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When our baby has homework, my wife, Jane, usually helps her rather than I. It's not that I don't want to help, but Jane is more attuned to the academic world and has always been a better student. And by the time I've put in a day's work, eaten dinner, helped wash the pans and stack the dishes in the dishwasher and quaffed a stout, my brain fails to function in meaningful ways anyway. Somehow heavy beers and trigonometric functions have an inherent incompatibility.

But this time, I'm roped in. Tonight's assignment is a critical exploration of Chaucer's character development in "The Canterbury Tales."

As you have guessed, our baby is not really a baby anymore, at least not in the literal sense. Our daughter is 17, a senior in high school. But she's my baby, our only child, and as I remind her often, this isn't something she'll outgrow. If I'm graced to live to 100 and she's 65, she'll still be my baby.

We discuss the assignment briefly, and I tell her to give it her best shot and then I'll help with edits and writing tips.

When I return an hour later, she sits cross-legged on her bed, laptop computer before her. Her posture is like Linus, the Peanuts comic-strip character, hunched over his piano. Her desk is piled with books, dolls, college recruiting letters and shopping bags; it is never used for actual homework.

I sit beside her, and we begin to read her work aloud. We reread each sentence and look for flow, syntax and clarity. I make a few suggestions and teach her how to use Microsoft Word's track-changes function to allow us to compare new versions with the original.

Her swivel-top cellphone sits in her lap and interrupts us incessantly. When I complain about it, she tells me matter-of-factly how skilled her generation is at multitasking. I make a vain attempt at rebuttal, saying a person is best able to focus on one thing at a time, regardless of age. We end in disagreement and press on.

I look at her as she explains her next emerging thought, and I am struck by how lovely she is. Her blond hair is pulled back in a knot. Her face is more angular than when she was younger and her cheeks are unblemished and high. She has a dazzling smile with teeth as white and straight as a string of pearls. High eyebrows accentuate her expressive eyes the color of a bluebird. She finishes her thought, and I ask her to repeat it, pretending I didn't understand it rather than admitting to being mesmerized.

She rambles on, and again I'm lost in reverie, thinking about how quickly the years have gone by. I joke to friends that last year she got a driver's license, a car and a cellphone and we haven't seen her since. She's often a clutter of teen angst, with competing demands of schoolwork, a boyfriend away at college, her own college applications, her horses, her singing and other extracurricular activities and lastly a dad who just wants an occasional few minutes of attention. She'll leave within a year for college, and I'm not looking forward to it. I like having her around, and I will be an unhappy empty nester.

As I make a few more suggestions and edits, I question my own rhetorical skills, transporting myself four decades earlier to my own English literature classes and recalling my own anguish and verbal inadequacies. I empathize with her need to not only learn but also reach her teacher's expectations. I convince her, I hope successfully, that she's not a bad writer, but she simply needs to be more patient and expository with her thoughts and more thorough with her edits. I make some quip about actually enjoying the process of composition, but she dismisses me with a wry, disbelieving grin.

We do a wrap and I let her prepare for bedtime. When I return later, her head is on her pillow, but she is awake. Her cellphone's display washes her face in an eerie luminescence. I remind her of the hour and insist that she commits to sleep.

Michael Abraham would rather be on two wheels than four. He lives in Blacksburg.