...and I quote

Over the past couple days, Cleo's surprised me twice, and pleasantly, with some rather interestingly phrased compliments. On Thursday, I took her to Towson Town Commons, where we split a fruit smoothie, chatted about Snow White, and tried on some shirts. When I donned one rich purple button-down, I asked her what she thought. "You look handsome and dignified," came the response. And then, the next morning, when Cleo strolled into our bedroom at 5:55, she happily climbed under our covers for a few minutes - and then told me that I smelled like "warm toast, with a good deal of butter on it."

Kind words, no? But were they really hers? Well, not quite, or not simply. Her first compliment, for instance, was a direct appropriation of an assessment offered by Martha, a hippo, when she sees her friend George, in James Marshall's wonderful series of stories. George had fallen, and lost his tooth, but Martha responds - as she usually does - like a true friend. And now Cleo was perpetuating the act of kindness.

And the reference to toast? Well, that's a bit more obscure, but it was drawn, too, from a story on Cleo's shelves: or, rather, from a series detailing the adventures of a pig named Mercy Watson. Mercy loves, above everything, toast - or, to be more specific, generously buttered toast. Happily, her stories usually begin and end with toast. And so once again, Cleo was borrowing words, but was also quoting a context associated specifically with kindness, or happiness.

Which is, to finish the thought, more than some of her role models do. She's currently wrapped up in the 1991 Disney film Beauty and the Beast, lent to her by a fellow Yellowbird. In that film's climactic scene, the insufferable Gaston - a narcissistic musclehead who desires the affections of the intelligent Belle, and is thus dismayed to see Belle beginning to admire the noble Beast - inspires a mob of villagers to take up torches and to hunt the Beast. Here's a portion of the so-called Mob Song:

Gaston: We'll rid the village of this Beast. Who's with me?
Mob: I am! I am! I am!
Mob: Light your torch! Mount your horse!
Gaston: Screw your courage to the sticking place!

And so on. Cleo, I suspect, doesn't quite understand the line about the sticking place. And of course she doesn't know that it's a quotation of a line originally spoken by Lady Macbeth. But perhaps she does pick up on the fact that Gaston is urging a horrible deed - and maybe she even senses that he's speaking in words that are not entirely his own. We quote - Gaston quotes - to particular ends.

And so does Cleo. Borrow a phrase from a gentle, tender moment in a book, and you can retain some of that tenderness, even while warming your dad's heart in the present tense.