Tiny Zen

Having been once before to the Children's Museum, today we returned for the Monday morning sing-a-long. I had forgotten what happens at the end, but Annalee had not. A few bars into the first song, "Wheels on the Bus," she looked hard into my eyes and said, "Bubbles?" It had been a few months since we were last there, and I was happy and proud that my daughter's memory was so acute. Nonetheless, it turned out that cajoling her through the rest of the suddenly dreary program was no mean feat. "Bubbles?" she said, every twenty or thirty seconds. "They're coming -- I promise," I intoned. When they did come, she stood a few feet from the bubble machine, and let hundreds of inch-diameter bubbles descend near and on her like snow. She neither shouted nor laughed, but simply exuded a Buddha-like sense that all was right with the world.