There must be more

Yesterday morning, with a handsome fall day stretched before her like a sail, Cleo opted to kick things off with a return to the classics. She chose, that is, to watch 25 minutes of Beauty and the Beast, which was one of her favorite videos back in the spring, but which had since given way, in her video rankings, to more alternative and more surreal offerings (like the episode of Magic Schoolbus in which the kids take their bus into the throat of a sick Ralph). Anyway, as she watched in a warm pair of inherited ballet-themed pajamas, Belle's small village took shape before us, and Belle began all over again to chafe at the associated limitations of life outside the city. Sure, she has her local library, and, sure, her dad is a lovable inventor - but, still, there are times when a girl wants something more, well, cosmopolitan. Or, as Belle puts it in a song that Cleo then echoed minutes later while gliding through the dining room, "There must be more than this provincial life!"

And, indeed, there is. The opening section of the movie was over by 7:45, and the rest of the day still lay before us. So: what can one find to do on a Sunday in a city of 600,000? Quite a lot, it turns out. The first order of the day was a sunlit table outside a cafe, where Cleo painted and L. and I actually got to read some of the Sunday Times. A few games of Crazy Eights and dominoes acted as an interlude, before we drove to the Walters, where Cleo manufactured a Japanese-inspired book binding and then toured the early medieval section with me, before posing for this photo:

Next, it was on to the city's book festival, where she hand-colored a Wonder Woman mask, and then to Druid Hill park, where she and I gamboled, played keep-away with two balls, and eventually met up with her classmate Jasper, for some impromptu narratives involving a princess, a knight, and two large swords.

Soon enough, it was 6:00, and the sky was beginning to look slightly like the peachy vault behind Belle, above. So we packed up, drove home, and met Mom, who'd taken in a play and attended a book club meeting. In time, we would watch another section of Belle's story. But for a time, I thought that our day had functioned as a neat embodiment of Belle's own aspirations. The city provides, on many levels, a respite to ennui. And we who live in it can thus only fantasize about characters who wish for much broader horizons.

Decisive moments

As a boy, the photographer Cartier-Bresson seems to have been interested in a career in music; frustrated, however, by the demands of that field, he soon took up painting, at first under the direction of his own uncle, Louis. By the late 1920s, Cartier-Bresson was enrolled in an academy - where he began to see, and to show interest in, contemporary photography; he began to traffic with the Surrealists at the Cafe Cyrano, and then met Harry Crosby, who encouraged the Frenchman's interest in film. Life, to be sure, intruded on any purely artistic interests: Cartier-Bresson had a lengthy affair with Crosby's wife, prompting Crosby's suicide - and then, too, after Caresse ended the affair, Cartier-Bresson's flight to Africa. Feverish and near death in Ivory Coast, he wrote home and asked that he be buried in Normandy, and that a string quartet by Debussy be played as he was interred.

But he didn't die. Instead, he made his way back to Paris, where he was soon struck by a 1930 photograph by the Hungarian reporter Martin Munkacsi:

Depicting three boys on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the image delighted Cartier-Bresson, who later recalled: "When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, Damn it, I took my camera, and I went out into the street."

And the rest, as they say, is history. Cartier-Bresson soon became renowned for his street photography - or, more precisely, for his ability to capture what he called the decisive moment, or that creative fractions of a second when the elements of a scene converge into something especially meaningful. In the image at the top of this post, for instance, the soft rhyme between the rippled water and the iron hoops, and the poetic match between the leaping figure and the dancer in the posters beyond suggest an insistent unity that is not at first wholly evident.

I'm no Cartier-Bresson. And Cleo's never seen Lake Tanganyika. But at about 5:35 yesterday, she leaped, and I clicked. Was anything decided, in the moment? Likely not. But look: she flies nonetheless, in a manner that loosely recalls both the suspended jumper of Cartier-Bresson and the exuberance of Munkacsi's youths:

And then suddenly

And then suddenly it's late September, or week four of the fall semester, and somehow the steady demands of life have yielded a gaping hole in this feeble attempt to create an online record. A week, two weeks: they melt, they evaporate, they - well, instead of grasping at verbs, let me quote from E.P. Thompston's famous "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," which I read today as a stunning sun arced overhead:

"[D]espite school times and television times, the rhythms of women's work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock. The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of 'pre-industrial' society."

Well, um, yeah - what he said. Only I'd like to see E.P. broaden his pronoun choice at least slightly, because any dad who has attended to a diaper change, or served up a snack between two other snacks to a hungry four-year-old, will also know the sensation that he's describing. 1:30? 5:30? A few days? Two weeks? Due to my cell phone, I always have a clock on me. But when I'm with Cleo that's not always the most relevant way of measuring time.

And yet we get by. Every now and then I sit down at our ancient piano and slowly shape arpeggio chords. Almost always, Cleo runs to join, leaps up on the piano stool beside me, and claims roughly 75 of the 88 keys as her own. She also introduces, inevitably, a new rhythm to my sluggish composition. 4/4 time gives way to something polyglot, something unmeasurable. But, too, I always end up smiling at the fresh chaos. No metronome would condone it, and yet. And yet.

So, yes, it's been 17 days since our last post. But now you know why. We've been attending to other tides.

We have a book

And, speaking of transformations, Cleo utterly surprised me yesterday on a walk home from the light rail stop, when she began to tell me about a book that she's enjoyed at the nursery school - and then, seemingly out of the blue, rendered the title in an ominous, dramatic voice almost worthy of a Hollywood trailer (well, if Hollywood trailers were commonly voiced by 4-year-olds). I asked her to lay down a version for posterity, and you can see it above; when I showed it to L., we both agreed that it seems to offer a window into what our girl will look like, or into how she might move and gesture, years and years hence.

Magic, in your hands

Open the rear passenger side door. Wait for her to climb, carefully and accurately, up onto the sideboard of the car, and then onto the lip of the seat; watch her pivot, and settle into the car seat. Gently wrap the safety straps around her obliging, dutifully raised arms. Click the latch. Walk around the car, slide into your own driver's seat, turn the ignition on, begin to move, and listen for the little voice, from the back: 'May I please have my Mozart music?"

It's a sweet request, and usually sweetly worded - and it refers to Cleo's current favorite CD, a creative retelling of The Magic Flute, in which a young girl whose mother plays the role of the Queen of the Night in a local opera company mistakenly wanders into the enchanted setting of Mozart's libretto. Carrying nothing but a flute, she's initially terrified when she encounters a knight errant fighting a dragon. But she quickly learns that in fact her flute bears special powers, which allow her to navigate a richly strange new realm.

Occasionally, the CD involves snippets of the original opera, although the sung words are altered slightly, and sung in contemporary English. Still, it's neat to see Cleo's enthusiasm regarding a relatively ancient work of music, and I'm occasionally shocked at the depth of her understanding regarding the motives of secondary characters (is Papageno courageous, or not? All you have to do is ask the back seat, and you'll learn the answer). Above all, though, I'm touched by the way in which the CD casts magic as the natural province of children. The world of magic, in this production, is democratic; it's always at hand.

And, occasionally, that sense then spills out of the car, into the world at large. A few days ago, on a lambent Wednesday afternoon, I took Cleo to a local creek, so that we could pretend to be the dwarves, looking for Snow White as they return from a day of mining. Along the way, though, she told me that she happened to have a number of treasures in her two small dress pockets. And sure enough: when I asked to see, she soon pulled out the trove that you see above, laid out on a rock in the middle of the coursing water. Plastic bear, cardboard mirror: the world of magic is never, it seems, as remote as we might first imagine.

De do doo doo

And sometimes you find yourself poking around online for lists of good songs with nonsensical lyrics. And when you do, you count yourself lucky when you stumble on this one, with brief glosses, pertinent defenses of the value of silly syllables (Sting, on how the simple can be powerful: "Why are our favorite songs 'Da Doo Ron Ron' and 'Do Wah Diddy Diddy'? In the song [De do do do, by The Police], I tried to address that issue"), and embedded videos. Consider the issue addressed.

But don't consider it exhausted. Cleo likes to sing, too, and sometimes the results of her improvisatory effort are - when they're not baffling - deeply entertaining. You might here a laconic commentary on her decision-making process, or a dirge about being bored, or an ode to a prince. Of course, none of that is really very nonsensical; rather, a theoretician might say that she's crafting positions, or testing possibilities. Point ceded. But surely there's an element of pure, silly play in some of her iterations, too. After all, she's four - and, as we saw yesterday when we got her together with a fellow Redbird, silliness is the current rage. Dadaist knock-knock jokes, absurd noises, and daring claims that these tiny people will poop on our crowns represent, at the moment, the height of humor and joy. A couple of weeks ago, Cleo took to calling, jubilantly, her uncle a sillybottom. But while she shrieked with laughter as she said it, the term wasn't solely funny; rather, it was also clearly a term of deep endearment, in its very application. Why is 'Da Doo Ron Ron' so durable, as a song? Because we're all, at some level, sillybottoms - and some of us even more than others.