Griffin woke up early this morning and intercepted me as I was finishing getting dressed. He wondered whether he had had a dream about a big “boom” that shook his bed or if it had really happened. In the darkness, in Sarah’s sewing room, we reviewed the facts. Had I had heard the boom? Was the dog next door barking? Did Maggie wake up? We determined that it was probably a dream, but it might have been a Boomba: a monster made of tires that can make really loud booming sounds. (This is the first I’ve heard of a Boomba, but Griffin knows many things that I don’t.)

Griff wanted to come downstairs and help me with breakfast. And he was a great helper—putting dishes away, starting the toaster, and asking many probing questions about my breakfast cooking technique. (Daddy, why don’t you put all the butter in the pan to watch it melt? What would happen if we turned the toaster to broil?)

Then, Daddy, can we listen to music? I put on my trusty Eels mix, and Griff sat with me while I ate, asking many questions about the songs and repeating the tracks that he liked. I explained that the lyrics had lots of inappropriate words, so he couldn’t sing them at school or at friend’s houses. He accepted this without question.

A few minutes later, someone peering in the window would have seen Griffin, in his PJs, and me, in my school clothes and backpack, pirouetting around the dining room, belting out the sublime refrain from Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues:

“Goddamn right it’s a beautiful day!”

And it is.