An Open Letter to my Daughter

Dear Beckster,

Wow, can you dance! And I'm so glad I got to see you dancing this weekend in Galveston. Your hip was hopping, your jazz was jazzy, and your poms were shaking all over the place.

(MESSAGE TO BOYS -- You better leave my little girl's poms alone, or you'll have to deal with DADDY!)

Okay, so now that I've said I really enjoyed watching YOU, I have a confession: I felt a little uncomfortable sitting up in the stands, mostly surrounded by "dance moms," looking at little girls shaking their "groove things" like no tomorrow. I felt like every mother there was looking at me and wondering, "What's that old man doing up there in the stands with a camera?"

I think I would have been more comfortable watching you in a bass fishing contest. Or maybe a bowling tournament.

Wait a minute. I know what we can do. Next weekend, how about you and me head out for a father/daughter trip to the Bass Pro Shop? We'll buy some fishing lures and relax in the camo-covered recliners. And then we'll head out to the lake, catch some bass, get our hands all slimy when we clean and gut them, and fry them for supper.

Either that, or we'll head over to the Harley-Davidson shop and try on leather, sit on Hogs, and drink a Rootbeer or two. Then we'll get on my bike, cruise through town pretending we're on a Harley, then end up at some biker bar where some guy named Mongoose will make a pass at you and I'll break his nose with a left jab, and the other bikers will say, "Mongoose had it coming," and we'll earn the life-long respect of every biker in America until one day you end up marrying an accountant.

Or maybe we can go to the airport, hop in a Cessna 150, fly to Ardmore, Oklahoma, and eat barbecue at the Blue Pig. Then we'll hop back in the plane, but I'll have made a crucial error in our added weight (we ate too much), and we'll run out of fuel over Lake Tawakoni, crash in the woods (we survive, of course), but nobody saw us crash, and we're there all alone, having to survive off the land, but it's okay, we just went to the Bass Pro Shop and bought lures, and our biker friends will be out looking for us when we don't show up for Saturday's ride through the Ozarks.

So how about it? Ready for a new adventure?