Catching a Shadow

We walk through the ticker-tape of Autumn.  Maples and Oaks and Walnuts give us their best fanfare and their music is at our feet.  She takes two, perhaps three steps to my one and oddly, she is in the Lead.  She is always in the lead.  I simply struggle to keep up.  Keeping up is bringing the grey in my beard.  The sun shines with an unusual enthusiasm for this particular season and I believe, with all my heart, it has everything to do with Her.  Her and her new Red shoes.

"That you shadow, Daddy?"  She ask pointing to the elongated, carnival caricature of my blocking of the light.

"Yup.  That's mine, kiddo, and....there's(!) yours."  I point out her very own caricature.

She smiles.  And runs.  Trying to capture what cannot be caught.

Or, can it.  Can you catch your own shadow?  I know for certain that a shadow is good for boxing.  My shadow hardly ever lays it's black, wrapped hands on me.  Be it that I'm too fast or my shadow is a kind and gentle shadow.  I'm going with the former.  It important for an old man to have lofty ambition.

She laughs and squeals and runs and makes the music of the season with her new Red shoes and then, JUMPS(!) and lands with a mighty squeal and shouts, "My catched it!!"

She has ensnared what cannot be trapped.  She is pleased.  I am whole.

We walk under a giant Sumac tree and her counterpart vanishes.  And in a true-to-form Wild Things moment, the rage comes.  The tears and the confusion. 

"Where is it my shadow?!!" 

I try and explain, as I start with a two-step-most-ricky-tic pace that will get us back to the Light.  She is not hearing any of my science-y type mumbo-jumbo.  She wants her shadow back, and this is all.  Black and White.  No gray area allowed.  She waits and she moans and her new Red shoes carry her one, two, three, four steps and there.....

There it is. 

"My shadow!!"

She doesn't know that she can't catch her shadow.  She doesn't care.  It is enough only to know that it's there.  That is her simplicity.  That is what makes me whole. 

I lost, long ago, the urge to chase my shadow.  And now, even after watching her in the ticker-tape of Autumn, withe the music at our feet and my heart on my sleeve and the promise of her youth in my head, I still know I can't catch my shadow.  But, she doesn't know that.

And I'll go to blows with anyone who tells her otherwise.