Transfers

With a very pleasant week at a North Carolina beach now in our rear view mirror, and the realities of I-95 in our near future, it's hard to forget a simple fact: we've spent a good deal of time in the car of late. Much of it has been, of course, utterly pedestrian, but some of it has been surprisingly beautiful. About 10 days ago, for instance, after dropping L. off for work, I turned to Cleo in her car seat, and told her, perhaps just a bit too meaningfully, that I loved her. 'You don't have to say that,' she immediately replied. Wondering if she was somehow embarrassed by my emotionalism, I asked her why not. 'Because,' she answered, 'I already know it.'

That's a comforting answer from any angle, but it touched me especially because I'd recently heard a related song. It was on my ancient IPod, which is chock full of tunes from the 90s - including the weirdly frank and disarming 'Sleeping Bag,' the best-known song by Paw, once heralded as the next Nirvana. Most of Paw's music was rather straightforward aggressive, Southern-tinged garage rock, but this song was different; in it, the singer described learning that his brother had been in a car accident. And so, he howls, 'This is pretty hard. Cuz you're my only brother. And I can't say I love you.' Why not? we wonder. Is this some code of cool, gruff macho silence between brothers? No: rather, his brother, laid out on a gurney, simply can't hear. And so our narrator begins to feel almost responsible, in his grief, for the accident: 'And the tears in my eyes Make the road all wet And hard for you to drive.' The one who wasn't driving apologizes, ironically, to the one who was.

Tomorrow, of course, it'll be me, apologizing to the one who's in the car seat. Are we there yet? No: it's still five hours, or more. But I've got an ace up my sleeve. Beneath the new activity book, below the volume of connect-the-dot pictures, is a pirate transfer design. Don't know transfers? They're like stickers, only you scratch them onto a laminated background, to compose a picture of your very own creating. And Cleo's no different from the 8-year-old me in loving them. In fact, her delight in learning to use them on the way down was so evident that she doesn't even have to articulate it. I already know. And I'm betting that it'll make for an even better time in the car as we head home.