We travel the spaceways (track 9)

Sun-Ra on the stereo in the dining room, as Cleo plays with her small Rapunzel and Flynn dolls - he just rejected, it seems, her marriage proposal. A few minutes ago, we listened to "Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus," and I read Cleo a few choice items from the liner notes. Who know, for instance, that his given name was Herman Blount? Or that, whenever that fact was raised, he coolly insisted that, no, he had arrived on Earth from outer space? Not hard, in short, to keep the attention of a four-year-old who honestly seems to enjoy a good deal of jazz.

But I left aside other details: ones that were too nuanced, or too dense with specific associations to make much sense to Cleo. Blount, for instance, was born in Birmingham, and the liner notes fairly point out that his ties to that city, so closely bound up with the history of racial discrimination and the civil rights movement, may have played some role in shaping his eventual interest in parallel realities or duality (his songs include "The Alter Destiny," "Other Places of There," and "Somebody Else's World"). What's Birmingham, after all, to someone whose entire life has been lived with Obama in the White House?

And yet: earlier, as I made dinner, I heard Cleo speaking slowly in the living room. When I wandered out, to see what she was up to, I saw that she was mouthing the text in Roz Chast's cover cartoon on this week's New Yorker. She had seen the issue in my bag earlier in the day, and asked me to explain it - and so I walked her through the rather complex, but certainly relevant, series of panels in which a mom experiences a range of powerful emotions as her child plays (and plays violently, apparently) at the playground. "That IS my kid," I heard Cleo read. "Get OVER here!"

When I had tried to explain the panels to Cleo, I noted that it's a cartoon aimed more at adults than at children. There's a reason, in other words, that we see the mom and not the child - and I clearly recall, too, the sensation of dull incomprehension when I looked at my parents' copies of the same magazine, years and years ago. But wait: at dinner, Cleo surprised me by stating that the cartoon on the cover was both silly and scary. "It's scary," she said, "because she's so angry. It's very dramatic."

So why assume that Birmingham, as well, would fly over her head? After all, Sun-Ra is clear in his liner notes: "With your mind's eye," he exhorts us, "you are invited to see other scenes of the space age by focusing your eyes on the cover and your mind on the music."

So we listen on, and keep looking, and continue to learn.