On the mend

A good day yesterday, as Cleo rebounded nicely, and spent all of the sunlit hours (and then some) building Lego robots, washing the glass partition in the bath, listening to Richard Scarry stories, pretending to hang laundry, eschewing a nap, and generally Being Three. We'll see where things go, but she certainly seems to be on the road to a full and quick recovery: she's now downing her antibiotics with a cool panache, instead of clamping hands over mouth, and where on Wednesday she had given a curt no to porrected ice cream, suggesting in rapid shorthand the depths of her illness, yesterday she offered a quick and enthusiastic yes. Hopefully, we'll all be able to make the short drive to the warm beach this afternoon, and soon the recent fears and confusion may be little more than a memory.

So perhaps it won't be inappropriate to offer a rather lighthearted anecdote about the act of interpretation and its perils. In last week's New Yorker, Ursula LeGuin remembered understanding, as a child, the phrase child molester as  referring to a specific office, held only by children, that involved retrieving or obtaining moles. If only, we think - but it's easy to come up with parallels in our own experience. Some of mine, in fact, are musical: I remember, for instance, an embarrassing moment in the early 1980s when my brother questioned my interpretation of the lyrics of a then-popular song by Golden Earring called 'The Twilight Zone.' I must have been singing it aloud, and offered a rendition of what I thought was a part of the song: 'when the bullet hits the bone." The phone? asked my brother. I think it's 'the bone.' And, willful as always, I argued at length for my idiosyncratic reading, before realizing later, in solitude, that his had all the force of reason and tradition behind it. Bullets only hit phones, I guess, when shot by moles afraid of the children sent to apprehend them.

So how does this relate to Cleo? Well, as you know, L.'s currently leading a group of students working on public health. And that would seem to explain the large pile of wrappered condoms that sit by our door, like a twisted bowl of Halloween candy. But the crinkly packaging and the allure of the wrapped object have recently attracted Cleo's attention, and she's begun to wonder what, exactly, they are. Um, we say. They're, they're... like medicine. They help people stay healthy. And we thought the point was satisfactorily made until, a few moments later, Cleo approached me as I sat on the couch and announced that I needed to take my pretend medicine - and that I should open wide, for my condom.

All of which goes to show that child molester can have a third meaning, as well.