A Perfect Day

There was a delightful song that was popular once upon a time -- a hymn, if I remember aright -- called "A Perfect Day." Eons ago, a young Sterling Holloway (he who later became the iconic voice for Disney's Winnie the Pooh) sang it for Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Remember the Night. That movie was typical of its age (1940) -- optimistic and innocent, in spite of the fact that the Great Depression was still in force and a world war was raging. The song, and others like it, captured the spirit of an era that has passed into vague cultural memory, an era that was fundamentally optimistic, even idealistic, about human potential. It was a time when people could sing about perfect days with a straight face because, by and large, they still believed in them.

In my experience, a truly perfect day is a rare event. The last one I can recall was years ago on the Texas Gulf Coast, when I spent a glorious day wandering lonely beaches observing fabulous birds, and ended with a sumptuous seafood dinner in a wharfside restaurant in Galveston. It was one of those rare occasions when the cares of the world sloughed away like a shed skin, and for a few glorious, solitary hours, life was completely good.

The years since then have been less kind, but today was the nearest thing to a perfect day that I've seen in a long, long time. Today is my daughter's fourth birthday, and it coincided with a rarely beautiful late winter day masquerading as spring. The sun came out and the temperature soared to sixty degrees. Honeybees and small beetles were flying around for the first time in months, and the birds were active.

There were a few glitches, to be sure. After finishing my classes, I headed for the car, only to discover that my car key had disappeared. It wasn't in the car, in my office, in my classrooms, in the locker room where I had changed before swimming my laps, or anywhere in my personal effects. Nor was I sure I could find a replacement. I had just finished talking to my father, who had dug up a spare key and was preparing to drive the 18 miles to campus to give it to me, when -- mirabile dictu! -- someone suggested I check a lost and found that I didn't know existed. Just minutes before, someone had found my key lying on the ground and turned it in.

I rushed home, wrapped my daughter' presents, and drove the harrowing, still-icy lane up to my parents' farm, where Elaine was playing happily with her grandparents. The sun was shining fiercely and the surrounding woods rang with exuberant woodpeckers drumming and the distant caroling of a Carolina wren who managed to survive last month's cold snap. I had little difficulty persuading Elaine to come outside to play, and she was soon wading through rivulets in her Hello Kitty rubber boots, getting herself gloriously wet and muddy. I showed her how to make a cattail seed head explode, and she showed me how to jump off a bank of melting snow plowed up along the edge of the barnyard. Not until the sun sank below the ridgeline did we go back indoors.

There followed dinner, cake, and presents, leaving Elaine exhausted with joy and sensory overload. At length we rounded up all of Elaine's new possessions, loaded them and a very sleepy but still wound-up little girl into the car, said goodbye to "Pocky and Nanna," and drove home. Elaine was sleeping soundly when we got there, and barely stirred when I carried her upstairs and put her to bed.

The house is strewn with three days' worth of playthings, but I decided to procrastinate cleaning until tomorrow, when I have no classes to teach. I pulled out my banjo for the first time in several days and practiced for an hour and a half.

Yet it was not quite a perfect day. Sometime around 11 PM, Elaine woke up crying from some bad dream and complaining of aches (she's getting over a cold of some kind). I suspect that she was a bit upset that her mother, who is out in the Midwest for her mother's wedding this coming weekend, failed to telephone as she had promised. She did call later that evening, and sheepishly admitted she'd forgotten to call. She'll call tomorrow, she assured me.

In any event, Elaine required considerable consolation. I unfurled her new Dora the Explorer sleeping bag and draped it over her, which seemed to mollify her. Finally, she fell asleep again, and my house is at peace for a brief, precious interval. Tomorrow, the cares of the world will loom large once again -- Will my wife return next week, as she promised, so that our divorce can be finalized the following week? Will the economy continue its death spiral, beset as it is by so many wrong-headed attempts by our government to "fix" problems that the government created in the first place? Will I have time to pay the bills, clean the house, and take care of other necesaries while giving Elaine the attention she needs?

But for now, I can luxuriate in the lingering warmth of a near-perfect day. Someday, perhaps, I will see its like again.