Friday night was the Daddy-Daughter Dance, sponsored by our Parks and Recreation Department. I had a speaking engagement this time last year, which I discovered isn’t a good enough reason to miss such an event when judged by the mind of your daughter. Abby, my 10-year-old, cried the freshest stream of tears when I told her. Between body quakes she managed to sputter out “I understand,” which wasn’t true. She didn’t understand, and her false statement didn’t stop her deep heaving sobs, the kind you see opera singers make while clutching the skull of their dead husband while lying in a puddle of despair with a heavy spotlight on them. Then to make it worse, she gave me a huge hug, which sealed in a year’s worth of fatherly shame and self-reproach.

So you can understand my Marine-like determination not to miss it this year.

She picked my clothing for me in order to ensure that “we match,” something my sons have never worried about. She chose my black suit, pink shirt, and silver tie. “I haven’t worn a tie in about three years, Baby,” I said. I meant this as a deterrent, as in Dad doesn’t want to wear a tie, Sweetie. But she took it as a compliment. Dad hasn’t worn a tie in a long time, but he’s wearing one for me, said her little thought bubble.

About 150 father-daughter couples filled the large dining room with a dance floor in the middle. As I said it’s Friday night, which ensures that most every man hear put in a full week of work. You see it on our faces. We’re tired: blue collar, white collar, we’re all beat. We seem to set new records in exhaustion with each passing year. But we suck it up, an ability usually handed down from involved fathers to their sons. Or we suck it up because our father’s didn’t give us the attention we thought we deserved, so we’re determined to give our children what we didn’t get. Love is giving someone your undivided attention, and tonight we planned to give it.

They played about five songs before dinner. We danced the Twist, Chicken Dance, Hokey Pokey, and a proven crowd pleaser, the Macarena. Most every girl moved like a budding gymnast from Romania. We fathers looked arthritic, like we carried rough-cut wooden beams across our shoulders. If we knew how to dance, we lost that gifting years ago. Some stomp their feet like horses in a stall. I did my best to mortify Abby by doing what my children call The Stupid Dance. It’s a cross between break dancing and how those hippies moved at Woodstock. I am both rigid and uninhibited at the same time—a marketable form of epilepsy. There were times when Abby looked like she saw a ghost.

“I used to know how to dance,” a friend told me during dinner. “I don’t know what happened.”

“These are the productive years,” I said. “We don’t get paid to be spontaneous. We get paid to be efficient. There’s something very wrong with how we spend most of our day.”