Taking stock

With a bottle of prosecco in the fridge, and 2010 calendars scattered about the house, and a slate of meaningful AFC games on tap this coming Sunday, we at 1202 Sabina are currently all about looking forward. Folks, tonight we will be the change we want to see: slightly tipsy, perhaps, but full of love and resolutions and the persistent hope that this year really will see a resurgence of heavy metal. We'll buy the new Mastodon album, I promise, if it's worth buying.

But the last day of the year, of course, is also about looking back. And so even as we prepare to raise our glasses, and to ring out the old, we're feeling Janus-faced. 2009 was, after all, a pretty doggone neat year. From the streets of Kairouan to miniature golf near Paw Paw, W. Va, we saw some neat sights. And then, too, a little girl came into our life.

Like 99 percent of the nation's newspaper section editors, I'm tempted, then, to do a year-end best-of list. But let's give it a slight twist: let's simply use today as a microcosm of the year. After all, I spent a good part of the day reading about early Islamic architecture and drinking coffee: two activities that probably consumed a healthy slice of my 2009 pie chart. Too, there was a lovely two-inch frosting of snow on our lawn when we woke up: a reminder that the year was filled with moments of unexpected beauty. True to form, L. was both beatific mother, generous sister, and unpredictably ambitious cook: while I type this, she's making chicken something or other. There was great music in the background: Beethoven's Trio in D Major offered a stately background while I read on the Timurids.

And then, as in so many days over the past seven months, Cleo was at the center of things. We took her for a walk in the morning, enjoying her cool, been-there demeanor as flakes fell about her. I managed to get a series of baby giggles - rarer now, as she's seemingly becoming more discerning in her humor - with a series of raspberries on the back of her neck. L. nursed her; we both sat her, in turns, on our thighs while she opened her mouth wide, like a tiny bird, towards spoonfuls of pear, and apple, and rice. She managed to crawl backwards, for reasons unclear, for about a foot, and she showed a sudden fascination with a radiator.

In other words, it's been a full day, and a full year. And here's hoping that the next one is just as good.

First syllables

Home today, after a wunnerful six-day trip south for the holidays - a trip that was illuminated by the generosity of friends and families, that was bookended by two stops at Virginia Cracker Barrels, and that felt, at a few points, like a blog tour might feel, if there were such a thing. What do I mean by that? I'll explain, by means of thank-yous: thanks to Janet, for the remarkably kind words about the blog; thanks to Dad, for the Satie and the Beethoven, which will soon make their way, surely, onto the Cleo Top Ten playlist; thanks to Jaro, for the warm encouragement; thanks to Alex and Faith, for giving us a place to stay, and for the wireless that made the last post possible; and thanks to L., for the hardbound volume (a lovely gift, although you, L., remain my favorite embodiment of memories shared). Six days, folks, and I must have met half of my readership. Try that, John Grisham.

But - he says, suddenly remembering his place - this blog ain't about me; it's about the little one. And the little one is suddenly beginning to vocalize, in patterns that might be called intentional or recognizable. While it's true that she does still cry rather regularly, and that at other times she can sound quite like a yeti, as my brother pointed out after several of her miniscule roars, she's also been practicing her mas and her bas.

No big surprise there; those are among the first syllables that most babies utter, and it's usually around the six- or seven-month mark that they start to be said with any sense of intentionality. But, still, it's really endearing to here her in her crib, long before sunrise, starting to wake up and mouthing what sounds like a devout chant of ma, ma. And tonight, she even participated in a very brief conversation: I offered the inquisitive opening (ma, ma, ma?) and she, in turn, offered a reasonable response (ma, ma).

Do the sounds mean anything? It's hard to believe that they do; she utters them at such varied times, and in such different company. But, still, as we realized a few days ago, even such a small arsenal of sounds should allow her to:

1. call for L., when she needs a good hug from her mama.
2. effectively imitate a sheep.
3. predict the winner of the BCS title game (so long as it's Ba-ma).

All of which, it seems to me, is rather impressive, for a little girl who just went to sleep at 5:45.

The letter C

Today, dear readers, let's think about the letter C.

C, of course, in this context is for Cleo - Cleo the baby, who is now six and a half months old, who has spent a fraction of the past week practicing her first intentionally vocalized syllable (maa, maa, maa), who still approaches the world by trying to pick it up and then put it in her mouth, and who is starting to crawl backwards, in an apparent first step of sorts - an awkward and inverted step - towards moving from place to place.

But C is also for Chapel Hill, where the three of us are spending the holidays. And it's thus for the generosity of two friends, who have lent us their lovely house for several nights, and it's for two wonderful sets of grandparents, who watch Cleo wriggle, and hold her, and offer gifts and open arms and unconditional smiles, and it's for the memories prompted by any return home (L. remembering 411's whole wheat pasta with chicken, and me, today, recalling afternoons spent playing video games at what used to be the Pump House), and for 47 degrees, and for not having, necessarily, to lock your car when you park.

And C is for Christmas: for the 12 Days of Christmas displays that kept Cleo entertained this morning as she and I walked around a pre-dawn Chapel Hill, and for parking meters covered for the holidays, and for breakfasts with Santa, and for brothers flying in from New York, and sisters flying in from Chicago, and for baristas in Santa hats, and tins of shortbread, and pecan tassies, and fudge.

And, finally, C, say the Romans, is for 100. In cricket, 100 overs represent a century. And what of a hundred posts in a blog? I don't know if there is a term for such an odd combination of egotism, verbosity, and perseverance, but, regardless, this is the hundredth in my proffered series of meditations on Cleo, and I'm thankful, deeply thankful, to that little girl for so much fun over seven months - and thankful to you, reader, if you've read any of the previous 99.

The unexplainable

That was a tough last entry, folks, and the overnight ratings from L.A. are down, down, down. Too serious, they said, and nothing about music. So let's grab the steering wheel and get this thing back on track.

In A Primer for Critics, George Boas observes that “A Neapolitan sixth usually causes an agreeable feeling, but not one person out of ten can recognize a Neapolitan sixth and no one whatsoever knows why it should be so moving.”

Or, in my case, knows what the heck a Neapolitan sixth is. (Learning, from Wikipedia, that it's "a major chord built on the lowered [supertonic] scale degree" does not help. That's something like explaining that Merv can be found in the Murghab river delta).

But I think I know, nevertheless, exactly what Boas is trying to identify, as a phenomenon. It's this: the illogical but absolutely true and even ravishing pleasure that I can get from touching Cleo's absolutely smooth little cheeks. Why should it be so moving? No doubt, the evolutionary biologists probably have their explanations, and Freud would probably like to weigh in, too. But I discount, preemptively, all of their reasons. No one whatsoever knows, really, why it should be so moving. And yet it is.

Original sin, part II

After reading yesterday's post, L. told me that perhaps I was coming down a little hard on Cleo. Evil? Ahab? Really? I mean, she's only six months old. And, yes, well, that's true. But then, L. hadn't yet come face to face with the black sludge (as I did, again, at 4:40 last night). Sure, we all know, in the abstract, that Everyone Poops, but let's just say that infants have a way of doing so that's rather endearing. And Cleo, I guess, is no longer an infant.

But that's just a long way, really, of saying that I'd meant yesterday's post to be lighthearted. And lighthearted for a reason, for shortly after Cleo's passage from infancy we both came face to face with something much more sobering than a soiled diaper. With temperatures in the mid-50s, and an afternoon before us, we walked over to Whole Foods, for some salmon. Nothing very special there; that grocery store is, for reasons largely geographic (we're hemmed in on the other three sides by large roads), a cross between an oasis and an amusement park. But yesterday afternoon, it was also somehow on edge. As Cleo and I neared the checkout counter, I saw a number of the cashiers conferring, and standing rather nervously next to their registers. And then I looked down - Cleo, in her stroller, was simply looking at the coffee counter, as far as I could tell - and saw a man sprawled on the floor, on his back, with a halo of blood around his head.

He'd fallen, apparently, and hit his head on some sharp surface. I didn't pursue details - why add to an awful scene? - but as we walked to the far end of the store, we heard two employees note that he had moved, and was thus alive. The manager called, over the p.a. system, for a doctor. And a few minutes later, as we left in a stunned sort of haze, the EMT team arrived in a blare of sirens. I don't think we'll ever know, for sure, the rest of the story.

But why, regardless, do such things happen? What logic, what existential or religious logic, could explain a man doing something as benign as shopping suddenly coming face to face with death? As I noted yesterday, some of our most cherished stories emphasize the sudden appearance of threats, or mortality, in our lives. Snakes wander into Hercules' crib; the Fates hover over the threads; Deus vult. But, still, whichever narrative you choose, the basic question remains: Why?

This father does not yet have an answer to that question. But I'm open to suggestions. And I'm open to the idea that suggestions can occur, like the tragedies that necessitate them, in the most unexpected places. A few hours after we left Whole Foods, I took Cleo to the doctor, for the last of her 6-month immunizations. As we made our way towards the building, we passed a woman, who looked at Cleo, and simply said, aloud, "Look at God's precious angel."

Serpents, angels: we navigate a seemingly pedestrian world that is interrupted, occasionally, by the possibility that we see only the surface of a much larger whole.

Original sin, part I

It's fair to say that the books that we've been reading to Cleo probably won't ever make it onto the reading list of a graduate seminar on narrative complexity. Instead of a plot, one book gives itself entirely over to pictures of fruits, and vegetables, and animals. Another places Teddy the Bear in a number of reasonably interesting settings, but we never learn how he arrived at the breakfast table, or where he chooses to drive his nice red car. In fact, the closest we've gotten to any real sense of narrative conflict is in That's Not My Dragon, where we're allowed to look at a range of dragons that allegedly don't belong to us - the text is quite emphatic about that, in fact - before we reach the climax, or the resolution, on the final page, when we see our dragon, with its scaly wings.

But, as one of mankind's oldest narratives reminds us, into every Eden comes a serpent. In time, Teddy at his table is no longer enough; we want motives, or tensions, or (if we're French) frisson, and (if we're French academics) obtuse semiotic relationships. Complexity, in short, eventually enters the picture. And it often does so in shocking ways. Captain Ahab finally comes into view, or Judas decides to accept the silver pieces. We look to the sky, and suddenly see the imperial star fleet approaching Tatooine.

Today, our six-month-old narrative arrived at such a moment. As you may remember, Cleo's been trying solid foods for about a week now. She's downed a few tablespoons of boiled pear, and nibbled rather critically on some strained squash - all while offering a range of expressions that range from plainly disgusted to wavering, and uncertain. But if she was withholding opinion regarding these new foods, she was also withholding something else: her poop, that is. For three days, nothing.

Until today, when the dam finally burst. A better writer, perhaps, could come up with an original description; for my part, I'll simply refer you to George Orwell's description of Sheffield's slums, in The Road to Wigan Pier: "And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begin smelling gas." Or begun to throw up alternative smells, as roadblocks: after tossing the heroic diaper that had tried, valiantly, to stem the tide, and after giving Cleo the most vigorous bath I've ever given her, I retreated into the back rooms with her, and began to remember where we keep the incense.

Now is a good time to reconsider the photo, above. Look at her: she sleeps, untroubled, scent of baby, angelic, as though made of cotton and milk. And yet, I now realize, that center could not hold. The story was simply too dull, and evil had to enter the picture. And now it has done so, and the complexion of our tale is irrevocably changed. There are forces of darkness, folks, and they suddenly crowd our horizon. We will remain strong; we will continue to feed her pears. But we now do so in a world that is no longer innocent.

Da solo (sola)

My apologies, folks, for the diminished pace of late: I've been trying to gracefully steer my fall courses towards that final landing strip (classes end this coming Friday), while also preparing the first few class meeting for the spring (which has meant, among other things, reading the Qur'an for the first time). Add to that the fact that I spent most of my word hoard on a conference talk and a revised article, both due earlier this month, and am blocking out a 1,500-word exhibition review due next week, and you'll begin to see why I haven't won any recent Blogger of the Week awards.

But here's one for you, written while eating a sandwich, before driving to campus. Although it's true that Cleo is rarely more than a foot from either me or L. at any point in the day, there are still a few rare moments, every now and then, when she's clearly doing her own thing, and seems almost oblivious to our presence. The reasons for her distraction vary - it might be a good ceiling fan, or a bout with a stuffed something or other - but the effect is always rather touching: there's a unique appeal about watching her simply involve herself, without depending on us or gauging our reaction. Think about it: we'll be driving L. to work, and there will might be a happy occupied silence in the back, and then suddenly a little shriek of excitement, or a long string of carefully rendered nonsense syllables.

In an essay called "Patrimony," Michael Hofmann once observed, of his son, that “I feel he exists most strongly when he is independent of me in some tiny way. (My looking at him does nothing to help establish him.) When he lifts his hands to touch the tufts of hair over his ears… or taps at his head with his wooden hammer to test the effect. Then he is agent and acted upon, and I am nowhere.” Or, if not nowhere, I'd add, perhaps in a delightful somewhere: in the role of parent, to a child who's becoming an individual.

That's not to say that I'm aiming at a completely detached or voyeuristic parenting style. Not at all; in fact, most of my experience so far has been characterized by a virtually total immersion. There's no distance, literally or symbolically, and so I spend much of the day with Cleo in my arms, or against my chest, and milk stains on my sweater. And, sure, there's an appeal to that closeness, too. It's the appeal, roughly speaking, that Ellen Johnson once noted in the paintings of Jackson Pollock: “Being in their actual presence is somewhat like sitting in the front row at a symphony concert – one feels mixed up with the music, physically involved in the very process of making it.” That's a good description, I think, of parenting an infant.

And it's also a good explanation of why it's nice, occasionally, to hear or to see Cleo establishing her own independence. Sitting in the front row can be wonderful. But so, too, can listening to the absorbed cellist from the back row.

When the levee breaks

It often happens suddenly, and dramatically. After writing few compositions in the previous years, for example, Allen Sapp resigned as Dean of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, in 1980, and a "torrent of ideas" (in the words of Alan Green) suddenly came to him, resulting in a number of his best-known works, written over the span of a few months. Or Paul Hindemith, a 23-year-old when World War I came to a bloody close, suddenly embarked on a whirlwind of activity, writing what Arnold Whittall once called a "flood of compositions." A change of career, a long-awaited armistice - and the floodgates are open.

For Cleo, like many babies, the floodgates seem to open, at least temporarily, around the six-month mark. For several weeks, she's made few dramatic strides: sure, she's more comfortable on her belly, she's getting close to sleeping through the night, and she's increasingly able to grab objects with strength and confidence. But these are changes in degree, really, rather than radical novelties.

Or, at least, that's what I thought when I got home today, and played with her for an hour and a half. Suddenly it was like dealing with an entirely new person. The nanny reported that she'd eaten a tablespoon of pear puree: that's big news, after she'd offered only bored expressions to my lovin' spoonfuls of yam, and peas, and had actively rejected Lisa's proffered zucchini. And then Cleo was sitting up, ramrod straight, for minutes at a time, after months of wobbling like a reed in a strong wind.

Does she know that she's changing? I'm not sure, but I'd guess the answer's yes. For weeks, she seems to have been in a sort of cocoon, evolving, and biding her time. Now the moment's come, I gather, for a sort of emergence. So why not simply enjoy it? As Thoreau wrote, in Walden, "Life in us is like the water in a river." Both have their own logic, and their own pace, and they pursue their own destinations.

The moral of the story

Here's a good story for you: Borius Goldovsky, the pianist and conductor, was once leading a rather tentative pupil through a Brahms capriccio that's apparently often used as a instructional piece. After she played a certain note midway through the composition, he stopped her, and told her to correct her mistake. She, however, pointed to the score, and said that she’d played what was written. Goldovsky, dubious, checked the score, only to find that indeed she had – but that there was an apparent misprint in the music. Later, curious about the source of the printing mistake, Goldovsky eventually looked up other editions of the score, and found that every one of them contained that same misprint, substituting a G-natural for a G-sharp. While widespread, though, the error had apparently never caused problems in live performances, as professional pianists had simply inferred from the local context that the intended note was a G-sharp. In other words, professionals looked through the error, not even noticing it; it took an amateur to actually take the mistake at face value.

If I were Malcolm Gladwell, I'd likely work this little (but true! I promise) anecdote into my latest top-of-the-list tapestry of socio- and psychological observations. I'm not, though - the hair I've got left is less muppet-like, for one thing, and I'm not nearly as big on the public speaking circuit as he is - so I'll simply massage it into a simple parental truism. It may take a village to raise a child, but it can take a child to point to the fallacies in our accustomed logic. Why is the sky blue? they ask, and we wonder at how rarely we actually look at the vault above us. Or, long before they can even ask questions, they voraciously stuff paper receipts into their mouths. And us? We take the receipt, and throw it out, and neither look at nor taste it. We look through the thing, for years, until a tiny, clumsy pair of hands shows us what it really is.

Ideals

New parents don't always speak very openly to one another. Sure, they'll occasionally admit that they're not sleeping very much, or they'll voice some uncertainty about whether they should be imposing a stricter schedule, or making the change to solid foods. But generally - and I suppose this blog is just another example of the tendency - they speak in rather rosy tones. The baby's always thriving; things are great; life is good.

Which is is, of course. But every now and then a parent does speak with complete honesty, and it's almost as though a dam has broken. That, at least, is how we felt when a good friend of ours recently expressed some relief that his two small children are now in a day-care program. Really, he noted, they're not very exciting conversational partners. And, he went on, about an hour or an hour a half a day with them is probably enough.

Wow! Was this that rarest of all individuals, one honest enough to call the king naked? Or was he simply (we wondered, like sheep now unsure about why we flock) something less than the ideal parent? Was he saying what we wanted to, but felt we couldn't, or was he saying something that probably shouldn't be said? Or both?

In thinking about this, L. and I didn't really ever answer any of those big questions, but we did try to tackle his implicit question. What is the ideal length of time, per day, with a baby who can't yet talk? Is it, as the saints of motherhood might claim, as much as one can get? Is it whatever the baby seems to need? Or is it, posits Homer S., the time between the football game and the trip to the donut store?

In his A Short Guide to Long Play, Martyn Goff suggests that the perfect length of an overture is between 5 and 10 minutes: such a duration allows a composer to establish a range of ideas without detracting from the body of the piece. Similarly, in his Radio: The Book, Steve Warren argues that the ideal length for a demo, for prospective on-air d.j.s, is between 7 and 10 minutes: enough to give the producers a taste of one's work, but not so much as to seem pretentious. And of course the song most often forwarded as the greatest of all rock tunes, Stairway to Heaven, clocks in at 8 minutes and a second. There's something about an 8-minute span.

Okay - but surely other forms of activity demand other lengths? Well, sure. Take, for instance, an unsigned piece in a 1958 issue of Current Opinion, which wondered what the ideal length of a novel should be, and concluded that many prefer books that take a reader no more than around 4 hours (which meant, in turn, about 35,000 to 40,000 words). Admittedly, the writer added, there are many (including A. Conan Doyle) who say that a successful novel demands a longer form - that a novel, in other words, should last a reader a good 12 or 15 hours, at a minimum. But, he concluded, "under existing conditions, reading, as people are reading, simply for pleasure or recreation, the short novel holds out an undoubted attraction."

I like that phrasing. And I wonder if it could be massaged into a summary of attitudes towards parenting - something like, "under existing conditions, parenting, as people are parenting, for both love and a vast range of other variables, is often attractive if..." If what, though? Well, if they're working Australian dads, I recently learned, they probably spend around three to four hours with their infant. That's pretty generous: another study estimated that Aka fathers (who are nomadic pygmies) only hold their infants for around 10 to 20 minutes per day. Maybe they spend the rest of their day reading long novels by Doyle.

In any event, put L. and me down as comfortably Australian. No offense to Cleo, but we both felt that around 3 to 4 hours of one-on-one time with her, per day, might be ideal. Which, when you realize that Cleo still sleeps for roughly 14 hours per day, works pretty well. Add in a little bit of full-family time, and there's a complete 24-hour day, with no hard feelings. But also, we might add, with little time to perfect that d.j. demo we've been working on...

Finding it out

Think about it: for nearly six months now, everywhere that Cleo has been is somewhere she's been taken. That is, instead of actively going somewhere (for Cleo can't even crawl, not yet), she is always somewhere she's been carried, rolled, or driven. And, generally speaking, that process doesn't involve any active consent. Sure, once or twice I've steered away from a destination if she seems especially upset by it (usually her bedroom, at non-nap times; once a lovely park, for reasons that lay, inaccessible, buried in the depths of a 4-month-old brain). But, on the whole, she simply goes with the flow. Or, more specifically, with her two parents.

Which puts, it seems to me, a certain amount of pressure on us. It's something like the eternal predicament of the tour guide: we don't want to wear our charges out, but we also don't want them going home and then having to answer the relatives' disbelieving questions: "What, you didn't went to London and didn't know about the Soane Museum? You traveled to Slovakia and never made it to the painted wooden houses of Cicmany? Your guide didn't know about the juice bars of Aleppo? But they make the best smoothies in all of Syria," they'll say, and our clients will hang their heads. Or, in Cleo's case, will tug in a vaguely disconsolate way at her right ear.

But, at this point, another, broader analogy suggests itself. The other night, in a brief moment of what might be called reverie (or, less generously, wool-gathering), I began to think that the way in which we experience music, over the course of our lives, is something like the way in which Cleo has experienced the world. That is, it's a largely passive process. We turn on the radio, and hear a piece by Brahms, or - if we're 12 and we're really lucky - by Cinderella, or Ratt. A friend lends us a CD by Natalie Merchant, thinking that we'll like it. Or maybe a jazz act comes to town: we can choose whether or not to go, but we're still largely at the mercy of their tour itinerary. If they hadn't come to the mid-Atlantic, we might never have seen them.

Obviously, as our tastes mature, we can do some active searching. We might, if we're in a Nick Hornby novel, wander into a Camden record store and ask for suggestions that are similar to the music we like (but we'll likely, if we're in a Hornby novel, be mocked, or even thrown out of the store). Or we might, in recent years, visit one of several online sites designed to point us to work in genres we enjoy.

But even these processes, are - aren't they? - largely contingent ones. We depend on the advice of others, or on increasingly nuanced marketing techniques. And, all the while, even as we're led to various musical monuments, we may get an occasional random glance of something greater. I still remember sitting in a the Daily Cafe in New Haven in 1997 and hearing Dead Can Dance on the stereo. I still remember coming across the music of Thievery Corporation while searching for music for our wedding reception, in 2006. These were deeply powerful moments of discovery for me, and they were totally unplanned. (Or at least mostly unplanned: a small part of me always sensed that hanging out at the Daily might make me cooler. But I sat in the front, away from the really cool smokers in the back...).

So: does Cleo have comparable moments? Maybe, although it's really hard to tell. Sometimes she grabs at a leaf, or simply rides in contemplative silence, or falls asleep. I take these as signs that she's in, at least temporarily, the right place. But there must be moments, too, when she senses that there's still more out there. And perhaps wonders if her guide can get her there.

Flying

If I was a contestant on Family Feud, and Richard Dawson had just kissed all of the female members of my extended family, and the next category on the board came up, and it was Why People Listen to Music, well, my top answer would probably be, To Relax, or To Feel Good. But if I was answering for myself, rather than trying to predict the tastes of the hoi polloi, I might go with something a little more subtle - such as, to be carried away from the immediate present, and, often, into the past.

For isn't that part of the reason that 97.9, or WBJC, or whatever's in your CD player right now, appeals? Turn it on, turn it up, and you're suddenly somewhere else - either in an abstract sense, as you ride a wave of Bollywood polyphony, or in a nostalgic sense, as you listen to that old Chris De Burgh song that you loved when you were 13.

But of course music's not the only tool that allows us to travel in such lovely vicarious ways. I'll resist the temptation to point out that you're doing something similar in simply reading this, but you can probably think of other analogies, as well. Really, such options are all around us. Just last week, for instance, Cleo and I peered down into the Jones Falls and saw a small group of male hooded mergansers (see the picture above). They were simply preening, and floating, but their very presence in Baltimore in late November suggested migrations and flights south. And then, too, I drove Cleo out to the airport recently on a rainy late morning, as we simply looked for an interesting place to walk, and to learn. But once in an airport, even as a mere pedestrian, who can resist looking at the large tables of outbound flights, and thinking, That could be me, on the flight to Miami.

I chatted briefly with the server at Starbucks this morning, and she mentioned that the turn in the weather had her thinking about going south. Where would you go? I asked. Somewhere, she said, south of the equator.

A fair answer, to be sure - but in small ways, isn't she already there?

Thanksgiving

I've learned a lot of neat things about my wife's capacity for generosity and love over the past five and a half months, but one of the most concise and indelible images of her natural tendency towards warmth came to me on the very first day that we were parents. I left the hospital room to get some coffee, I think, and returned to find Cleo asleep and L., still in bed and still pale from the delivery, and clearly exhausted after having been awake for roughly 40 hours, beginning to draw up a list of the folks at the hospital to whom she wanted to send thank-you cards.

Since then, that list has only grown longer, as friends, and family members, and even relative strangers have been remarkably generous towards us and our tiny daughter. And while we've tried to be good about thanking everyone for their thoughtfulness, of course we've sometimes, in the haste of the day, not quite phrased things as fully or as creatively as we'd hoped to. Or, in a few cases, we may have forgotten entirely.

So let's devote this day's blog entry to a few further thanks. Thanks, Holly, for the lovely knit wool hat, and thanks, Robin, for cluing us in to the late-night virtues of a pink lightbulb. Thanks, Tasha, for the Baby Bjorn, which - although you'll remember I was completely flummoxed by it last Christmas, when I tried to put it on backwards - I've now worn for at least 150 hours, with Cleo pressed tight against my chest. Thanks, Tripp and Mara, for late summer invites to the neighborhood pool, and thanks, Shannon, and Melissa, and Steve, and Liz, for giving up your evenings to babysit and let us remember what a city's like at night. Thanks, Dillon, for the fat tub of Boudreaux's butt paste: we may buy stock in the company. Thanks, Jaro and Linda, for being understanding when we've been less than competent hosts. Thanks, Monica, for the suite of baby clothes; your generosity overwhelms. Thanks, Helen Ann, for the many creative gifts, and for a terrific Halloween costume. Thanks, Darran, for the handmade baby food, and thanks, Jessie and Geremy, for your early visit and your colorful gifts. Thanks, Julie, for socks that keep baby feet warm in the grayest of weather, and thanks, Jane, for the heartbreakingly beautiful little blanket. Thanks, Mike, for the thoughtful gift of a bannister, and thanks, Jenn, for your kindness to a little girl who was a complete stranger only three months ago. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for a stream of delightful gifts and for your fall visit, and thanks, Young, for passing it forward. And, heck, while we're at it let's even thank Chris for not lighting that sixth firework last Saturday night at 1 a.m.

But above all, of course, thank you, L. Since day one, we've never had quite enough time to do all of the things we wish we could. But, given that, the best that you can do is always, in my eyes, much more than enough.

Confessions

In the rare moments that I actually think about what I want this blog to be, instead of simply scrambling to shape a post before Cleo wakes from a nap, or before L. and I sit down to dinner and the evening's dose of Jeopardy!, I sometimes worry that my posts are unfairly optimistic, or rosy. They seem to suggest, that is, a dad who knows what he's doing, and a household that runs smoothly and without hiccups. (Or, at least, without major hiccups; Cleo's still cursed with small bouts of them at regular intervals).

Well, as any of you who have visited the Pink House in recent months have seen, or as any of you who are parents have known since Day One, any sense that I am fully competent in this calling is simply a veneer. Set into neat paragraphs, and accompanied by a smiling image of Cleo, all may appear easy, and smooth. But let's be frank: there's often as much airbrushing behind these posts as there is behind a standard edition of Vogue.

Should I name names? Well, why not? After all, it was me who wrote a piece just a few years ago on how the computer seems to prompt a certain confessional spirit. So, with the warning of the backwoods preacher in mind ("Son, that ain't a confession; that's just bragging!"), here's a brief and humbly intended list of three recent Awkward Parenting Moments.

1. Using the men's room at Starbucks, with Cleo strapped to my chest in the Baby Bjorn, seems to me only a minor violation of some rule of perfect parenting - and an unfair rule, at that. Hey, at least I made it to the men's room - not always a given when one's toting 20 pounds of infant and groceries, and an umbrella, from store to home on foot. And my aim, I'll add, was still true.

2. Was that me scrambling to complete an online fantasy football transaction while Cleo began to cry after waking in her swing? Guilty as charged. But, Cleo, someday you'll understand: Santana Moss just wasn't getting the catches that had been projected, and there were better options out there...

3. Oddest, though, was certainly the moment last week when Cleo was happily chomping on her Whoozit on the futon next to me, and I was actually able to do a little reading, while nursing a bottle of hard cider at the end of a 9-hour day of child care. I opened the Washington Post magazine, and came across an advice column featuring a letter from a clearly conscientious grandmother who often watches her daughter's child. Trouble was, the grandma was used to enjoying a glass of wine, or two, in the evenings, and wondered if she could continue to honor such a tradition in her own household, now that her daughter was prevailing on her for even more childcare. No dice, came the answer from on high, along with a coolly worded absolute law: You should never, never drink while watching a child. And so, sheepishly, sheepishly, I put my cider down, and put the magazine down, and turned back to Cleo...

But wait - I hear her waking just now. And in every slight moan upon waking, there seems to be the possibility of absolution. So enough for now, and I'll walk to cribside, and begin all over again.

A different focus

If you've waded through a few of my previous posts, you know that over the past few months I've been listening - often with Cleo; often, in fact, with a sleeping Cleo in a car seat - to a good deal of classical music. And while the pieces I've been listening to - Schubert's lieder; Satie's piano compositions - are hardly obscure, they're also not exactly the big men on the classical campus. If the canon of classical music is a country, I've been visiting pleasant towns, and well-preserved regional cities.

Until a recent afternoon, that is, when I was suddenly thrown back into the capital city. Driving home from lunch with L., and with Cleo nodding off behind me, I turned on the car radio and suddenly heard the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth.

Wow. I'd known the piece, of course, for years - everybody's known it for years. But when I'd heard it in the past, it was usually against a more chaotic and clamorous backdrop: it competed, implicitly, with anthems by Guns 'n Roses, and the brassy theme to NFL Today, and the blips of PacMan, and all of the other jangling sounds that make up the soundscape of a teenaged boy, or a 20-something still partly convinced that he's a teenager. But now, hearing it against my recent memories of Satie's subtle variations and Schubert's delicate, wistful odes to winter, I was blown away. Beethoven's reputation suddenly made sense; so, too, did the alleged drama of Romantic music. Placed in a fairer context, the music's original boldness suddenly stood out in high relief.

Is it a stretch to say that that, in a sense, is how I feel about babies now, as well? Six months ago, I saw babies as babies: as tiny little folks whose evolution was unclear to me and whose varied appearances, abilities, and moods I barely registered as I walked past them on sidewalks or in coffeehouses. I had other things on my mind, and saw them through broader frames. But now, with an infant of my own, I suddenly see them through a narrower lens: through, you might say, a more baby-appropriate lens. And suddenly the myriad variations are much more apparent. The baby in the Baby Bjorn at Whole Foods is so small that she has yet to unclench her fists. The baby in the stroller on Roland looks to be about nine months old; she's probably learned to sit up, on her own. And the baby in the back seat of our car? Well, we just learned that swinging her in a large arc while making a staticky sound can make her giggle.

Viewed against the wild variety of the world as a whole, music, and babies, and all things, are seen only coarsely. Viewed within their class or genre, though, their contours become much clearer.

The more things change...

In the second edition (published in 1941) of Florence Brown Sherbon’s The Child: His Origins, Development, and Care, Sherbon approvingly offers an anecdote involving a couple who taught - both of them, husband and wife - at a small college, and who had recently become parents. "From the time that the baby was three weeks old," writes Sherbon, "to the end of the school year, the father took care of the child during the hours when the mother was carrying on her work on the campus."

I drop L. off at the Hopkins greenhouse three days a week, at about 8:25 in the morning, and then Cleo and I motor north, usually stopping for a stroll in Roland Park, of late under falling leaves. Perhaps we wander the aisles of a grocery store. Cleo naps. When she awakes, we walk - she bundled in her Bjorn - along small streams and rivers. Coffee plays a role, at some point, and then there are more naps, and time with blocks, and time yelping, and nuzzling, and tickling. We have been known to check the state of the stock market, briefly, on TV. And one of us usually gets a bath. But back to Sherbon:

"The father said that he wished to do it, he enjoyed it, and he thereby ‘felt that it was really half his baby.’ When the infant was five months old, the mother said proudly that John could and did do everything for the baby quite as well as she, except for the one item of breast feeding."

Well, I wouldn't go that far. L.'s the master of putting Cleo down at night; she's also the one who's tended to Cleo in the quiet middle of the night, putting fears and hunger to flight. And, man, you should see the peals of laughter she can get in playing with Cleo, by pulling a cloth over her tiny face. But why compare, in any case, or why divide the baby into halves? I too wished to do what I've done, and enjoyed it - and if Cleo can fall asleep against my chest while we walk through the city, as on Monday, then enough, enough.

Or enough as far as I'm concerned. And what of others? Well, here's Sherbon, one last time: "It was reported that the whole matter of the arrival and care of the baby was of great interest to the campus and that the young father lost no prestige with faculty or students.”

Well, with no comments extolling or mocking my fatherhood yet surfaced on RateMyProfessor, I can't really speak to the current status of my prestige on campus. But of interest? Everyone's been more generous than I could have imagined. And that includes you, reader. The forms change, then - I'm guessing my 1941 predecessors weren't blogging about their infant. But so much remains, so much remains the same, as I hand Cleo back to L. and get ready to teach my Friday classes.

De gustibus non est...

The idea that personal taste is somehow predictable, somehow reasonable, is an appealing one. Appealing, for example, to modern Wall Street: hence the rise of a fleet of programs designed to interpret your musical tastes, and to recommend further music that you'll presumably enjoy, and want to buy. Hence, too, the wide popularity of dating sites that use algorithms to promise a fully compatible partner within six months. But the idea doesn't only appeal as a business model; thinking of taste as predictable also feels, well, friendly. If we know someone, even only slightly, shouldn't we be able to forecast their tastes with some accuracy?

That's what one of my generous first-year students, no doubt, was thinking when she suggested that I listen to a band called Of Montreal. I often play some soft music before class, and, based on what she'd heard from my laptop, she offered what she felt was a likely match. And so, later that evening, I checked them out - who could be a better musical matchmaker, after all, than an open-minded and well-traveled 18-year-old?

But no dice. No offense to Of Montreal, who seem to be flourishing without my interest, but their tunes just don't do it for me. A little too offhanded, or informal, or weightless, for me, in the end. It sounds like music that one might actually make, rather than music that one might walk miles to find. So: thanks, Zara, for the hint, and keep them coming - but in this case what we've got is just another proof that it's never easy to know exactly what someone might enjoy.

Of course, I hardly needed any proof in that regard. Although a weirdly high percentage of my conversations with L. now involve the evolving tastes of Cleo - like 17th-century courtesans, we try to parse the queen's mood - we're also consistently taken by surprise. Baths, once a source of delighted splashing, now yield tears. That rough William & Mary pillow, uninteresting for five months, is now a magnet for her small hands. And the elegantly vanilla-scented yellow squeaky toy that Cleo's grandparents generously brought her this weekend? Only time will tell, folks: if there's a formula, we sure don't know it. And, if we did, do you think we'd blog about it? Nah - we'd be too busy trying to call Wall Street.

Because you can

Every so often, it seems to me, the too-familiar routines and unthinking habits of our lives suddenly come into focus, and their limits suddenly seem clear, and alternatives, completely fresh alternatives, present themselves. What if I took a left turn, instead of the right turn that always leads me home? Or what if I walked? Or what if, while I walked, I did a somersault on that neatly manicured lawn? And then kissed the grass, or simply rang the neighbor's bell, and asked if I could join them for dinner?

You can call it thinking outside the box, or you can think back to Joyce's epiphanies, or you can shake your Teutonic brow and label it all merely foolish, but such a sudden reconceptualizing seems to be a rather natural consequence of spending a lot of time with a five-month-old. Sure, Cleo and I do many of the things I've always done: we walk the dirt path near our house, and the number of times I've taken her to Starbucks is probably better left unmentioned. But, on the other hand, even really familiar activities are now given a new quality. What if, while walking, we simply grabbed a maple leaf and popped it in our mouth? What if, whenever we were hungry, we simply wailed, and waved our arms? What if we took three naps a day?

Giving such possibilities room seems to me to be one of the basic charges of parenting. It's natural to try to impose our own order on the infant - but it's also occasionally rewarding (and, quite frankly, inevitable) to let the infant's logic guide us. And so we reach compromises that could never really be predicted, or perhaps even justified. Yesterday, Don Giovanni played (with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing; he's become a real presence in our home) while Cleo slobbered on the stringy hair of a wooden puppet, and rolled about on her back. And why fight it? I lay on my back, too, and tried to find out if I, like Cleo, can fit my toes in my mouth. I can't. But it was worth the try.

The emergence of variety

Is it a sign of my waning creativity that I've begun the last two posts with quotes? Well, perhaps - most of my creative energy these days goes into coming up with noises that might make a five-month-old giggle - but it may also be due to my recent of diet of reading for classes. Pick up any issue of Artforum from the 1960s, and you'll likely find at least one article - and, more probably, several - that opens with a high-octane quote from Wittgenstein, or Jonathan Edwards, or some opaque minimalist. After you read enough of them, the habit simply becomes second nature, and one simply sees all of one's actions and words as prefaced by the floating wisdom of one's elders. It's a pretentious variation on Quoyle's habit, in The Shipping News, of thinking of his own life in terms of corresponding newspaper headlines. Man Lives Ordinary Life Framed By Ostentatious Quotes.

In any event, in his 1955 book The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck discussed the music of Eric Satie, a composer I've mentioned before in this blog. Here's Shattuck: "Satie frequently scrutinizes a very simple musical object; a short unchanging ostinato accompaniment plus a fragmentary melody. Out of this sameness comes variety."

Out of sameness comes variety: amen. For roughly 160 days now L. and I have been living days that are, for the most part, marked by regular patterns: wake to Cleo's cries; feed her and wolf down a bowl of Cheerios, or oat bran; walk, follow the course of a mobile, and try to live a rather full life during those three 30-minute naps. Of course there are occasionally dramatic variations, but for the most part our recent life has been lived in a comfortable set of well-worn grooves. And yet, just as the pattern begins to feel rote, or too familiar, Cleo throws us something new: she smiles. Or she rolls over. Or she puts her left foot in her mouth.

Out of sameness comes variety. Hercalitus said that we can't step into the same river twice, and the reason's clear, in music and in parenting: motifs heard twice are different than those heard for the first time - and those heard for the first time are, against a backdrop of rough sameness, sometimes completely disarming.

Mail call

"Fatherhood," Hugo Williams has noted in an essay on parenthood, "is a mirror in which we catch glimpses of ourselves as we really are." Well, yes, in some ways - as Williams notes, with the pressures of fatherhood come a series of inevitable prioritizations that can reveal one's true values. (Which seem to be, in my case: swinging from tree swings is good, and a consistent flow of espresso even better). But if fatherhood is a mirror, it's a funhouse lens: it distorts part of our lives, and eliminates others. We babble, we applaud pooping - and we forget what it was like to read a novel over the course of a weekend, or what it was like to go out with friends after 6 p.m. A parent is a wacky rubbery simulacrum, in other words, of a once-normal adult.

But even in the funhouse, there are occasional, insistent reminders of the more reasonable world outside. In their most dramatic form, such reminders might take the form of a fugitive running across our lawn; in more quotidian form, however, they're the national news, or a weekly chat with the parents, or the week's reading for class. Through such lenses, even the newest parent can see that all is not changed, that all is not warped.

And then there's the mail. So much of what we give and receive now - this blog included - is digital, but every weekday at around 10:15 our mailman happens by and leaves the daily haul in our old milkbox. Sometimes, admittedly, it's a thin harvest: a catalog, or a fundraising letter. On most days, however, it's a more interesting yield: on Thursdays, for example, Sports Illustrated arrives. And, you wonder, what's so special about that? Well, for me it means a quick contact with a world whose rules and patterns I once knew very well. But for Cleo, it means something rather different: the thin paper stock and the bright colors make a wonderfully chaotic toy:

And so I read the first few pages quickly, and give them over to my daughter, who fights them like Hercules fought the Hydra, reducing the beginning of the magazine to a scattered series of leaves. And then, after she's in bed, I finish reading the issue, and on Friday we go at it all over again.

But if Thursday's always thus a fun mail day, this past Wednesday was a virtual miracle. Three packages appeared, like three magi, and they held a range of wonderful contents. From Mom, a cute little outfit for Cleo, with frills and long legs. From an old friend of my parents, a truly lovely handmade sweater, with a breathtaking blue bow. And from an old college friend in Illinois, a jar of Boudreaux's Butt Paste, which we'd first encountered in the Harper's Ferry hostel, before either one of us had any real need to combat diaper rash. Add 'em up, and throw in the bright yellow hat and mittens a colleague had left on my desk, and we had a full outfit for our daughter - and enough butt paste for pretty much everybody in our zip code. Cheers, y'all.

Fatherhood may be a mirror in which we catch glimpses of ourselves. But it's also a frame through which we see others. And others, it's clear, are wonderfully generous and creative. Thanksgiving is still three weeks away, but, really, why wait? I'm already feeling thankful.

Amicitia

A few months ago, Dad recalled hearing a traditional definition of a new parent: " A new parent is someone who can sleep anywhere, at any time, for any length of time."

Well, how does a parked car on the north side of Colorado Avenue, at about 1:25 p.m., sound? Good enough, yesterday, for both me and Cleo; after visiting with L. during her lunch hour, we both passed out in the Prius - Cleo for a good 40 minutes, and I for a pleasant 25, which ended when I awoke to the rhythm of her tiny snores and to the voices of construction workers in a nearby lawn.

Is a joint snooze in a car bad parenting? Probably, probably - but I take solace in Tim Hilton's observation, in "In Tandem," that "Nobody can be an interesting parent all the time." I try to offer, when I'm watching Cleo, a relatively diverse course of activities. But sometimes, dammit, you just need to sleep. Especially after the clocks are rolled back, and your unaware baby is suddenly rising at 5 in the dark morning, rather than 6.

But here's what struck me about the nap afterwards. I've found myself in similar circumstances - that is, coming to in a car, groggy and unalone - only a few times in my life: with an old college friend near Urbino, in 1993, for example, or with my brother, in an Oregon parking lot, in 1998. In each case, it's been with someone I've known for years, and the rather squalid aspect of trying to grab some Zs with legs scrunched under the dashboard has thus been offset by the sense that all is forgiven, from the start. No, it's not luxury; but friendships don't always demand luxury.

Could I call Cleo, then, a friend? She had no say in the situation, of course - but at the same time she certainly seemed content, as she sawed twigs in the back of the car. And while all parents want the best for their children, sometimes, maybe, the best is simply answering what's needed with what's at hand. That's what friends do, after all, as a matter of course. Even as they iron the kinks out of their necks.

Winterabend

Sometimes in the mornings, as Cleo writhes and wriggles on her play mat and the sun rises, or near the end of a day, as we wait for L. to get home from work, I place a CD of Schubert lieder into the CD player in the nursery, and I forward to track 11. The machine whirs briefly, and then a varied, ruminative piano motif quickly takes shape, and we hear the baritone Dietrich Fischer's Dieskau's voice from across the decades.

Entitled Der Winterabend, or The Winter Evening, the song was written in 1828, and based on an 1825 Karl Gottfried von Leitner poem that begins like this: "It is so still and secret all about me. The sun has set, the day has gone; how quickly now the evening grows grey. I like it so; the day is too loud for me. But now all is peaceful; no hammering from the blacksmith..."

While it evokes the pensive mood of dusk, though, Schubert's song isn't necessarily restrained; as John Reed wrote, in The Schubert Song Companion, "A mood of stillness and serenity can be established either by music that scarcely moves at all or by music that is constantly in motion, like a dance. In this song..., Schubert uses the second method." And the result, I'd add, is quite bewitching: a texture of melancholy and gratitude, interwoven.

Cleo dances, in her way, with her Whoozit, and I think about the advent of the coming winter, and Fischer-Dieskau sings: "How good it is to have this blessed peace."

The sounds of silence

Since this is a blog, and since everybody knows that bloggers don't develop new content, but rather depend parasitically on the ideas of others, let's begin with a quote. In her recent memoir A Book of Silence (which I breezily admit that I have not read in full - cherrypicking being another prerogative of the contemporary blogger), Sara Maitland writes that "I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needs holding, nourishing and unpacking."

Re-reading that for a third time, I still can't say that I'm convinced that silence needs unpacking (which has become one of the worst of academic cliches; eventually some poor scholar working on a cultural history of the suitcase will unintentionally note that the suitcase has to be unpacked as a phenomenon). But I certainly agree with her primary point: silence is rare in contemporary America.

Do you doubt it? Well, to settle the point I suppose we could wander about, sound-level meters in hand. But, in the absence of such equipment, or such resolve (if I'm going to wander about with high-tech gear at arm's length, it's gonna be a metal detector, for obvious reasons) a five-month-old in a Baby Bjorn actually turns out to be a pretty good gauge of what is and what is not loud.

Cleo, as you know, goes everywhere with us. And, like most babies, she doesn't much like loud noises. She no longer exhibits the Moro reflex, and so doesn't startle, but a boisterous cocktail party or nearby motorcycle will pretty quickly upset her, while a walk by the relatively quiet Jones Falls tends to yield interested glances and a pleasant, placid mood. As a result, I've grown, by extension, more attuned to noise: like the handler of some hypersensitive diva, I try to avoid potentially upsetting situations.

But they turn out to be, unfortunately, rather common. Lisa, bless her heart, recently took Cleo into ESPNZone briefly to buy a co-worker a gift card -only to report that it sounded like a battle zone and that Cleo appeared simply overwhelmed (I think of the wavy lines that Schultz used to indicate Charlie Brown's common grief). When I drove Cleo to the Towson mall recently - it was rainy; an indoor stroll seemed a nice alternative to another hour of crinkly toys on a mat - I soon realized that it was impossible to find a space in the mall through which a soundtrack didn't weave. And when we wandered, for a brief moment (might jeans be on sale?) into Abercrombie and Fitch? Forget about it: Cleo burst into tears that were just barely audible over the crushing music.

Sure, those are stores. But even in more natural settings, manmade sounds intrude. I've already noted in this blog that we can always hear, from our tree-covered lawn, the traffic from nearby roads. So, too, along the river: yesterday our nanny opted to stay in, instead of taking Cleo for an afternoon walk, as a large lawnmower was at work. And the parks in the rich county to the north of the city? Well, even they are peppered by the barks of dogs, the occasional overhead airplane or distant beep of a construction vehicle or car alarm system.

In one sense, this is just a fact of life; it doesn't need unpacking so much as it needs accepting - and certainly Cleo isn't bothered by the regular noises of dogs and roads. But the very process by which she, and we, have grown accustomed to such noise can lead one, as Maitland writes, to forget the revelatory quality of silence. While we walk, I often offer an occasional commentary on what Cleo's seeing: A tree. That's a tree. I see a big puddle. And so on. Cleo sometimes follows my pointing finger, and I imagine that sometimes she's actually listening to me. But, now that I think about it, perhaps it's telling that she never complains when I don't speak.

Perhaps learning words is pleasurable, on some level, to a baby on a walk. But perhaps the quiet of a walk without a soundtrack is equally, or more so.

Excitement and litost

Perhaps we could think of babies as explorers. Initially, their discoveries are rather modest: in learning to track an object visually, or to open their little bunched hands, they're not venturing far from the town in which they were born. It's like discovering a nearby creek, or stand of willows. Over the next few months, though, they become more ambitious, and their finds more impressive. Smiling, grasping objects, laughing, raising the head: they're building canoes that wander up and down the local river, and they're mapping the foothills of the nearby range. And then things get really interesting. In the Middle Ages, Gael hermits found the Faeroe Islands, and European sailors charted the Azores. In their fifth month, many babies find their toes, and learn to sit, while holding pushing with their hands, and learn to roll over. New horizons emerge.

This past weekend, Cleo rolled over, intentionally, from her stomach to her back for the first time. She repeated the trick twice yesterday, and three times today (meaning that, if she keeps up the pace, she should be able to do it roughly 6,795 times in a day when she turns 19). In fact, the event's become predictable enough that I simply shot it on our camera today: see above.

Admittedly, that's not the most overpowering piece of footage, and in one sense, rolling over is a small thing: even after she's rolled over, after all, Cleo's still an inarticulate and totally dependent baby. But don't knock the video; after all, even the Zapruder film is rather unimpressive, on a purely visual level. Rather, it's what the images, and the acts they depict, suggest that can bowl you over. Here's what I mean. There have been many times over the past five months where I've passively assumed that what I'm doing must be what fatherhood involves: cradling, talking without meriting a response; feeding. But suddenly, in a single action, it became clear that there will be vast changes, and that slowly, slowly, Cleo will earn a total autonomy and eventually have little need of us.

That thought is both awesome and deflating, at once. I was simply stunned by the realization, made concrete in her new skill, that she really is a person who is slowly growing into something fuller and more complete. Amazed, I spoke to her in a different tone of voice, with new respect. But at the same time, I was also reminded of Milan Kundera's description of an untranslatable Czech word, litost. Kundera roughly renders the word as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery," but the example that he offers is more memorable. Think of a boy, he says, who wanders into the ocean with his girlfriend, who is a strong swimmer. The two play in the waves, and then start to swim; the girl politely restrains her pace, so that he can keep up. But then her body simply follows its own athletic logic, and she pulls away, a graceful dart in the waves.

What the boy, left behind, feels is litost. What I felt, watching Cleo roll over, was similar.

Subito

Subito, from the Italian for quick, is a musical term for a rapid development or change in a composition. If I was a South Asian boy genius, and it came up in a spelling bee, I'd ask for it to be used in a sentence, and I might get something like this: 'The piece, much of is to be played pianissimo, includes a subito fortissimo at one point.' Last night, however, L. and I experienced an even more vivid illustration of the term.

It was about 9:30, and we were working on the Sunday Times crossword, with NPR's mellow (mellissimo, really, but that's not a word) Echoes on the radio. My small nip of bourbon had left only an amber shadow in its glass; our cat was curled up; Cleo slept. All quiet.

And then, suddenly, sounds of sirens, close, and closer, and a loud car crash on the avenue that lies just south of us. More sirens, and the chop of a helicopter, and suddenly the chopper's search light was clear outside. We both hurried to the window, and at that very moment saw a man vaulting the fence across the street, landing, and running across the street towards our house. And then he reached our gate, next to our front door, and was out of our line of sight.

Police arrived about two minutes later, and the chopper's light illuminated our whole lawn, as eerie shadows wheeled about. An ambulance pulled into the neighborhood. More police cars. As it became clear that our street was secure, the cops began to explore the woods that begin in our back yard, and then, realizing that our basement door was partly ajar, came inside, pulled their pistols, and lurched downstairs. No one there: all well. The cops, eminently polite, watched while we bolted the door, and then continued to search, with bloodhounds, until about 10:30. No luck, apparently, and we went to sleep much later, still slightly shaken and apprehensive.

Living in any city involves occasional crescendi and sforzandi: an angry driver; an ominous piece of news; a jackhammer. But this was something rarer, as it felt as though we were in the middle of the composition, with no obvious way out. We listen to music; we turn the volume dial; we may choose to change the station. Last night, though, the range of choices felt much, much more limited: things were loud, and intense, and that was that.

At least for two of us. As the police gradually took their dogs back to their trucks, we ventured into Cleo's room. She slept, rolled towards one side, untroubled and surrounded by fleece. And that image, more than anything, helped us return to calm. It took a while - the change was not subito, but rather more of a diminuendo - but eventually we all slept, one baby dreaming of who knows what and two parents shaken by the melody they'd just heard and hopeful that the next day's would be less stormy.

Evolving rhythms

Well, since we don't have any Baby Einstein videos to return for a full refund, I feel like I've got a little extra time on hand: Daylight Savings will give us one hour, and now the Disney Corporation has given us another, in a sense, as we don't have to wait in line at some soulless Babies R Us. And, given that Cleo's napping, there's no better way to spend those free hours, of course, then trawling the Web and blogging about her - the 43 student papers waiting to be graded will still be there, I assume, when I've finished my post. So get in, friend, get in, and let's go for a brief ride.

Perceptual psychologists have long noted that humans have a tendency (or an ability, depending on your point of view) to discern order in chaos. I know the idea largely thorough the work of some especially interesting art historians: J.J. Pollitt, for instance, once argued that the isolation, or imposition, of order in the face of nature's flux was at the core of early Greek art, and Sir Ernst Gombrich dealt at length with the notion of perceived order in his later work. But you might also think of music: consider, for example, the convergence of rhythms in a drum circle. Or here's Yehudi Menuhin, the American violinist and conductor: "Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous." When confronted with chaos, one of our instincts seems to be to spot, or to imagine, a simpler, recognizable order.

Of course, there's nothing like a 4-month-old to create chaos. A look about our house confirms that: unwashed bathrooms; toys scattered on surfaces like salt on a salad; unfulfilled lists of things to do; a pile of laundry to be thrown in the washer. But despite such disorder (or perhaps precisely because of such disorder), it's also surprisingly easy to spot certain patterns. Cleo, for example, almost always goes to sleep between 6 and 6:30, awakens briefly for a feeding between 1:30 and 2:30, and then awakens again between 5:30 and 6. She still naps 3 or 4 times during the day, and her naps are almost like clockwork: 35 to 45 minutes apiece. And her parents? We see the clock turn to 10 p.m. most nights, and then we're out within a few minutes.

Those are relatively obvious examples. But there are also subtler rhythms that have gradually come into focus, as well. Most days, for instance, I take Cleo for a walk in the Baby Bjorn, and we often stop at the rope swing in the nearby meadow. As we swing, one or both of the elderly folks who live (and have lived, since the Korean War) in the house on the edge of the meadow appear in a downstairs window, and watch for a short time. I see their silhouettes, but this is hardly Mrs. Bates in the bedroom; it's somehow instead a simple and comforting quiet conversation across generations.

After a few moments, we usually roll on, and another subtle pattern usually emerges. Almost always, Cleo's left hand finds a loop on the Bjorn, and holds tight for most of the rest of the walk. It's always her left; it's always without looking. It's a quiet order all its own, perhaps even unconscious at this point. But for that very reason, it appeals. We hear sirens nearly every night; this morning Cleo and I passed a dead squirrel, a condom on the sidewalk, and a team from the gas company drilling a hole in the road. There are complications, in other words, everywhere one looks. Which is part of the reason why, perhaps, we tend to appreciate a simple, well-ordered composition or melody so fully, and so naturally.

Favorite voices

Cleo's not yet at the age where she responds to the pronunciation of her name - to her, I guess, "Cleo" is just one more of the many nonsensical noises ("oatmeal," "toothpaste," or "defensive back") that she might overhear in a day. That means, of course, that we can gossip about her without inspiring any more interest on her part than if we were discussing, say, Brazil's foreign policy. But if she hasn't yet picked up on the meaning of her name, she sure does seem attuned to the sound, or the timbre, of certain voices.

Neither L. nor I have really developed, I'm sad to report, a really good, mealy-mouthed, full-cute-on baby talk voice. Some of our friends have masterful versions of the voice and even strangers who smile at Cleo in the store will sometimes bust out a bouncy, squealy version of baby talk. I'm always impressed, and curious as to where the talent comes from: is it genetic? was it something that was taught in Home Ec? Regardless, as Rummy taught us, you have to go to war with the army that you have, and so L. and I usually speak in simple, quiet, loving tones, and hope that that's good enough.

It seems to be; she often turns her head at the sound of one of our voices. Still, when we up the ante by trying on alternate voices of various sorts, the rewards can be high: an oafish DA DHU DA DUH DHUM that I've been offering over the past week or so has drawn some great smiles and one long burst of weirdly adult laughter. And L.'s got a wonderful soothing voice for the last few minutes of the day, as Cleo starts to slip into sleep. Somewhere, I imagine, these voices are becoming the core memories of her childhood.

But the other day it was neat to see her really respond to a wholly separate set of voices: to a CD by an a cappella band called Take Six. My folks had brought the CD with them on their last visit; it came recommended by a colleague - thanks, Kent! - and while baby taste is incredibly hard to predict (really? the plush blue monkey doesn't appeal?), this one hit the spot. As soon as the first track began, her eyes left her toy and turned toward the CD player. And while she rarely listens for more than 10 or 15 seconds at a time - c'mon, folks; she's 4 months old - she really does seem to listen to it.

When I began this blog, I wondered when she and I would really be able to listen to music together. And, so far, the answer's been, well, Not yet. Beethoven evinces no reaction; Chet Baker inspired only the occasional babble, and a general yawn. But Take Six clearly engaged her on some level. And maybe that makes sense: composed purely of voices, and of voices much more musical then ours, it's music that's built around something she knows.

It may still be months, or years, before Cleo and I listen to a piece together in any meaningful sense of the word. But it was fun nonetheless to see that one doesn't always have to use baby talk to interest a baby's ears.

Concert

L. and I don't yet have the local babysitters on speed dial - frankly, the few quiet hours between Cleo's bed time and our own weary laying down are often so pleasantly simple that we don't even think of trying to Go Out. But when I recently won a pair of tickets to yesterday's Peabody Institute concert from WBJC, it was too much to resist. Get out your best blouse, wife: we're hitting the town.

For at least a couple of hours, in any event. After getting a sitter set up in the living room, we drove downtown, and were slightly stunned to see people out and about, as though they thought that it was totally normal to eat at a restaurant, or to emerge from the house after 7 p.m. I felt slightly like a World War II-era G.I. must have felt, when he returned from the Pacific to his Akron family home: Yes, I vaguely remember such a life, but it seems so far away now.

But that doesn't mean that we'd forgotten how to enjoy it! Jackets off, programs in hand, and now the perfomers ambled onto the stage: four piece by Francis Poulenc, a French composer who moved for a time in the same circles as Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. I'd never heard of him, but who cares? The pianist played with grace, we both had a crush on the bassoon, and the oboe, as it sparkled, looked like a jeweled find in King Tut's tomb. And the second movement of each of the first two pieces was lovely: a quiet duet between restrained voices.

There were four pieces, in all, but I'm afraid that I can't report on the second two: like schoolkids giddy with the advent of spring, we made a break for the doors at Intermission -oh, but don't be too angry, WBJC, for we really did appreciate the tickets! - and each ordered a drink at a local restaurant. A cider and a beer: nothing exotic, but made the more delicious by the knowledge that Cleo was asleep six miles to the north, and that it was not, after all, impossible to combine this world and that. Did Cleo know that her parents had closed their eyes and thought, for a few moments, of nothing but music? No - and neither did the bassoonist know that occasionally two of his listeners were momentarily distracted by thoughts of Cleo, back home. But even if the two spheres were thus distinct, they made for a happy combination last night.