Like any other, but not

Today had the feel of a familiar room, of a space whose contours I knew well. Autumn Saturday: rise at 6:30 to Cleo's stirrings; carry her downstairs for a change of diaper and a cup of espresso - and then spend much of the day grading students' art history papers, while L. takes Cleo to the zoo. Oh, I've spent afternoons in this way before: a Midwestern college football game on, muted, in the background, while thesis statements come and go, and the pile of work to be read slowly grows a little slighter. And with the Miles Davis Quintet on, in the background, I pause and listen at the very same moment in Nasqualero where I've paused in years past: at the soft, delicate development of a piano motif, rising.

But of course it's never quite the same as in years past, either. A year ago, I read a similar stack of papers; Michigan State may have competed on the small field of our television. Perhaps Miles Davis blew his horn. But Cleo wasn't walking, last year, from room to room, having returned from the zoo and now kicking a red balloon and now sitting to leave Crayola skid marks on a pad of paper.

The same river, they say, is never the same. Nasqualero had a new dimension of domesticity, I thought today, and the students advanced, bless their hearts, new theses about works of art that are hundreds of years old. And Cleo, still an infant in our minds, totters up and indicates that her diaper is wet.