Back?

I went with my family to San Diego this weekend to visit my brother-in-law, his wife, and their holophrastic 20-month-old daughter.

There's a poetry to kids in that stage of language development, as they reduce the complex world they live they experience to just a single word.

Things going badly for your favorite team? We could do a complex statistical analysis of the phenomenon, or we could just say:

"Uh-oh".

My niece had a vocabulary of about 30-50 words. My favorite was "beaut". "Beaut" comes from "beautiful" I guess, but to her, it means "balloon".

Such innocence doesn't last long. Back in April, I believed the A's would be like those beauts, floating with grace and ease, filling us with a sense of wonder and magic, capable of defying the concept of falling, helping us believe there is something pure and simple and good in the world.

Eventually, though, we come to learn that even the best of beauts go bad.