We had been warned in advance. It usually comes at around the age of 11/2, we heard, so at 20 months Alena was, if anything, a little late, but when it came it was with the force of religious conversion.
"Alena likes Anpanman," my wife informed me.
An understatement. A threshold had been crossed, and what had perhaps been only meaningless flitting colors on the TV screen had become breathtakingly real. I'm not sure if Alena had ever even eaten an anpan (a sweet roll filled with bean jam), but the adventures of the round-faced superhero became an obsession overnight, the great, consuming passion of her life. Woody and Buzz, her former favorites, were relegated to the shelf -- high-tech computer animation defeated, crushed by old-fashioned flat images.