13-year-old girl: Why don’t they attack from the east? It’s not like Iran likes Iraq.
Adult male: Iran hates the West even more. They’d never let American forces enter the country.
13-year-old girl: Too bad. Iran is so way much bigger than Iraq, with so much more coastline. They could just march in from Kermanshah or something.
Adult male: Eh, yeah.
13-year-old girl: So why are they attacking from the south? Bagdad is more in the north. I mean, it’s in the central part, but closer to the north.
Adult male: Is it now?
13-year-old girl: Well, I mean, okay, Mosul and Arbil are the northern towns, and As Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk, but…
Adult male: Maybe the north is more mountainous or something. And those dang Turks… and Kurds… maybe they figure the Kurds will help out in the north… or the Turks…
13-year-old girl: Yeah, okay, the borders with Turkey and Iran are mountainous, I’ll grant you that…
Adult male: Don’t you have to study for a Latin test?

The kids are in bed. A fire flickers in the woodstove. A couple is on the sofa, husband reclined with head in wife’s lap. Wife runs fingers through his hair.

Wife: I guess I like the new haircut. It was just hard to see, you know, because it was already so short.
Husband: Mmm.
Wife: It’s nice to get a haircut now and then.
Husband: Mmm.
Wife: Do you still have any of that hair growth tonic I gave you?
Husband: Honey…
Wife [who works in marketing]: No, it’s still plenty thick. I just mean, it’s probably the tonic that keeps it thick, you know?
Husband: Sigh.

Thank you, Arthur.

It burns me that I can’t tell from looking at sheet music what it should sound like, I told my cello teacher. He assured me that was normal for someone who hasn’t even been playing two years yet. He said not to be too impatient.

His cello class is having a recital on April first. He invited me to play something. I said I’d rather sit in the audience and relax. I didn’t say it, but I think I’d rather [insert some awful experience here]. There are limits to my masochism. Hopefully next year, though.

He told me how important it is to play in front of an audience. I’m convinced he’s completely right about that.

I’m now learning a piece where the rhythm gets tricky in the middle. It goes from one rhythm to another in the middle of the piece. So far, I’ve been concentrating so hard on bowing and fingering the notes, that the rhythm has suffered. “Try tapping your toe,” he told me. So I did.

Tapping wasn’t helping much. He observed. He gave me pointers on tapping my toe. “Don’t lift it up so high,” he said. So I tried again, this time not moving my foot so much as I tapped my toe. “Better,” he said. We worked on toe-tapping for a while. By the end of the lesson, I could tap my toe like a pro.

When I arrived home, I noticed my bow was missing. I must have forgotten it at the school, focussed as I was on my toe.

Do words matter?

The wee one turns out to be better company at an art museum than her big sister was. At least she didn’t touch any pictures. I had the larger one at the Vienna Art History Museum once; she must have been about three. She put her hand right on an old master. No alarms went off. She was in my arms at the time; I just turned and sauntered off, a jaunty whistle on my lips. That was a bad age for her, she pulled the emergency brake on a subway car at that age as well. Also on my watch.

There were quite a few people out looking at art Sunday, including a few kids with neat hair colors and a woman who looked like an angry man trapped in a woman’s body, but slowly working his way out.

The younger one did get bored quickly. She is such an artist herself, I’d expected she’d have more patience with the art. So we went next door and crawled around on the exhibits at the fire department museum. No one yelled at us so I guess it was okay.

Hanging out at the UN magazine rack today, I carefully studied the cover of a Vanity Fair. It depicted a gaggle of Hollywood stars. I prayed I would age like Jack Nicholson and not like Harrison Ford, who looks more like one of my aunts every year.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.