Playing with such beauty

Now that she's 3 and a half, Cleo can - and I don't think I'm simply playing the proud parent here - do a number of things rather well. She can say the word invisible without a hitch; she can read several words (and, on, and forare right in her wheelhouse), and she can tell you that one plus two equals three. She can confidently execute an arabesque or kneel and kick with both legs, like a donkey; she can tell you that Cape Town is in South Africa. She can tie, as you see above, a rather thorny knot. And, if you're inclined to trust her, she can see in the dark even better than a cat or dog. 3-year-olds, it turns out, are pretty remarkable.

But, happily, she can't quit do everything quite perfectly, quite yet. She still grows frustrated, to the point of tears, in trying to stuff cards into envelopes, and we regularly find ample splotches of yogurt on her blouses. Stretches of Finding Nemo - the references, for instance, to a 12-step program for sharks attempting to quite eating fish - remain incomprehensible to her, and she still requests help in pulling tights onto her little legs.

Why, though, do I say happily? Well, for a couple of reasons. The first is the simpler: her occasional blunders seem to help in teaching her humility. None of us, of course, can do everything that we wish we could; learning that, as a kid, helps to offset some of the wild confidence of the 3-year-old. Cleo's often emphatic that she can run faster than me, and that she is as tall as L.; that's fine, but it's even more palatable when she adds, in her matter-of-fact tone, that she won't be able to swim, or take ballet lessons, until she's 4. Or drive until you're 16, I think, but the point's the same: you're growing older, but it's a lengthy process, and you never do learn to do quite everything.

But then there's this, too. After seeing the gifted violinist Jascha Heifitz, George Bernard Shaw sat down to write a deeply appreciative, and apparently concerned, note. Here it is:

My dear Mr. Heifitz,
My wife and I were overwhelmed by your concert. If you continue to play with such beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can play with such perfection without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to play something badly every night before going to bed...

Occasionally, as Cleo readies for bed in the evenings, I think of Shaw's missive, and of his message. It's a great thing to be confident; it's wonderful, too, to play beautifully. But there's no need for perfection. Indeed, our sometime stumbles may be a sort of redemption in their own right: a beautiful proof of our humanness.