My daughter Emma is not, at least on the surface, a great deal like me. She is quite rational, cautious and responsible. She is neither impulsive nor foolish, I would say she is much more serious than I am.

She would not in a million years leave her job to buy a farm upstate and live with dogs and donkeys and sheep.

She prefers a structured job in a structured life, and thinks about the future. She is married to a responsible and steady man. She has a big job in a well-run corporate media company, and she has little desire to jump into the hurly burly and unpredictable life of the writer or the artist, even though she is wondrously creative.

I am proud of her, I think she has put her life together well, she has love and work and what she believes is security and opportunity.  She has dealt with her issues well before I did.

Good for her. At times, I worry she is too serious, I sometimes wish she would be just a bit more crazy, jump outside of the box more, but that is a projection, and is also not my business. She is doing very well.

Sometimes, I see that she is my daughter, and echoes of my own excess and impulsive pop up. She has some of those twisted genes, and it may be that Robin will bring them out.

Today, she texted me this photo of Robin in a giant shark suit for Halloween, she may not remember that I would go out on Halloween when I worked in television in New York and scour F.A.O. Schwartz and the hip East Side toy stores for costumes just like that when she was a baby or a toddler: dinosaur suits, Super Woman costumes, Dracula and Frankenstein masks, whale costumes, ghosts and monsters,  toys that lit up, sang songs, danced and screamed.

I was making a lot of money then, and I spent as much as I could of it on her, it was insane, excessive and some of the most fun I ever had. She had a pretty good time too. She was all eyes when I walked in the door. My wife then would roll her eyes, and shake her head.

Emma is decidedly sensible and when she texted me this photo, I replied simply, “Lord,” and I wondered if she remembered the ridiculously over-the-top things I bought her home from the city. Totally sane people don’t buy costumes like that that will be in pieces or forgotten in a few months.

“So,” she texted me back, “the costume is a TINY bit big. I regret nothing.”

I laughed when I saw this photo. I answered her: “You are my daughter.”

A sane baby, I thought, would be shrieking inside of a  suit like that. My granddaughter gets the idea.

So, she is, and from the slightly mad expressions that keep popping up on Robin’s face, she has some of those damaged genes as well.

Happy Halloween.