Capriccio

I suppose that we all have, in our thoughts about any broad field, certain concepts that have never quite come into complete focus, or that remain only hazily defined. Reverse loans, value investing, chastity bonds: who really knows, beyond the brokers who share manhattans and alpha-male jibes at Trinity Place after a day of trading, what such terms mean? Or take musical terms: yeah, I'm pretty sure I know what a downbeat is, but a cantata? Scordatura? Not a clue. And capriccio? I've enjoyed many pizze cappricciose, but I had to turn to Merriam Wesbter to learn that in music the word denotes "an instrumental piece in free form, usually lively in tempo and brilliant in style."

Or, at least, that's the third meaning of the word. The first is more familiar: a fancy, or a whimsy. And, to learn that, I didn't have to open any dictionary. Rather, I just followed Cleo about the Patterson Park playground on a cool, sunny, windy Monday morning in mid-November. Clad in a flowered shirt, a white sweater, a pink hat and pastel blue pants over tights, Cleo wandered the largely empty playground in fine form. A couple of minutes were spent climbing onto a table and chairs that might have sat two large squirrels. She then tottered over to a rock, explored its cold surface, and next wandered towards an elevated bridge. From there we took a long detour to the playground door, an iron gate that occupied Cleo for about five minutes. Back again to the core of the playground, for a snack, and then a few minutes spent spreading a diaper cloth on the wood chips that surrounded the play area. None of the sequence following, as far as I could tell, any grand logic, but each of them in accord with a seemingly implicit inevitability. Rocks need to be felt, cloths spread. And, in the process, the meaning of capriccio became clear. Whimsical, lively, and brilliant in style. I wonder why it was ever less than clear to me.