The music of chance

Did you happen to see Beth Boyle Machlan's meditation, in yesterday's New York Times, on the durable appeal of radio music? Titled 'Driving to the Music of Chance,' it was a celebration of the sheer unpredictability of the tunes that find their way to our cars' antennae as we drive. In an era where music is often carefully curated by the listener - through ITunes playlists or Pandora cues - the radio forces us to accept a loss of control and an attendant degree of unpredictability: a surrender, as she put it, to contingency - but also, occasionally, to convergence.

Well, that piece made a special sense to those of us here at halfstep, where a scheduled day off, two snow days, a weekend and a holiday have meant that L. and I have spent six straight days with Cleo. And while we've managed to get outside for brief periods - a half hour in the snow, building an igloo and sledding; a short walk to our local elementary school - for the most part, we've been snowbound. Which, in turn, means that we've been doing the parental equivalent of turning on the radio. Sure, we can rely to some extent on familiar, organized activities: a half hour of Tangled, or a good read, or a jigsaw puzzle almost always appeals. And now that the skies have clearer, playdates make sense, too. But, nonetheless, we've also had to simply rely on what comes to mind in passing some of the dozens of hours. And that's resulted in some interesting permutations.

Take, for instance, what we now call the fishing game. Cleo sits on a bed, with a sheet stretched in front of her, like a plane extending a few feet before her lap. You lie, in turn, on the ground just beneath the sheet, and wait for her to cast one of her two lines of soft, gentle white rope. When the line appears, you quickly tie an available toy - a block; a doll's chair - onto the rope, give it a tug, and... the girl reels it in, and soon declares that she has caught an eel, or a flounder. Repeat, and repeat again, and you've got yourself a real game.

In her article, Machlan described two college friends of hers who liked, for a brief moment in the early 1990s, to drive  around Portland, Maine, waiting for the local station to air Pearl Jam's 'Better Man.' "They would never buy the album," she explains, "but on the road they loved to sing the song."

We know the basic sensation, even if it's occasionally been too treacherous, in recent days, to drive. We've played with pretty much everything, but we don't need to buy any games. At home, we love to fish for fish.