Soundtrack

Ah, Cleo: today was about as easy as they come, and the soundtrack of our day can give you a sense of its contours. You playing gently, softly, delicately with your toys this morning at 6:05, crafting a recipe (I gather) for Arctic Fox as Mom and I slept in, not far from you. The patter of your feet on the hard soil paths of Robert E. Lee Park, where we hiked in about a mile and then helped to assemble a dish of (what you said was) mushroom pie. Your declaration, at the Mount Washington Tavern, that the sausage on your plate was terrific because it tasted like hamburger (which, in any other context, you say you don't enjoy). The creaking joints of the small Ferris wheel that whisked us up into the air above the JHU spring fair (which we visited for a second day in a row), and the appealing melodies of Matt Hutchison, a guitarist and vocalist whom you promptly declared your very favorite singer ('because,' in your words, 'I love his voice and he looks just like Harper's dad'). Later, as Mom went to her book club, Rachmaninoff's (you chuckled heartily at his name) all-night vigil, as we shared a meal of hard-boiled eggs, carrots, cauliflower, and ice cream. And now, as I type, the sounds of you in the bath upstairs, washing a rainbow off your left cheek and, I'd wager, weaving a narrative about a certain mermaid and her father.

'The rhythm is free,' Winfred Douglas wrote long ago, in a program, about the all-night vigil, 'and untrammeled by the usual pattern of equal measures; like harmonized Gregorian song it surges and ebbs according to the meaning of the text and the meaning of the words.' And so, perhaps, with our day: the melody varied, but always fulfilled the demands of the moment.