Her Hands His Eyes — Entry 8
What a six-year-old knew without knowing. What a father saw without saying.
I was six years old.
The car moved through Korat in the early morning. Light cut through the dust the way it always did. People stood in doorways. I pressed my face to the window and waved. I was smiling. I remember that clearly. I was smiling and waving at people I did not yet know I was saying goodbye to forever.
I thought we were going on a plane.
That was enough for six.
What My Father Was Doing
He wasn’t watching the plane.
I know this now because of the slides. That morning at the airport, something shifted in the way he was holding his camera. Not the way he held it at birthdays or dinners or ordinary Saturdays. Something different. Heavier.
He was photographing what was ending.
The waving hands in the doorways. The morning light on the road out of Korat. The tarmac with our skirts blowing. My mother’s face turned toward Thailand one last time. He pressed the shutter, kept pressing it, and said nothing. He just kept his eyes open and recorded what six-year-old me could not yet carry.
That is what those slides are.
Proof. That we were there. That it was real. That a little girl in a starched skirt stood on a tarmac in Thailand and waved and smiled and had no idea what the air around her was holding.
“He just kept his eyes open and recorded what
six-year-old me could not yet carry.”
What My Body Knew
I have been writing about that morning this week and something keeps surfacing that I did not expect.
I didn’t know what I was leaving. But some part of me knew.
Children feel things before they have words for them. The air at that airport was different from the air in Korat. My mother’s hand was gripping mine differently. The adults around us were speaking faster and lower and with their eyes doing something I could not name. A six year old’s body registers all of it. It just doesn’t know yet what to call it.
Now I do.
Sitting at this laptop in Florida, finding words for a morning fifty years ago, I understand what my body was marking without telling me. The weight of it. The finality of it. All that waving.
She deserved words then.
I am giving them to her now.
What He Kept for Me
My father carried those slides through every house we ever lived in. He never said open the box. He never said, here is what I saved for you. He just kept them. Moved them from state to state, closet to closet, for twenty-four years without once saying a word.
That is love that waits.
Quiet. Patient. Completely certain that the right moment would come.
It did. On a Saturday morning in Florida, with the light coming in too bright and no patience for delay.
Some of what he kept, I am still not ready to say out loud.
That airport morning is in the book.
But this is where it starts.
A little girl waving goodbye to a country she didn’t know she was leaving.
Her father was behind her, watching, keeping his eyes open so she wouldn’t have to.
“That is love that waits.”
Next week: the chapter I almost didn’t write. The one that took me the longest to start.
