One day, in an old farmhouse in the Texas Hill Country, I went fishing in an old clawfoot bathtub and caught a little mermaid. She had wispy, stringy blond hair and shining blue eyes, and she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. How, I wondered, how in the whole wide ocean did you find your way here, to this bathtub, to me? Silly Daddy, miracles aren’t for understanding. “I just did,” she said. “Little mermaid, will you stay with me and be my little girl?” “Yes,” she said, so I lifted her out and wrapped her in a towel. As I dried her off, her fins became willowy legs and wrinkly feet and toes that wiggled as I rubbed them, and I wondered if I should have gone back with her to live in a beautiful world under the sea. Then I looked up into her eyes, and she took my face in her hands with a little smile, gently patted my cheeks, and ran off to dress. The wonder and awe and love that I felt then still fills my heart, and I will be forever thankful for the beautiful being that came from out of the eternal ocean of time and space and into my life.
Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express. ~Joseph Addison
The Little Mermaid (Danish: Den lille Havfrue), a bronze statue in Copenhagen harbor by Edvard Eriksen, depicting Hans Christian Andersen’s mythical character who gave up her life in the sea for love.