Tambor at Friday Nights at OMCA, Friday evening

What do they know of the Friday Nights at OMCA who only their kids know? CLR James made Kipling’s line about England about cricket, but both were about what focusing only on the thing itself can tell you, or can't, about the vast external context outside of it that gives it meaning. To me, Friday Nights at OMCA is a field outside filled with kids and their parents who give you knowing smiles, it’s a natural history museum with a new-ish kids section (go through the tunnel, put your backpack over only one arm, chat with a stranger about how bilingual your and their kids are), and it's food trucks with a dozen styles of food but you’ll only buy French fries, chicken nuggets, hamburger.

I keep going to Friday Nights at OMCA with my kids, and barely seeing it, because you can bring your kids there to see it while you see them. You can let the kite string get long, because as long as you can still see your kids—even if one of them is up on the stairs at the back of the field and the other is edging forward around the front, up to the stage, and you have to constantly re-triangulate to keep both bodies in the same three-body problem—you can know that, in a place as packed with parents as this, nothing can really happen that won’t basically be fine.

I wanted Bululú to be as good as Dos Four had been last month, and maybe they were, but I have no idea. My kids hadn’t vibed as much with the Oaktown Jazz Workshop a few weeks ago (though appreciating jazz renditions of “baby shark” and “wheels on the bus”) and the Liberated Culture Celebration had been a little too much concept and not enough beat. But Dos Four had been so good that I’d been tempted to attribute it to the words “latin,” “rhythms,” “dance,” and “vibrant energy,” and since whoever writes copy for Friday Nights at OMCA had used the same template, it made me think that maybe tonight would slap as hard, or maybe just that little bilingual twins appreciated hearing Spanish.

Was it? Did it? Do they? Who knows. We ate French fries, and the strawberries and pouch and granola bars we brought from home—after having pan con peanut butter in the car—but when the noise and confusion and vibrant energy became too much for one twin, we walked back through the part of the museum where you can look at the fish, climb the jade rock, and gawk past the steps where dance class happens—where when we had walked through the first time, the dancers had been tentative and concentrating on new steps, but by the second time, the same faces had gone smiling and relaxed—and anyway, to get away from the tambor, we went back inside into the part of the museum they call “the kitchen” where my kids played with trains, discovered an old friend (Brown Bear in Chinese), and fed play food to a delightful Indonesian grandfather whose daughter told me, later, that he loves “kind children,” but whose gentle warm energy makes me suspect he finds a lot of “kind children” wherever he goes.

I barely remember the music. But when we got home, the twin who had wanted to get away from the noise, the crowd, the hubbub, asked his mother if we had a tambor in the house. We don’t, but we will.