Not pink

So is it all smiles, then? All bright sun, cherry blossoms, and major chords?

No. It's not. And you know it's not. Maybe you've come across, for instance, The 99 Darkest Pieces of Classical Music. You know from the Swan Lake suite; you know Barber's Adagio for Strings. You know that it can be hard.

And I learned that again yesterday, when Cleo and I, after a good romp at the green space, sat down to play a game of princess jewelry. It starts simply enough, as players select their colored glass slipper, and so when Cleo said that she wanted blue, I followed suit: I'll take pink, I said. Only to hear her reverse course, and say that she now wanted to be pink.

Now, this might sound like the dullest of parental narratives: the mercurial 4-year-old; the pink slipper. But in fact Cleo's typically rather decisive, and she generally respects other people's wishes, and so I was taken aback. And, honestly, I did kind of want to be pink. So I refused to give in. I said no. And I watched the tears begin to flow.

After a minute or so, it was clear that she was crying as much out of embarrassment as anything else. But I didn't feel like giving in, and neither did she, and so began to excuse myself, and to suggest something else - only to see the sobs redouble. So, finally, I proffered a compromise: should we both be other colors? And that evinced a subtle nod, as her shoulders shook.

So we sat down to play, Cleo still sniffling, and recovering. I waited, and, after a generous pause, nodded toward the spinner and said, "Do you want me to go?" But she, head down, missed my gesture, and thought that I was threatening to leave - which once again plunged her into desperate tears, now spurred as much by the painfully obvious fact that she didn't want to be alone, even as I was the very reason for her unhappiness.

Well. Soon enough - within two minutes, in fact - we were back on board. I drew the ominous clock tower, earned a few small laughs with a silly suggestion that I wear it like a hat, and soon we were back on board. But, for several minutes, we'd been torn apart.

And that rift, that distance, is still with me as I write this. Partly because of its unusually potent sadness. But also, I have to say, because of the way that it threw all of the lighter moments - and there are many of those, folks - into higher relief.

There may be 99 especially dark pieces of classical music. But there are, arguably, hundreds and hundreds of moments of sublime beauty.