Happiness From the Sun Roof

November 27 2023 Day 27

One of the best photos ever taken of my daughter took place last week during a ride through a bedecked fair ground, surrounded by a million plastic lights.

We’re in that season now, the place where fair grounds and race tracks and enormous parking lots are awash in an extravaganza of holiday lights. The twinkling mirth is thick like caramel, or maybe molasses. Or syrup. I don’t know, something sweet and slow and expensive.

I may have lost control of that analogy.

The point is that my family and my sister’s family all piled into a SUV and we drove down to Hamburg Fair Grounds in Western New York to slowly wind our way through the rows and rows of holiday lights. Snoopy. Grinch. Twelve days of Christmas. Elves. Reindeer. (Rudolph was there, like, ten times.) And so, so many sparkling Santas doing everything from playing basketball to dancing to giving out gifts.

The excitement my daughter feels in just being in a back seat between her two older cousins alone would make this excursion worth it, but when my brother-in-law lowers the sun roof and says, “Come up here, Uma, stick your head out,” her enthusiasm cranks to eleven.

She climbs up past me and her mom and stands on the arm rest between my brother-in-law and sister and pops her head out into the cool, lit up sky. I lean forward and wrap my arms around her waist to make sure she’s secure.

And as that view comes into her sight, as those lights and the notion of the holiday and being with the people she loves the most all comes sweeping over her, she lifts her face to the sky, and my sister takes this picture.

It’s dark. The pic is a bit blurry and blown out. But it doesn’t matter.

I want good things for my baby. I want her to feel happiness. I want her to know that her parents and her aunts and uncles and her cousins love her. I want her to feel loved. Even amid the corny lights, even in the reflection of maids a’milking and a baby Yoda in a Santa hat, I want her to be able to feel joy in being secure - in being a little girl with her head out of a window, the cool fall air whipping through her hair, knowing I won’t let her fall, knowing everyone in that car wants her to smile.

And she does. She smiles and laughs and points. And it’s just all worth it. All of it.