All that is solid melts into air

You could swear the girl weighed twenty-some pounds; you remember the pressure of her in your arms; you recall her tight, compact frame, even weeks after holding her. And yet, the photo seems to suggest otherwise: part of her is nothing but a wisp, a blur, a wraith. A few ounces of energy, and nothing more.

That's dad, or Grandpa, holding Cleo about a month ago, at a meeting of Music Together, where Cleo and a gaggle of other toddlers and caretakers regularly assembled to watch the intrepid and vaguely tragic Miriam play her guitar, to shake the rattles and stomp during free play, and to try to inject a dose of ordered, measured music theory into lives often composed of random noise.

But that's also a career classicist who knows well, from reading Virgil, that poor Aeneas, try as he might, will never be able fully embrace his ghostly father when they meet, in the underworld. The old king Anchises' flesh turned to something immaterial - just as the toddler dissolves into watery lines and streaks of light.

At a Barnes and Noble today, while Cleo meticulously put each of the miniature locomotives on a train table into their shelters in a roundhouse, I read the first fifth of The Hunger Games, the teen novel that recently crossed over from cult hit to blockbuster. As you'd guess, it's a quick, easy read - until, at least, page 34, when Katniss, the protagonist and narrator, learns that her lovely, naive younger sister has been chosen, by lottery, to participate in a grim gladiatorial fight to the death. And suddenly, despite being completely alert to the unsubtle tug of melodrama, I felt shot through with cold. What if, I thought, she were taken from me?

Happily, it's a merely rhetorical question in my case: a thought experiment, a grounds for some Aristotelian catharsis. But for Katniss, of course, the question is real, and her response is both immediate and unequivocal: she promptly volunteers to take her sister's place. I will die for you, she decides - and thus follows the lead of - yes, of a hundred cliched love songs, but of millions of parents, as well. We will not, sings the chorus, let you fade away. It's you who is solid; we fathers are content to retreat into something less real, or more grey: into an underworld, if that is what is required.

Thankfully, though - unbelievably, I want to say - it is not required: at least, not yet. And so on this Sunday evening, while L. dined in Washington with old friends, I watched with full heart as Cleo spread an imaginary picnic before me, assigned me my place, gave George the monkey his bib, and then placed him in my lap. We were simply and fully present, in a simple, full meal. At some point in years to come, yes, one of us will be nothing but light, but air, but memory. But on this evening, at least, I was amazed that I could be exactly what Aeneas yearned for, as he closed his arms around nothing.