Back atcha

So some of the folks at Reddit got a bit nostalgic yesterday about 1990s hip-hop: specifically, about Busta Rhymes, and the remarkably creative and energetic videos that he produced toward the end of that decade. And, yeah, I could relate: I remember watching one of those videos on a small monitor in Rome in 1997, and taking a deep delight in his idiosyncratic art.

Soon enough, though, the Reddit thread took a few turns, and people began to list other favorites in the genre. Are there any current rappers, they wondered, who might be compared to Rhymes? Well, yeah, said a few: what about, for instance, Aesop Rock? And suddenly I was in unfamiliar waters: I'd never heard of this figure, and spent a few minutes following the proffered links to videos, interviews, and reviews. In the end, I was mildly impressed - can one really ever completely abandon the loves and tastes of one's twenties? - but belonged to a clear majority, in feeling that any golden age is long gone.

Still, that sense of fresh discovery stuck with me. There's not much that's more flatly exciting and richly pleasing than wandering into a new field of promising evidence: whether you're following a link or parting the fronds of a weeping willow and now peering out over an unfamiliar pond, that sense of discovery is about as close as many of us get to magic. And, happily, it's also a regular part of my interactions with Cleo these days. Of course, she actually claims to be magic, and so I'm often learning about powers that somehow have escaped the cold dominion of documented science. But she's also, simply, 4, and so we're constantly discovering, as most 4-year-olds do, new possibilities in our given landscape. The other day, for instance, a trip to Whole Foods on a warm day turned into a sustained battle with Huns along a crumbling Great Wall; standing about a small river, we defended our turf with sticks converted into swords, and with mysterious poisonous pods that we worked into our enemy's soil. I'm not sure how we looked to more errand-bound passersby, but to this day the neighborhood remains Hun-free.

More often, though, she's simply interested in learning something new. "Tell me," she said (as she often does), "everything that you know." And so yesterday, as we drive from library to lunch, I found myself trying to teach her, in basic terms, the distinction between owning and renting. What sorts of things can we rent? A house. A car. Perhaps a bus.

Or, as we learned last night when we settled down for a bedtime story, a mill: indeed, on the first page of our copy of Puss-in-Boots, there's an important reference to a rented mill. I don't know, in short, if Cleo will retain for very long the concept of rent: these things have a way of quickly dissolving, and giving way to new waves of imagined Hun attacks. But I like to think that, for a moment, as she sat in her carseat and listened to my few coarse sentences on ownership, that she felt a simple delight in the emergent contours of the world that was not unlike that which I felt in reading, initially, about Aesop Rock.