What am I?

With L. scheduled to return from Cape Town tonight, Cleo and I hit the road yesterday, driving to West Virginia for a spell from the sclerotic traffic and salt residues of still-wintry Baltimore. But even a 2:30 departure time, it seems, isn't quite early enough to beat the developing rush hour entirely, and so we spent a good bit of the drive simply chatting.

And chatting with Cleo, these days, is certainly interesting. She's full of opinions, but also generally rather conversationally graceful, and truly interested in what I have to say. Unless, that is, I'm offering one of my suspiciously revisionist readings of the lyrics from Disney's Frozen. I haven't even seen the film, but I'm pretty sure, for instance, that the ice princess is claiming, in the title song, that she is 'Frozen / In the life I've chosen.' Unfortunately for me, though, that conflicts with the variant that has become canonical in the halls of Bolton Hill Nursery, and which runs like this: 'Frozen / In the life of Chosen.' It's a subtle difference, sure. But it's also the difference between a voluntary exile and a fictional kingdom. And so I play the dull straight man, wondering if perhaps, possibly, there could be an alternative way of thinking about the lyrics.

No dice. But I had much better luck in telling Cleo a few riddles. Her favorite: He who invented it, didn't want it; he who makes it, doesn't need it; he who needs it, doesn't know it. And soon we were making up our own, in turn. I was relatively proud of my initial effort (Less than six, more than four; two and three and nothing more), which led to a prolonged silence in the back seat, before Cleo then suddenly and happily blurted out the correct answer ('Five!'). But I was even more impressed with her initial effort, which was apparently a visual response to the row homes of West Baltimore, but bore a certain taut poetic air: Brick and brick: what makes a brick stick?

I like it, Cleo. And so I'll give you one more, our last before we turned onto I-70 and bade the city a momentary goodbye. I have a wooden mouth, and four glass eyes. I'm made for people, and large in size. What am I?