As the world turns

One way of putting it, I suppose, would be that you try to give her something new, within a familiar framework, so that she can contextualize the novel, and so that unprecedented experiences are paired with comfortably known entities.

That is to say: when we took the MARC train down to D.C. for a day trip today, we touched some of our usual bases. A bagel with cream cheese at the station bakery: check. A rental bicycle, with burley: check. And, just as we'd done months ago, we stopped at the Jefferson Memorial, and looked about. From there, though, we branched out, taking in a cricket match just west of the Tidal Basin, and then pausing to examine, and think briefly about, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. More than 53,000 dead: can such a number mean anything to a 4-year-old? And yet she understood that each name had left a family, in some form, behind. And we even found a Clio among the listed names.

Travel, of course, can also make the familiar seem anything but. When we emerged from Baltimore's Penn Station, our trip almost done, I was struck by how modest the city feels upon arrival. No avenues lined with trees; no Capitol Building, of course, beneath sashaying American flags. But even as these thoughts occurred to me, we happened to hear, from a passing car, Pharrell Williams' 'Happy, the now-ubiquitous ode to simple joy.

L. tells me that that song is now KLM's adopted anthem; its light, airy melody greets travelers as they board, and find their seats,

Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth

I associate the song, meanwhile, with a different environment: with the Hopkins gym, where it seems to play on an hourly basis. Regardless, though, it seems to be a song that inspires comfort - and that's the feeling that coursed through me as I listened, nodded, and looked around at the city in which I've lived for twelve years, and in which Cleo was born.

And yet: on the drive home, we flipped on WTMD, and happened to hear David Neal Adams of the Ceramic Tones, a local band, speaking about the ceramic plate that he uses as an instrument. Sure, he said, there will always be a place for the guitar in pop music. But people, he speculated, are also always looking for something new.

You look for the new, within certain comfortable frameworks. Sometimes that novelty can burnish, in turn, those frameworks. And what we thought we knew is new once more.