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VISITATION DAY Here’s a small thing that isn’t. As usual, as always. A father and his daughter are strolling across the University campus. It’s Visitation Day — the last day before new students either enroll here or decide to go elsewhere, poor things. So the campus this morning is filled with students and their parents and sometimes grandparents and they are all walking in every direction toward every sort of informational meeting imaginable. It’s all beautifully meticulously planned and paced and there is excellent signage and there are tall confident friendly current students acting as guides and ambassadors and the campus is glowing in the sudden sunlight, partly because the groundskeepers spent the previous week begging the roses and dogwoods to bloom and editing scraggly bushes and laying down redolent bark dust and erecting bright new banners and persuading the ground squirrels to take a day off from mating in small wriggling knots on the main quadrangle. Because we are a Catholic university we dearly love the title Visitation Day because we think that Mary the Mother of Jesus has a wry sense of humor, and when She is apprised of the date of our Visitation Day She will smile and clear Her calendar and decide to visit, probably registering Her Son in the humanities, although there are those of us who think of Him more as an engineer or an entrepreneur. One of us annually puts in for a special parking pass for Her and Her Son in front of the gym where the opening informational motivational session starring the president is held, but we never are actually granted Her pass, which maybe why She has not yet come for Visitation Day, that we know about. The father and the daughter in the opening paragraph of this essay are actually heading directly toward our sweet lovely bronze statue of Mary the Mother of Jesus, which stands at the nexus of several pathways, so that no matter how you are cutting across the quadrangle you must pass pretty close by Her left hand, which is held out in greeting or blessing to passersby, and many is the time I have seen someone scurrying past lean toward Her and brush his fingers against Her fingers, which always moves me deeply, and has more than once made me weep, for murky reasons. Also I have seen students place notes in Her hand, and I have seen a man holding Her hand while praying with his head bowed so low I bet his neck was sore for days, and twice now I have seen Her hand filled with snow. As the daughter walked with her father she twice danced all around him so smoothly and gracefully that he never broke stride but only smiled, and then just before they got to Mary the Mother of Jesus, the daughter, now back in stride with her dad, reached for his hand, and he took her hand, and for another few steps they walked hand in hand, just like they must have done when she was a tiny girl, although now she was a tall woman. By now they were only a few steps from Mary but I never did see if either or both of them reached for Her fingers because I was standing in the redolent bark dust under the oak trees weeping yet again. You would think a man long past age fifty would be able to explain or at least try to explain why a young woman reaching for her father’s hand so gently like that would set him to watering the oaks but I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps it was the sharp stinging scent of the bark dust in my eyes. Perhaps it was because my daughter is a woman now and we used to walk hand in hand when she was tiny and when we did I was so happy there are no words for how happy I was. Perhaps because it is always Visitation Day in this bruised blessed world and when we reach for each other in the sudden sunlight we are also somehow reaching for Her. That could be. That could most certainly be. n Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine and the author most recently of A Shimmer of Something, a collection of ‘proems.’