I brought my teddy bear and my lip gloss

We saw the Kronos Quartet perform this morning at a family matinée in the strangely void neighborhood banked with stone walkways and blunted trees near City Hall. The civic heart of San Francisco is cold and impersonal; the bodies of the tired are draped over benches. Occasionally a skate-boarder skids by. And then it is flooded for brief but frequent intervals with ladies holding up handfuls of skirt to keep the hems from dragging on the way from dinner in nearby Hayes Valley to the opera, their gloved hands resting delicately in the crook of an elbow, their minds on higher things. If the concert halls have made the area into a sort of destination it is an accidental or arbitrary one. Patrons go where the music is but they go like tourists, seeding a second economy to cater to their tastes that somehow doesn't ever bleed into the local community itself.

We were all surprised that the Kronos Quartet was involved in a family anything: avant-garde chamber music hardly seems like a big draw for the Sesame Street set, but the hall was packed and out of every other seat peaked a little head with a little bowl of hair on top, barely high enough to see over the chair in front of them, let alone the person sitting in it. The Quartet played an endearing hour-long set of songs from around the world. They introduced each song with a short blurb about where it came from that was pitched to the level of those in the audience who maybe had not yet seen a globe.

The second song was from China. "This is played when people fall in love," the first violinist said, before sliding into a tune that was like a metal see-saw, balancing in the rain. Notes fell all around. Not when people are in love; not when they're engaged, not when they get married: when they fall. But when do they?

The eerie spatter of melody suggested a national string quartet charged with divining in which park someone is standing right now with someone else under a tree, wishing they could reach up and break off a leaf-shaped piece of light from between the leaves. A wandering ensemble carrying their violins from village to village hoping to catch the exact moment a woman looks up from a collar she is pinning to the line, to see the cloth go slack in her hands, to follow her fleeing gaze. They wouldn't march up and introduce themselves. They would choose a spot off to the side, almost beyond the frame. No one would leave tips, recognizing them as state employees. The drip of notes would be steady and their bowed heads would bob gently in time.

At the end of the concert, the children were invited to come up on stage and ask questions. A little girl tottered to the microphone. "I brought my teddy bear today and my lip gloss," she said. It was a question, and the answer was Tinkerbell. Children, it turns out, are natural surrealists, and perhaps the best audience for contemporary music after all.