Rules to live by

With the rains now returned, and most of our age-appropriate books thoroughly perused, L. and I are doing our best to come up with new activities that keep the days feeling fresh. A morning croissant at Melissa's, before school? Sure: and it turns out that Cleo likes to place her own orders, with a lively emphasis on the strawberry jelly. That meter of bubble wrap I bought, on a whim, just in case? Made into a pretend wedding dress last night.

Happily, though, we don't have to do all of the thinking, as one of Cleo's grandmas sent us to Cape Town with an arsenal of small gifts that included a sort of time-release capsule, Santa-style: nine tiny presents, each individually wrapped, in a small bag. We've been doling them out one per week, on Fridays, and yesterday, at about 6:30 in the morning, Cleo unveiled a pack of fish-themed playing cards. By 6:33, we were on the floor, trying to figure out the intended rules - see accompanying card - to Fish and Pig. Suddenly, though, Cleo announced her own rule. "If you see a dragon," she intoned, in an almost complete non sequitur, "you can't give a card to a dragon."

All right, then. I'm all for gnomic advice and koan-like aphorisms, and this one struck me as a relative pearl. My favorite, easily, is a sentence uttered by my senior religion professor in an introductory course, in 1989. Although a gentle man, he had a stern appearance, and his fluent command of the difficult anthropological texts that we read intimidated us; so, too, did the rumor that his wife, with whom he lived about an hour from campus, was battling cancer of some sort. And so when, one day in the moments before class, he suddenly said, "On the drive here, I saw horses. They could have been anything, but they were horses," some of us took notice. Was this deep, accrued wisdom, in a form opaque to us? I still suspect that it was.

Are there musical sages who speak in the same vein. Frank Zappa might offer a fair analog. Consider, for instance, this doozy from the man who is arguably the most popular musical figure across Eastern Europe: "Remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best." I like the way in which Zappa moves from a sort of Marshall McLuhan-like stance to a bald rejection of Keats, and then into, gradually, an apparently self-consciously playful tone colored by braggadocio.

Love is not music; they could have been anything; you can't give a card to a dragon. More than enough, young grasshopper, for one blog entry.