Off and running

I mentioned, in my last post, that we recently enjoyed a meal of fish and chips. And I meant what I said: we, as in, Cleo was eating fish. She's insistent that she only likes whitefish - no salmon or sushi quite yet - but, still, this is news: before yesterday, she'd never been open to eating it. And yet, just last night, she tried to order whitefish on three separate occasions (as the waiter tried to take our drink orders, for instance, and to ask if she wanted a side with her chicken tenders).

But, really, Cleo seems to be growing up in all sorts of ways. She's no longer a Redbird, for instance, for her graduation from nursery school took place on Friday. And this morning she swam - actually, literally swam, under her own power, with no boost from the edge of the pool, for six or seven feet at a time - for much of a delightful hour. Of course, not every change is welcome: lunch was accompanied by a series of odd threats involving the possibility that we withheld her pie, and a playground visit yesterday took a slightly awkward turn when Cleo began to tell the other kids sharing the slide that she was being flushed down a toilet, into the ocean. Growing older doesn't always imply, apparently, a gentle refinement of taste. But, still, it is intriguing to watch her becoming very much her own person.

Maybe Simon Leng's biography of George Harrison is helpful here. Noting Harrison's cynicism involving the Beatles' early American concerts, in which the crowd noise often drowned out his guitar entirely, Leng writes that Harrison was deeply attracted to the refined classicism of Ravi Shankar, whose work he began to listen to quite closely in the later 1960s. Harrison's personal goals were relatively modest, but his admiration seems to have been sincere. Or, as Leng puts it, "While George Harrison knew that his lifestyle would never permit him to become a true sitar player, his exposure to sitar study made him the best musician in the Beatles. It also gave him the basis of a new style that would only flourish when he discovered slide guitar."

Will Cleo ever become an Olympic swimmer? The odds are long indeed. Will she delight us at every meal, astounding us with the variety of her healthy diet? No; in fact, she proved as much at lunch this afternoon. But in trying these new things, she is developing what you might call the basis of her own style. And she has already, in fact, become the best developer of creative, outlandish threats involving dessert in our little family. Moreover, she's only five. And she hasn't even heard of Ravi Shankar yet.