There’s no doubt, Alden is a strange bird. As her vocabulary expands and her verbal skills improve, we are afforded deeper insight into the ongoing carnival inside her head. She just sees things differently than the aging, jaded masses that surround her. As all kids do, I imagine.

A few examples:

Alden has recently discovered the high five, and takes great delight in sharing them with everyone she meets. Even inanimate objects. The other day during dinner, we witnessed her exchanging high fives with her spoon, both “up high,” and “down low.”

We haven’t taught her “way too slow,” yet, hoping to shield her from the inevitable onset of meanness for a bit longer at least.

Having been witness to a number of birthdays of late, Alden enjoys singing Happy Birthday, in any context, and with no regard to whether there is an actual birthday to celebrate. An example: in the midst of another recent meal, she sang happy birthday to her macaroni.

It was evident that the macaroni was moved.

Occasionally we stay at the playground until 8:00pm, when a nice man in a pickup comes by and suggests that it is time for us to leave. When this happens, I am forced to explain to my child that the playground is closed and that we have to go home, a thing she usually accepts with surprising grace. The other day we were at the playground and Alden suddenly declared that the playground was closed. It was 5:30. When I assured her that it was not, she steadfastly refused to believe it. She would not climb or slide or swing from that point forward.

Perhaps she knew something I didn’t? In any case, we went home.

Grandpa John and Grandma Judy gave Alden a toy laptop for her second birthday. It has a tiny LCD screen and a lot of buttons to push. Alden likes it a lot. She likes it so much that she has named it. She has named it “Grandpa Peter,” which sort of sounds like computer, I guess.

The thing is, she knows how to say computer. She knows that my laptop is a computer. But Grandpa Peter is Grandpa Peter. She will hear no arguments to the contrary.

I ask Alden what she’s thinking what she does these things, but her answer is never instructive. The problem is, she’s always on to something else, the events of the recent past as distant as her birth.

There’s just too much to do these days. Whether playing by the bay, . . .

. . . lounging in the pool, . . .

. . . shucking corn, . . .

. . . discovering the joys of watercolor, . . .

. . . or practicing helmet safety, . . .

. . . many of her motives are inscrutable to me.

But they all make perfect sense to her, it seems. And really, what else matters?

Luxuriating in a state of preliterate bliss, Kato is simple and transparent, or seems to be. The kid likes to swing, to smile, to take it all in.

It’s an approach I can understand. And one I envy.