As you were

This morning I came across a wonderfully odd document online: a 1935 master's thesis by a Martha Byrne, who set out to chart the relative popularity of a dozen waltzes among groups of children and musical experts. There are all kinds of methodological problems with the study, including the relatively small sample sizes, but her earnest tone and the sheer idealism of the project (which cites, among other authors, Aquinas: Byrne was at Loyola, in Chicago) make up for most of what it lacks in scientific rigor. And then, on page 159, we arrive at the heart of the matter. "[I]t is true," she says, "too that these young children have marvelous imaginations; they are at an age when it is natural for them to follow a lead, so it is easy for them to allow their imaginations to follow the ideas which the composer puts forth and to let their young minds travel where the music leads them."

Well, amen to that. I've been struck repeatedly, over the past months, with Cleo's sheer aesthetic flexibility. Sure, the girl likes her Milkshake, but she's generally open to other types of music (with one real exception noted thus far), and she admires pretty much any visual art that I show her. And, wonderfully, her tendency to accommodate extends to clothes and to personal appearances, as well: she never seemed rattled by my unkempt summer style, and when we darted into a store, recently, to try to find some new pants, she was a pleasant one-man chorus of ayes and yeses. ("And, Cleo, what do you think of these?" "Good.")

But of course it's not just Cleo: children tend to be accepting in ways that can surprise us. Last night, while reading Rick Bass's Why I Cam West, I smiled when I came to his self-deprecating list of the times that he's mistakenly sprayed himself with the searing hot pepper spray he sometimes carries to ward off grizzlies. the worst time, arguably, was when he mistakenly set the canister off by crouching, while on a walk with his two daughters; the spray covered his groin, forcing him to run for a river, and to seek relief on the long walk home by covering the stained areas of his pants with pounds of moss and lichen.

"Curls of black lichen," he remembered, "protruded from the neck of my shirt ad from beneath the sleeves of my T-shirt. Wisps of black tuft gathered around the tops of my boots, and as I lurched humpbacked through the forest, pausing from time to time to readjust the shifting lichen, I'm sure I looked like nothing less than a werewolf, and it was both alarming and touching at how matter-of-factly my daughters accepted this strangeness."

Waltzes, slacks, lichen-covered daddies: there's a willingness to overlook and to accept, in little girls, that's both disarming and somehow close to holy.