East Coast elitism: Sauntering into New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last week with a sandwich of French pate and cornichon on a baguette.
Not so fast, Gonzalez. My daughter and I were stopped cold by museum security even as I nonchalantly flashed my member’s card.
“No food allowed in the museum,” the petite young lady announced loudly enough to cause heads to turn and give us the disdainful look New Yorkers reserve for visiting philistines.
“I wasn’t going to eat it in the museum,” daughter offered. “It’s for my lunch later.”
The security gal pulled herself up to her full 5’2” presence and shot back, “You have to take it outside.”
If you read my blog last week, you’ll remember that I was unable to decide when to get into Manhattan to take in the new “Divine Egypt” exhibit at the Met.
My solution was to invite my daughter, Julie, to go with me as my guest, thereby ensuring I would actually work up the energy to go at all.
It turned out to be a day unlike my typical solo forays from my Connecticut home to the city.
For starters, when I visit the Met Museum, I usually walk the forty-plus blocks from Grand Central to Eighty-second and Fifth. But with daughter in tow, I treated her to a cab. Ka-ching. $25.26.
Before boarding the cab, she wanted to drop into Pave, the gourmet sandwich shop on Forty-sixth. It was there that my vegetarian daughter acquired the pate sandwich. Ka-ching. $18.85
By way of explanation, you have to understand that this is the kid who knew how to dip lobster into melted butter at two years of age – while sitting in a high chair! (My wife was a teacher and took seriously the education of our two daughters, including how to eat a steamed lobster.)
Having been metaphorically but soundly smacked down by museum security, we found a place to sit on the Met’s grand but cold steps for Julie to dispatch the sandwich.
After, of course, buying a bottle of five-dollar sparkling water to wash down the sandwich. Ka-ching. $5.06.
After the museum we had to have lunch, of course: two salads and a glass of house wine at Nectar. Ka-ching. $104.38.
And so it went all day.
But. A Dad cannot put a price on his child’s eyes brightening with the thrill of seeing new things – still, after all the years since she was little enough to carry with one arm.
I have to this day the memory of my other daughter, Wendy, when I took her at four years of age to the Christmas show at Radio City, watching her walk alone into the cavernous entry portal to the women’s room. My eyes misted, knowing this was simply her first steps toward my losing her to independence.
A few years ago The Guardian
newspaper in the United Kingdom carried a story in which the writer, Declan Fitzsimons, bemoaned the fact that at fifty-two years old, he was unmarried.
He wondered what it would be like to have a daughter:
“Would she have my eyes? My smile? What is it like to see in a child little mannerisms, a way of doing things, moving, speaking, laughing, playing, that remind us of ourselves? Or of course, she may have the eyes of my loved one. And what a joy that would be, to see in our child’s face, our love; to bring into this world a beautiful child that was of us – a child that would grow into her own person but growing out of who we are.”
Declan’s story was titled “Childless At 52: How Sweet It Would Be To Be Called Dad.”
As the Dad of two daughters, I declare Declan correct. It is sweet.
In my girls, my late wife’s smile lives on. Their eyes are her exact shade of hazel. Their voices on the phone indistinguishable from hers.
I wonder if my Dad recognized in me the manifestation of his love for my mother, as my daughters manifest my love for their Mom.