Words and music

Occasionally when I was little I wondered if perhaps each of us was allotted, at birth, a certain number of words to be spoken. You get a million and a half; I get, say, 834,802. And if we say that many, in our life, we simply run out: we go mute.

Hopefully, that's not the case - because I've been using words like water over the past week. Not, as you'll know, on the blog, but on book revisions, which occupied an unseemly number of hours: 6 a.m. editing stints at Starbucks, and a long stand in a West Virginia McDonald's. But now that's done, and the manuscript - a book on art criticism - is back in the publisher's hands, and so I can get back to spending my allotted words in a more enjoyable way: on Cleo.

Cleo, that is, who is blissfully uninterested in word limits. To the contrary: she's speaking often, and with increasing accuracy, now. She uses pronouns relatively confidently, she notes that there will likely be mosquitoes (kee-tos) near the red swing in our back yard, and she happily reports that she cried in school. Like this, she then adds, and breaks into a rather comic imitation of a toddler crying.

But words aren't the only sounds she's making. Increasingly frequently, she's also playing music. In West Virginia, she spent several minutes drumming, with one stick, on her big plastic drum - and insisted that I keep time with her. A touching experience for this father: a chance to weave my rhythm in and out with my daughter's. And then, back in Baltimore, she ambled confidently over to her little xylophone and plinked out a melody that was, if unplanned, rather palatable. Even the piano sees an occasional improvisatory experiment.

All around us, then, are the sounds of a little girl coming into her own. And so perhaps it wouldn't very bad at all, really, were I to use my last allotted words. I could simply sit back, it seems, and listen.