Unforgettable, for dad, that is

It's hard to pinpoint when the trouble began, but that doesn't matter now. On Monday, my hands were shaking, and they wouldn't stop. This made note-taking difficult.

Maybe it all began to sink in at a school event Friday, when my daughter's new principal made one of those jokes you're supposed to laugh at when you're in public. And we did, all 200 or so adults in the sweltering heat.

"Daddy," Carleigh whispered in my ear, "I don't understand why everyone is laughing."

You will, I thought, but thank God you're still my baby girl and so you don't need to worry about it right now. Soon, but not yet.

The truth is, I'd been scared to death of this day -- Carleigh's first day of kindergarten -- since long before that moment last week, at the ribbon-cutting and dedication ceremony for Bozarth Elementary School, one of several new schools in Clark County this year.

This place is so new that Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., at the ceremony, stumbled and hemmed and hawed and pronounced the "Bogarth" family worthy of the praise of having a school named after them.

That was indeed funny. I wondered how the Bozarths felt about it.

But Carleigh didn't laugh at that either, of course. She just hugged my leg and made me feel like a good daddy for being there with her.

And that is how it should be, should it not? My baby girl is not supposed to grow up. She's supposed to depend on me and need me and want to hug me in public and hold my hand and call me "Daddy" in her chipmunk voice until the end of time. Of this I am certain.

And yet ... there she was on Monday, making me doubt my certainty. She was decked out in a pink and black and blue plaid skirt and sharing the stage with 26 other kindergartners in teacher Laura Brooks' class, 531 total students at Bozarth, 22,823 kindergartners districtwide, 313,688 students in all.

Carleigh was no longer my baby. She had become a number. Were the rest of the parents going through this, too? Was it going to be this way when she started middle school, then high school, college, marriage, grandchildren? Was this, kindergarten, really the start of it all? I could see it already -- skirts that are too short and asking to borrow the car and teenage eye rolling.

So that's why my hands were shaking. It was 8:35 a.m. Monday, and we were on the way to school. We parked what seemed like a mile away in the first-day rush. I was thirsty to the point of cottonmouth, and Ashleigh, my wife, was tearing up already.

Carleigh skipped down the sidewalk and laughed.

There was a gaggle of kids and moms and dads and strollers and school police and road workers -- and, to remind you that you were in Las Vegas, the rip-roar of a jackhammer making some sort of suburban progress.

"Are you scared?" I asked my baby.

"No," she said. "Maybe a little nervous 'cause I haven't made any new friends yet."

Leaving the parking, we cross paths with the principal.

"How are you this morning!" he asked.

Principal Rodney Saunders is a relentlessly cheery fellow whom everyone kept telling us was the best of the best. He transferred to this new school from Lummis Elementary in Summerlin, which everyone also kept telling us is the best of the best.

Yes, sure, all right then, but will he know who Carleigh is? Will he care that she got a splinter the other day while helping her mommy transplant the marigolds? That she sings like Ariel from "The Little Mermaid" and that she can make her baby brother laugh so hard he sometimes seems on verge of convulsions?

Will her teacher know all of this? Will she learn it? Will she even try? Will she have time, with 26 kids in a half-day kindergarten class?

Does that matter?

So there I was crying, under my sunglasses, and Carleigh was gone. Mrs. Brooks came out and helped wrestle a bawling little boy away from his folks and into the classroom.

And then, the door closed. I couldn't walk away. Not yet. I sneaked up to the window. It was a perfect square, as high as my head and a foot wide, like a picture frame.

Through that frame I watched Carleigh, with only mild guilt. She stood with her arms softly folded, her head tilted to the left. I knew this meant she was nervous. She scratched at her arm and squirmed a little, too. I knew she would soon see me through the window, and I imagined her smiling and waving and being slightly embarrassed by her goofy dad.

I looked away, toward the jackhammer or at some crying child, maybe at my wife or my baby boy.

When I looked back, Carleigh was gone, sitting on the floor with the rest of the group, not alone anymore, but on her own.

She never once looked for me through the window.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.