Thursday evening, and I've got film on the brain. Or, at least, I've got mistaken memories of a film in my mind. I'll get to Cleo in a moment, folks, but first, this: the other day I had a sudden flashback to what I thought was a moment from one of the Godfather films. Man in opera box, I thought, eating cannoli: a scene in which wealth, culture, and dessert come together. All in place.

But it turns out that I misremembered. (Or dismembered?). Now that I look it up, I find that the scene is rather more sinister. There's a montage in The Godfather III - the legendarily disappointing sequel to the two legendary original pendants - in which Coppola, the director, cuts rapidly between the melodrama of a Baroque opera, performed on a Palermo stage, and the real-life violence that stems from Vinnie's orders to kill the rivals of the Corleone clan. A musical vendetta thus parallels the actual vendetta. And, as if that's not enough, Connie offers an enemy named Altobello, seated in an opera loge, a box of poisoned cannoli: she then watches, from a distance, as he samples, and slumps over, dead.

Um, yikes. And here I'd begun to feel, about 20 years after seeing the film, that I wanted to be that guy in the stands, eating cannoli. In fact, now that I think about it, I once tried to recreate the image in my mind: in the winter of 1992-3, I attended a performance of Don Giovanni in Brno with two friends - and brought the closest semblance of a cannolu that Moravia could offer. Did I feel as cultured, as accomplished, as distinguished, as I'd hoped? I don't think so. But at least the cannoli weren't poisoned.

Anyway. The other day I took Cleo to the grocery store, at the end of a busy Tuesday. She's been big enough to ride in the cart for some time now - one of the small joys of fathering - and so I usually place a few items next to her, so that she can look at them, or feel them. Or, as on Tuesday, begin to eat them, to my surprise. Her little hand wandered into the bag of red grapes once, and again, and again, and as we moved up and down the aisles she continued to help herself, in a leisurely manner. And it occurred to me, briefly, that perhaps she felt as I had long imagined Coppola's operagoer to feel: in the right place, with a good seat, and all that is needed at hand.