What we learned

With summer winding down, Cleo and I drove out to West Virginia for a last splash of hot weather, wading in springs, and looking for dragonflies. And now we're back, class, to report on what we learned. I'll boil it down for you, real quick:

1. As you can see in the photo above, Cleo learned - from a gregarious 5-year-old boy who was both self-promoter and generous teacher - how to pump vigorously enough on a big-girl swing to keep herself going indefinitely. Wonderful it was to step back and simply watch her arch her little body to generate the energy needed for a good session.

2. I learned that fairies are, well, complicated. This morning, shortly after she woke up, Cleo looked lost in thought. Her brow was furrowed; her posture frozen. So I asked her, building on what I saw, 'What's the hardest thing you can think of?' And she, in turn: 'Fairies.' Ah, I thought, but wanted to know more. 'Is it because they're hard to imagine,' I continued, 'or because they're complicated.' 'Complicated,' came the answer, as sincere as can be.

3. And, finally, we both learned about life, from the local country station. As we drove home after a picnic o a field near football and cheerleading practice, we turned the radio on, and promptly learned that one singer couldn't forget the object of her love; that another's love went on, and on, and on, and on, and on; and that sometimes you've got to sing like you're not getting paid, and dance as if no one is watching.

Or swing, we now think, as if summer just might never end.

Transfers

With a very pleasant week at a North Carolina beach now in our rear view mirror, and the realities of I-95 in our near future, it's hard to forget a simple fact: we've spent a good deal of time in the car of late. Much of it has been, of course, utterly pedestrian, but some of it has been surprisingly beautiful. About 10 days ago, for instance, after dropping L. off for work, I turned to Cleo in her car seat, and told her, perhaps just a bit too meaningfully, that I loved her. 'You don't have to say that,' she immediately replied. Wondering if she was somehow embarrassed by my emotionalism, I asked her why not. 'Because,' she answered, 'I already know it.'

That's a comforting answer from any angle, but it touched me especially because I'd recently heard a related song. It was on my ancient IPod, which is chock full of tunes from the 90s - including the weirdly frank and disarming 'Sleeping Bag,' the best-known song by Paw, once heralded as the next Nirvana. Most of Paw's music was rather straightforward aggressive, Southern-tinged garage rock, but this song was different; in it, the singer described learning that his brother had been in a car accident. And so, he howls, 'This is pretty hard. Cuz you're my only brother. And I can't say I love you.' Why not? we wonder. Is this some code of cool, gruff macho silence between brothers? No: rather, his brother, laid out on a gurney, simply can't hear. And so our narrator begins to feel almost responsible, in his grief, for the accident: 'And the tears in my eyes Make the road all wet And hard for you to drive.' The one who wasn't driving apologizes, ironically, to the one who was.

Tomorrow, of course, it'll be me, apologizing to the one who's in the car seat. Are we there yet? No: it's still five hours, or more. But I've got an ace up my sleeve. Beneath the new activity book, below the volume of connect-the-dot pictures, is a pirate transfer design. Don't know transfers? They're like stickers, only you scratch them onto a laminated background, to compose a picture of your very own creating. And Cleo's no different from the 8-year-old me in loving them. In fact, her delight in learning to use them on the way down was so evident that she doesn't even have to articulate it. I already know. And I'm betting that it'll make for an even better time in the car as we head home.

Old wine in new skins

So Cleo and I dropped by Artistic Costumes and Dance Fashions the other day, and ordered up a tiny ballerina outfit, in preparation for her eventual free weekly classes with Dance Happens, a loose collective of small people who like to spin (and parents, if we're being honest) who like to watch them spin. Cleo then took a part of that outfit for a test drive last night, as Keith Jarrett played in the background.

Swingin'

For the past few days, our DVD player has housed a borrowed copy of Toy Story 2, the surprisingly strong 1999 sequel to the Pixar blockbuster. It's an appealing film for a variety of reasons: Jessie, the cowgirl, adds a degree of complexity to the roster; Woody and Buzz affirm their friendship by working hard to save each other, in turns; the composed parodies of outtakes during the credits are both silly and clever. And above it all soars Randy Newman's adroit soundtrack, which moves deftly from a retro-swing evocation of a 1950s t.v. Western to, briefly, backing overtones of a crooner ballad.

Cleo, of course, is too young to know her crooners, but such references are already inevitably familiarizing her with the form. And I, meanwhile, can recognize the references on a generic level, but don't always know the precise referent. At least, that's what happened two days ago when, after dropping her off at school I sat down in a coffeehouse to read and found myself next to the house record player, from which Frank Sinatra's voice confidently boomed.

'Make it mine,' I heard, as I looked up, interested. 'Make it mine!' And then nothing but the placid, slightly wobbly turn of the record and the diminishing tones of the song.

If you're more clever then me, you may already have recognized the source: it's 'Three Coins in a Fountain,' one of Sinatra's bigger hits. At the time, though, the specific details mattered less to me than the realization that I was in my daughter's shoes: newly exposed to a classic, and only beginning to learn the rudiments of a beloved genre.

Make it mine, Frank. And she, in time, will make it hers.

Without declaration

Did you happen to read about the discovery of a 59-page letter summarizing many of the composer Mahler's most intimate relationships? Yowzers: while some of the language used by the author of the letter, a viola player and friend of Mahler's named Natalie Bauer-Lecher, tends towards the euphemistic, some of it is downright steamy. Take, for instance, her description of her own affair with Mahler:

"As we were immured in the very narrow room and isolated from all the world in fervently animated Scheherazade-like tales, up until the graying of the morning, we unfolded our entire lives before each other. Without declaration, question, and vow, our psyches and physiques melted into each other."

Well. As the critic Max Graf wrote, of Mahler's Tristan, such passion had been unheard of in Vienna. The leaf, perhaps, does not fall far from the tree.

Anyway: here at Half Step, we like to keep things more solidly in the G range. And yet, despite such basic resolutions, even we sometimes stumble onto declarations of passion. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, we arrived at Bolton Hill Nursery to learn that Cleo had married one of her classmates, in an elaborate ceremony that included an exchange of rings. In piecing things together, through the varied accounts offered by Cleo, a classmate and a teacher, we learned that Cleo had told the boy (a fine young lad named Oliver) that she loved him; he'd responded by offering that he liked her head. And then he failed to show up for camp the very next day.

But Oliver's unintended treachery (I assume his family was on vacation) was nothing compared to my own, in Cleo's eyes. Deep in another princess story the other day, I thought I would point out that princess can, after all, marry princesses - at least in 15 countries around the world. And princes: well, they too can choose. Yeah, said Cleo, and I'm going to marry you and Mom. Well: while I liked the feeling behind the thought, I wasn't sure how that would work, exactly, and - surely pushing my role as source of facts about the world a step too far - noted that the list of countries acknowledging those unions would be even shorter. And Cleo, bless her heart, burst into momentary tears. But I just want to marry you, she said, crying into my lap.

I can't say that our physiques melted into each other. In fact, they didn't. But we did make up quickly, and, recomposed, headed out to pick tomatoes in the garden, back in the world, far from immured, and delighted with each other's company.

Sometimes

Sometimes the most beautiful music is music unadorned, music unarranged - music that's not even, perhaps, music. The patter of raindrops on the porch roof in the middle of a summer night. The rip of water, as Cleo jumps ambitiously into the mushroom pool against a background of untrained chorus of playful shrieks. The sound of L. to Cleo reading softly in the quiet hour before bedtime. Or, yesterday, the focused silence in the Toyota's back seat, as Cleo worked on her magnetic drawing board, before suddenly producing this sweet emblem of musical notes emanating from a flute: a silent, static melody that grew out of a brief ride on the highway:

Spaghetti heads and air heads

You might recall, you insightful and voracious reader you, that a few months ago I wrote about Cleo's fondness for a CD called Beethoven Lives Upstairs. Part children's story, part musical lesson, and part Viennese promotional literature, it's an appealing fictional epistolary account of a young boy's growing fondness for the quirky but talented composer who lets a room above his house. But it's also, it turns out, part of a series, and due to L.'s attentiveness and diligence, Cleo's now moved on to another entry in the group, called Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery.

Arguably, it's even better. It's certainly more relevant, as it's set in Venice, and it's fun to hear Cleo joyfully repeat references to monuments (such as the Bridge of Sighs) that she saw in person only a few weeks ago. It also does a nice job of integrating samples of Vivaldi's compositions with the story, which is a mystery that centers upon a talented orphaned girl with an unclear past. And, finally, it can also be rather funny - at least, on a plane that appeals to your resident four-year-old. Whenever Vivaldi chides his forgetful students for acting like spaghetti heads, I can hear a small laugh in the back of the car. The laugh, in turn, eventually gives way to experimentation, as Cleo tries to find comparably silly insults that can provoke a smile without being censored by whichever parent happens to be the target. Butt head? Not acceptable. Table head? Well, okay - although it leans towards the nonsensical, it's at least a funny image.

So imagine Cleo's delight when I taught her the phrase air head. I did it self-mockingly, after forgetting for the fifth or sixth time to unbutton a sun dress before trying to pull it over her head. I'm an air head, I said, and she immediately repeated the phrase.

But I think that Cleo, like Vivaldi, knows that terms like air head and spaghetti head are ultimately terms of affection more than they are degradations. At least, one of her recent pronouncements seems to imply as much. A few days ago, as I was buckling her into her car seat, Cleo looked at me meaningfully, and said, 'You know, you guys aren't dumb. And you're not mean, either."

I may be an air head. But I'm smart enough to know that little girls don't mind being called spaghetti heads, when they know that they're loved at the end of the day.