The Lion King

On fathers, sons, daughters, and the spirits that walk beside us

Many years ago, a friend of mine who happened to be an Episcopalian minister introduced me to a word I had never heard before. The word was confluence. He brought up the word in a speech he was giving in reference to the fact that many things in life that start separately, eventually come together into a confluence. Those things can be people, situations, energies or even emotions. At the point of confluence, a change occurs in the qualities of the two things or the multiple things that come together to become one. I couldn’t help but think about confluence as I sat in my daughter Emma‘s grade school auditorium last weekend watching The Lion King, Jr.

There is a particular kind of emotion that arrives not as a single feeling, but as a convergence of many feelings at once, the same way that rivers meet, each one carrying its own history, its own temperature, its own particular color, and the place where they join becoming something more magnified than any one of them alone.

Confluence is what was happening inside me as I sat in that auditorium, watching a group of children pour their hearts into a production of The Lion King Junior. In order to tell you why though, I have to take you back about fifteen years, to a date and time when I first learned what The Lion King actually was all about.

At that point Christiana and I were still learning how to travel together, still in that early season of a relationship where every trip is also a small experiment in discovering who the other person actually is when they are away from the familiarity of home. More than anything in the world, Christiana wanted to take me to New York for her birthday. I can’t actually remember if it was her her twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, I would have to look at the pictures to say for certain. One of the things she definitely wanted to do for certain on that trip was take me to see my first ever Broadway show.

I had been to New York many times as a child. Every summer my family would make the pilgrimage from Metro Detroit to Westchester County to spend time with my father’s parents in Pelham, and one day each summer my dad would take me into the city just the two of us. We would go to the world‘s greatest toy story, FAO Schwarz, so I could pick out a new toy, and then we would go to Schrafft’s for ice cream sodas at the dairy counter. One year we even had lunch at the Waldorf Astoria, which felt to a young boy like something that only happened in movies. Those days in the city with my father are among the clearest memories I carry from a childhood where clear memories are rarer than I would like them to be, but in all those trips to New York, I had never once been to a Broadway show.

The show Christiana chose for my introduction? You guessed it, The Lion King.

Now here’s a little Jim factoid that will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about my relationship with pop culture in the 1990s and early 2000s: I had not only never seen The Lion King, I didn’t even know what it was about.

I hadn’t watched the movie and I didn’t even know it was performed on the stage. I had never even seen a clip or a trailer or anything at all. I arrived at that theater on our trip to New York as a man in his late forties with no idea whatsoever what the story was about, which meant that everything that was about to happen to me was going to happen to me fresh, without any of the protective cushioning of prior familiarity.

We were in the third row.

I won’t even try to pretend that I maintained any level of composure. From almost the moment the lights went down and the opening notes of Circle of Life filled that theater, something in me cracked open and stayed open for the duration of the performance. The themes landed in me that special way that themes land when you have no defenses prepared against them. Obviously the theme of the father and a son had a huge impact on me in general, but having just walked the streets of New York that I used to walk with my dad as a little boy for the first time in decades? I was gutted in the best possible way.

Then of course there is the death of the father and the son who carries the father’s spirit forward even when he cannot feel it, even when he believes himself to be alone, and even when everything around him seems to argue against the possibility that love persists beyond the body. If you’ve read even one piece of my writing prior to this one, you absolutely know how deeply that lands with me.

I wept through most of performance. Fortunately for me, Christiana already had a pretty good idea of how openly I have always worn my emotions and she had predicted long before we even got to the theater that I would be bawling my eyes out. What I didn’t know sitting in that theater 15 years ago, though, was that I was watching a story I would one day be living from the other side of it.

Fast forward those same fifteen years to a Saturday morning in Chicago at my daughter’s elementary school auditorium. As the lights go down, a group of children who have been rehearsing for months take their places on a stage decorated in part with artwork designed and built by my daughter Emma, who is sitting beside me in the audience because she was part of the set design team rather than part of the cast. The opening notes begin and the circle starts all over again, bringing full circle to the circle of life for me, in a way that I could’ve never dreamed when I was shopping at FAO Schwartz, sitting at that soda counter or having lunch at the Waldorf Astoria with my own dad.

Emma has always had a particular relationship with creation. She approaches making things, whether it is a Magnatile temple for her Buddha figurines or a painted backdrop for a school musical, with a seriousness and a care that I recognize in myself and that moves me in a way that is difficult to put into words. Watching her point out the pieces she made, watching her lean forward when the cast reached a part of the stage she had helped build, watching the pride move across her face as her classmates gave everything they had up there, was its own complete emotional experience, separate from and layered beneath everything else that was happening inside me.

Because underneath all of it, the story of The Lion King was doing what it always does.

I thought about my father. I think about my father at all references to The Lion King in the way some people think about a person when they hear a particular song or smell a particular smell - automatically and completely, without being able to help it.

My father has been gone for almost thirty years now and he never had a chance to meet Emma while he was in a body. He never sat in an auditorium and watched his own granddaughter point to something she made with her hands and feel that particular species of pride that only a grandparent can feel for a grandchild. That absence lives inside me, quietly most of the time, but The Lion King is never quiet, so last Saturday that absence roared in a way it only roars once in a while anymore.

A night or two after the performance, Emma and I were standing at the bathroom sink doing the nightly teeth brushing ritual with her on her step stool and me beside her, both of us looking at each other in the mirror the way we do during those unhurried end of day minutes that I have come to treasure more than almost anything else in my life. Emma asked me a question in the casual way that eight year olds ask questions that contain entire lifetimes inside them.

Daddy, how old will you be when I’m thirty?

I stood there for a moment and did the math that I already knew the answer to and that I have already made a certain peace with, most of the time. After a brief pause, I told her that I would probably be around the age that her grandma Charlene is now, and that I take very good care of myself and I plan on being around for a long time. I didn’t want to frighten Emma, but I also didn’t want to lie to her, because Emma has always had a keen sense for the truth, and I have always tried to give it to her in an appropriate way.

She leaned her body against mine the way she does sometimes, still brushing her teeth, and she said:

That’s good, daddy. Because I don’t know what I’d ever do without you.

I have been a father for eight years now and I have had thousands of moments with this child that I would not trade for anything in the world, and still, that one hit my heart in a way as big as any of the moments I’ve ever had with Emma because of everything that moment contained. Emma is a feeling child, a child who understands love in all its dimensions in a way that continues to teach me things about my own relationship with love.

That single instant standing in front of the mirror with unicorn sparkle toothpaste foaming out her mouth as she talked, was a confluence of her trust, her need, and the particular kind of vulnerability that comes from a child who loves without reservation and says so out loud.

In the story of The Lion King, young Simba loses his father and spends years believing that not only is he alone, but also that he is responsible for his father’s death. The great reminder of The Lion King, the one that broke me into pieces in the third row of a Broadway theater fifteen years ago and breaks me still, is that fathers never leave. They live in the stars and the wind in the face of every child that has ever looked at their own reflection in the water to see themselves in every generation that stood before them… if they’re willing to see.

I don’t know exactly when I will stop being here in a body for Emma, but what I do know is that whatever I am able to give her while I am here, the dancing in the living room, the cake pops in the rental car, the Buddha slideshows, the teeth brushing conversations, the watching her point to the artificial grass she made on a stage full of children giving everything they had, all of it is going into her. All of these things are becoming a part of who she is and it will travel forward with her into the life she has not yet lived.

That is the circle of life.

Last night while I was shopping at the Jewel with Emma, a woman walked up to me and randomly said, “I have to tell you, she’s gonna remember this forever.”

At first, the woman caught me off guard because I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she pointed at Emma in the shopping cart with her headphones on playing on her iPad, seemingly paying attention to nothing, and told me that the only thing she can remember about her own father is that he used to take her grocery shopping with him. It was the most beautiful tender moment between two strangers that you could ever possibly imagine.

Just like the woman in the grocery store carries her father with her through the aisles of a Jewel grocery store, my father is in me, I am in Emma, and someday, in ways neither of us can predict or fully imagine, Emma will carry something of all of us forward into whatever comes next.

Hakuna Matata means no worries, but it also means pay attention, because the story is happening right now. The story is in the auditorium, at the bathroom sink, in the third row of a Broadway theater where a man in his late forties sat weeping into his girlfriend’s shoulder and had very little idea what any of it meant at the time, and it happens in grocery stores all over the world, one person and one memory at a time.

Someday before I leave my body, I hope that we can take Emma to see The Lion King on Broadway. If we do, I’m sure it will be a waterworks of epic proportion. And even if we don’t, maybe someday she can circle back to it on her own.

It’s the circle of life,

and it moves us all,

through despair and hope,

through faith and love,

until we find our place on the path unwinding,

In the circle…

The circle of life