All seemed to go well with my eye injection. I had a lot of sitting to do between eye drops to numb the eye and waiting for photos to be taken of the eye. So I was sitting in a row of patients and the guy next to me had his daughter, probably around 12 read to him from People magazine about Whitney Houston's daughter, who overdosed. This was not pleasant information, especially for a kid, but she read the whole article aloud, loudly, struggling with some words, and I cringed at the manipulative sentimentality of the prose and the fact that a kid was reading it. Then it dawned on me that she was not the best of readers and maybe daddy was trying to encourage her to read anything for practice. He may also have seen it as an object lesson: don't do drugs. The whole row of us was kept informed of the latest gossip. The absurdity ended up amusing me. I was literally a captive audience.
You never know what you're going to learn out there in the world. If I hadn't been captive, I would have probably left in a huff and not thought beyond the inappropriateness of the article for a child. But gradually I realized their banter was tender and he was good with her. And maybe he felt she already had heard about all this scandal and he wanted to take away the terror of it. Who knows? But they were affectionate and even when he told her she was too loud, he said nothing negative about her and did not label her. It was a strange way to get father-daughter time, but there she was, in the middle of us old folks, being a kid and none of us discouraged it. Pretty sweet.
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