DEAR JUSTICE

A letter to my daughter upon her college graduation

- mitchell s. jackson

IT'S UP THERE AS ONE OF MY ALL-TIME FAVORITES, IF NOT my all-time favorite photo: Almost-five-year-old you wore your pink bike helmet cocked on your head. Your little braids, accented with sky-blue bobbles, fell all around your face. You were seated on your pink-and-purple bike-yeah, we were heavy with the pink theme in the park around the corner from your mom's apartment, gripping your handlebars. You looked straight at me, the zealous photographer, with a smile of pure triumph. We took the picture during one of your bike-riding lessons. It ranks as one of my faves because it occurred in the midst of me chasing the impossibility of becoming a writer, a dream that risked 2,500 miles of physical distance-and no telling the size of an emotional chasm-between us, and because those lessons are my earliest memory of daddy-daughter time.

In a couple hours flat, you were pedaling long stretches sans my assistance, albeit with me warying behind you to intervene in a crash. It seemed like lickety-split you got faster and the berth got bigger. Like all of a sudden you were zoom, zoom, zooming as if nothing on this earth could harm you.

"Look, Daddy! Look at me!" you squealed.

It was a feat, nothing less, and one made more remarkable because of my own biking lessons. They happened when I was ten-yeah, I was old-and, due to a complicated rift between my parents, had just met my biological father, had just begun to spend time with my four paternal siblings, a spirited quartet that seemed to accept me from "This your brother." All of them, save the youngest, who was a baby, had bikes and, for a time, would wheel around the neighborhood while I envied from the sidelines.