Evensong

With snow still lying on the ground, and dark descending before 5, each evening poses an implicit question: what to do? Indeed, Cleo's taken to voicing that query in a rather aggressively whiny manner: What, she asks, can we do? Sometimes we point to her toys; sometimes we cite a mantra developed by her grandma ('Read a book. Draw a picture. Eat a banana.'). But note her clever use of the first person plural: at 5:15 p.m., excited to be home from school, the girl doesn't want to play by herself. She wants to be involved.

So sometimes we all cook together. The other night we built a nest out of blankets, and stocked it with plastic foods and an army of stuffed animals. And last night? Last night, Cleo, currently infatuated with The Little Mermaid, wanted to pretend to be the rebellious Ariel, whose open curiosity in the world of humans deeply worries her father, King Triton. So I was Triton, shocked at her missing tail, and she was the princess mermaid who ran giggling and exuberant from our imagined palace and towards the beckoning surface of the water.

Happily, though, this imaginary Ariel also likes music, and wanted some 'loud fancy' music on in the background. And that's a wish that King Triton is happy to honor: indeed, it turns out that Triton enjoys looking through his old CDs. On Sunday, we'd gone to the Walters and had made a small semblance of an oud out of a bowl, cardboard, and rubber bands; as Cleo plucked it, I looked for Hamza al-Din, who plays a similar stringed instrument.

No dice: Ariel quickly complained that it wasn't dancy enough. And she was right: one can't quite squirm or gyrate to Hamza al-Din. So it was on to more upbeat material: to Albert King, to Common, and then to Natacha Atlas. And as we spun around a virtual musical globe, we also spun around the dining room, sometimes chasing, sometimes plucking, sometimes evincing grave disappointment at the princess's all-too-human legs, and sometimes merely improvising.

And soon enough, it was 8 p.m.: that magical hour when princesses start to get ready for bed, mothers choose books for a quiet reading, and King Triton settles down to work on his next day's class.