Full speed ahead

Too fast, too fast. You put down your blogging pen for a couple of weeks, and before you're back, your only brother is married, the class of seniors you just spent four years with is graduated, the summer school course you're teaching is halfway over, and the Nationals have fallen from first to last. And - oh, yeah - your daughter just turned one.

It's been a busy, busy half month, but also a beautiful one. Cleo, it's true, has often been more consumed with her new favorite toy - a plastic graduated cylinder - than with her surroundings. But even she presumably noted, on some level, the sublime and peaceful beauty of the Tuscan-like valley against which her uncle wed a lovely bride. And perhaps she took in, in those rare moments at the swimming pool when she was not dribbling water out of one end of her cylinder, the silken softness of late-afternoon June sunlight in the Chesapeake watershed. And maybe, just maybe, as she cavalierly ignored the two perfect cakes that L. made for her first birthday party and petulantly insisted, instead, on a dinner of garlic beans and peas, she realized that all of the generous folks gathered in our lawn were there at least in part on her account.

Maybe, maybe not. Turning one doesn't automatically bring, I don't suppose, a sophisticated awareness of beauty and generosity. But it does, at the very least, bring one clear thing in these days of fears regarding allergies: a green light, for the first time, to eat peanut butter. So full speed ahead, Cleo: we're behind you all the way.