Familiar motifs

On this day in 1933, I just learned, The All-German Richard Wagner Association, meeting at Beiruth to arrange for the Wagner Festival, decided to amend its by-laws so as to exclude all "non-Aryans," and to instruct its branches throughout Germany to expel Jewish members.

That decision cemented, in some circles, the composer's reputation as an anti-Semite. But he's also famous - famous enough to leave a mark on even my shallow knowledge of opera! - for his use of leitmotifs, or musical figures associated with particular characters in his operas. Each time Tristan, or Isolde, appears in a production of Wagner, they're accompanied by a variation on a musical theme.

And so I wanted to write, today, about one of my favorite leitmotifs involving Cleo. And that's her little white UNC Tarheels hat, visible in the photo above (taken at the zoo, while staring at chimps). Cleo's now worn that hat, nearly daily, for more than four months. And of course one-year-olds lose things at a relatively constant pace: from plastic giraffes jettisoned from strollers to small pieces of banana dropped beneath a car seat, there is a wake of items behind nearly every toddler. Certainly, Cleo's hat has been cast into that wake repeatedly: she's elegantly extended a hand from her stroller and deposited it on a dirt road, and she's thrown it with an almost flamboyant vigor in the pool. It's been pushed to the floor of a Panera, and in fact Cleo offhandedly let it fall to the ground at the zoo, while riding on my shoulders, just a few minutes after looking at the chimps.

You might think, then, that Cleo's no fan of the hat. But it's not that simple. In fact, she also often enjoys putting it on, and will contentedly wear it for long stretches, without complaints. But she doesn't seem to realize that the pleasure of throwing an object away will often lead, in turn, to the permanent loss of that object.

Often. But not always. For, like a leitmotif, the hat keeps coming back. At the zoo, a friend walked back several dozen steps and spotted it. At Panera, when we returned a few minutes after realizing, in the parking lot, that Cleo was now hatless, a kind stranger had placed it on a ledge, out of harm's way. I've found it lying in the grass, and once I came across it while walking Cleo home from the pool - completely unaware that we'd lost it at all.

We may lose that hat for good, eventually; certainly, Cleo seems intent on making that happen. But for now I love the hat, and its patient, buoyant tendency to return.