Guardians

We just had a wonderful visit from L's sister, Tasha, who may or may not be thrilled about being pictured on the good ol' World Wide Web (above), but who acted like a true patron saint to Cleo during her weekend stay in Baltimore. Nothing like an experienced mom to offer sage, practical advice, and nothing like a true CHHS '88er to pitch in and clean a bathroom. Thanks, Tasha.

Cleaning bathrooms is not, we should vigorously emphasize, expected of our houseguests. In fact, the only expectations around here these days resemble the codes imposed on any visitor to a medieval Benedictine monastery: we retire at about 8, get up several times in the middle of the night, and rise with the sun. And, as Benedict insisted (in rule 22), no knives should be worn to bed.

Such rules are on our mind because we recently hired a part-time nanny to work a couple days each week in the fall. She seems great, and came with glowing recommendations, and so we're hopeful that Cleo will take to her - and, as importantly, that she'll take to Cleo. Still, it's already weird to think about asking someone else to participate in helping us to raise this little girl.

Weird, perhaps, but not without precedent. In fact, it turns out that Beethoven - along with many, many other children in his era - was largely raised by parents who were not his own. As a youngster, he gave piano lessons to the daughters of the von Breuning family, and he gradually became so close to the family that he spent many nights at their house. In Beethoven and his World, H.P. Clive summarizes the composer's feelings for the family: “Beethoven would later refer to the von Breunings as the ‘guardian angels’ of his youth." More specifically, he singled out the mother, Helene, noting that "she knew how to keep the insects away from the blossoms."

Hopefully, we've found a nanny who knows similar tricks. And we've already found out that Cleo already has a guardian angel, in the form of her only aunt.

Predictions

Outside the Roland Park Starbucks the other day, a Kind Woman - the sort who appears in Curious George books - peered admiringly into our stroller and said, What long fingers! She'll be a pianist.

Cleo does have long fingers (and toes); in fact, that was pretty much the first thing that I noticed about her, after birth. And, yes, it does mean that she shares, for now, one trait with pianists such as Rachmaninoff, whose hands - pictured above - could allegedly span a thirteenth. On the other hand, when it comes to the piano, it's clear that biology is not destiny: the well-regarded Spanish pianist Alicia De Larrocha, who is roughly 4 foot 6, can only span a ninth with difficulty.

Regardless, though, what struck me about the Kind Woman's comment was the implicit desire to predict a child's future. L and I have been enjoying a book called Crib Notes of late: a collection of statistics, tables, and facts related to parenting, it includes several traditional ways to predict the sex of an unborn child, some of which I now wish we'd explored. How does the expectant mother pick up a key? If by the round end, it'll be a boy. By the long end, and you'll have a girl.

And so on. What color will the child's eyes become? What will her first word be? It's all common grounds for speculation, and, really, I understand: speculation is interesting. But there are times, too, when it seems enough to simply remain in the moment. As I'd noted on Saturday, these first few months pass quickly enough, without our trying to hasten their passage.

So, yes, she may learn to play the piano, in time. Or she may not. L might have grabbed a key by the stem, or might not have. But all that really matters, right now, is that Cleo is a little girl with long fingers.

Pacing

I have a confession: over the past few days, while holding Cleo, or playing with her, it's occurred to me that I might be able to speed up her development in certain areas by prompting her. If I hold her so that her feet just touch the ground, for instance, might she be walking at 11, rather than 12, months? If I were to recite the numbers 1-10, again and again in as we amble about the lawn, might she develop prodigious mathematical talents? Could a baby's neck be strengthened through three sets of six reps?

These are just passing thoughts; for the most part, we're thrilled (to the point of boring our friends, no doubt) with her small, natural signs of progress, and need no designed program. But of course such thoughts do open onto an entire industry, calculated to play on parents' fears and ambitions. Play Spanish tapes to your baby while she's still in the womb! Infant massages may stimulate muscle growth! And of course you'll need the entire line of Baby Einstein products.

How to resist the desire to keep up with the crowd, or to create a superbaby? Here's one way. I mentioned yesterday that I've been listening to the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. I've got the well-reviewed version by Vladimir Horowitz, and so yesterday I found a few minutes to read a rather famous 1992 discussion of Horowitz by Tim Page, who won the Pulitzer Prize five years after that for his music criticism. In the 1992 piece, Page argues that, while Horowitz was certainly technically proficient, his interpretive skills were not always strong. A master of control and as fast as any pianist, Horowitz can be seen as lacking, in other words, a certain subtlety or sophistication of feeling.

Such claims can feel subjective, to be sure. But Page wasn't alone in his feelings. In fact, he ends the piece by quoting a portion of a letter that Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote to a young Horowitz after hearing him play in the 1920s. “Mr. Horowitz," wrote Rachmaninoff, "you have won the octaves race. Nobody has ever played them like you. But I will not congratulate you because it was not musical.”

And that, friends, is how one resists the urge to speed up Cleo's natural clock. She'll crawl, in time. She'll read, in time. But no need to hasten. Instead, let's only try to make sure that, when she does so, she does so musically.

The point of it all

Babies need baths for roughly the same reasons that fraternity kitchens do: weird spills, late-night accidents, and inexperienced and occasionally exhausted roommates. So every few days we haul out the bright green baby tub, set up shop in the kitchen, and scrub Cleo down.

It's a ball. First of all, there's something simply right about summer, water, and total nakedness. As my first witnesses, I'd call Thomas Eakins' adolescent creek divers, Bouguereau's waterside nymphs, and a young fisherman painted at Akrotiri to the stand. But, really, is there any need for witnesses? Lolling naked in a warm body of water simply feels right. And Cleo has begun to realize this, too; although her smiles are still fleeting and often seemingly unintentional, she's at least calm and composed as we wash her back and (more embarrassingly) the folds in her neck.

Okay, then: so she likes water. Most babies do, shout the heckling old men in the loge box. What is the bigger point? Well, here you go. There's a fun little piece by Jill Lepore in this week's New Yorker. Nominally a review of two recent books on parenthood, it struck me as I read it (in tiny segments, over 45 minutes, as I tried to walk Cleo to sleep) last night as more of a meditation on memoirs and on writing, really, than on parenthood. Essentially, Lepore seems to be wondering why, and how, one writes on something like parenthood.

A fair question - and one that has occurred to your faithful blogger, as well. In fact, anyone who writes on parenting probably realizes two things very quickly:

1. It's pretty amazing.
2. Pretty much everyone has experienced, or will experience, it.

In that sense, writing on parenting is something like writing about high school, or even about buying a new house. Memoirs about parenting are not, by definition, like those airy accounts of teaching Nabakov in tense Tehran, or of founding public schools in remote corners of Pakistan. Granted, writers who do write on parenthood often do try to emphasize the uniqueness of their experience: their remarkable shortcomings as mothers (Ayelet Waldman), or their experience at an allegedly transitional moment in history (Michael Lewis). But these angles often seem more like camouflage erected to conceal the commonness of the subject at hand than truly defining circumstances. In the end, in other words, a baby bath is a baby bath: it has its own peculiar charms, but it's hardly earth-shattering.

So why keep reading? Well, Lewis, Waldman, and Lepore have their own answers to such a question. As for me, I'll quote a passage from the preface to Domenico Scarlatti's Essercizi, a series of brief studies on the harpsichord that have kept me occupied over the past couple of days. "Show yourself more human than critical," wrote Scarlatti, "and then your Pleasure will increase." Cleo's just three weeks old, and nothing she does alters the world, but if you can't see the beauty in a baby, naked, in the water, then you're missing something nevertheless.

Peter's theme

Yesterday - and I know this will sound a touch ridiculous, but it's simply where things are at the moment - yesterday Cleo and I discovered the Best Sidewalk in Baltimore. After a week and a half of bouncing over canted courses of concrete, of pausing before chasms and steering around fallen branches, we hit the jackpot. At the end of Longwood Avenue, in beautiful Roland Park, there's a sidewalk set into a sloped hill (for a look, click here, and on Street view, and then face south): it's smooth and as it clings to the hill, below several large houses, it really resembles, in miniature, a path in the Cinqueterre. At points a full 7 feet above the street below, it's nothing if not picturesque.

And it has, it seemed to me as we rolled along beneath spangles of sun, an actual narrative value. It begins with a soft ascent and eventually reaches a sort of climax at its greatest height. There was even a hint of conflict, of work to be done, in the strong scent emitted by a pile of mulch. All leading to a resolution: a gradual descent, until our stroller was deposited, like a paper boat sent by a stream into a larger river, back on the street.

I spent a moment trying to think of musical parallels: are there themes that have a comparable rise and fall, a similar narrative implication? Well, one example came to this weary, unmusical mind: Peter's theme, from Peter and the Wolf, Prokofiev's 1936 musical symphony for children. I don't know much about Prokofiev, but I know that piece well: it got some airtime on my dad's record player when I was little. You probably know it, too, even if you don't think you do: often narrated, it tells the story of Peter, a young Soviet pioneer, who wanders into a meadow, where he eventually meets and captures a wolf.

Each of the characters - Peter; the wolf; a hunter; a duck - in the symphony is associated with a particular theme, and Peter's is undoubtedly the most famous. Here's a link to an MP3 version of it: just click on Preview All. Prokofiev seems to have been thinking impressionistically; the lush strings suggest a fertile meadow, and the strong rhythm evokes a gamboling, wide-eyed boy. But what I'm really interested in is even more evident in the published score: Peter's theme, like our sidewalk, rises and then falls. It leads upwards, and implicitly outwards, and then suggests a sense of familiarity, or relaxation, through the descent of tones and the longer, held tones at the end. It bounces, like a boy, and is utterly whistleable, as any tune meant to be associated with a walk should be.

So if you happened to be driving down Longwood yesterday at about 11:30 (but I know you weren't; there's never any traffic there), and looked up to your left, that was Peter, wandering into the meadow and leaving the gate wide open as he pushed a stroller.

Standardization

As I wheel Cleo around the sidewalks of Baltimore, other pedestrians sometimes pause to ask questions (usually about her age; not a single inquiry so far about the snap in her curveball) or to offer comments. One of the more common observations made by experienced parents is at root a piece of advice: "Enjoy these first few months; they go quickly."

We'd agree with that. Even though there are the predictable occasional interminable stretches of 10 or 15 minutes, when nothing seems to appease Cleo, the days do roll past - something like the large white clouds that have been drifting overhead for the past couple of days. And, as they pass, Cleo changes, visibly: she's much larger than she was two weeks ago, and she's now pulling and pushing, where in her first few days she was incapable of exerting much force at all, in any direction. Over time - even over a relatively short stretch of time - things change.

That sounds trite, but here are a couple of ways of making it more concrete, and less cliched. On Saturday, I picked up a used copy of a 1973 bestseller among parents, The First Twelve Months of Life. On page 41, I read that “Although hospitals are beginning to allow a man to stay with his wife through labor, only a very few permit him to see his child born. After delivery, wife and child are unavailable to him. He is allowed to see his wife only in prescribed, short doses of time so that she can rest…” Amazing: 35 years later, I was present for - and participated in, to an extent - L's 13-hour labor, and I then spent all but about three of the next 60 hours in the same room in the maternity ward with L and Cleo. Things change.

Even the most seemingly static things can change, in fact. One of the most incredible facts about Western music, in my eyes, is that the sounds assigned to notes in the common scale have varied considerably. This was apparently especially true in the 1700s, when vocal music was less highly esteemed than instrumental work, and players - unencumbered by the abilities of singers - thus tuned their instruments higher and higher, to achieve brighter sounds. That practice, combined with simple local variations in taste and quality, led to what now seems like a wild diversity of sounds. One 18th-century English pitch pipe, for instance, played A above middle C at 380 Hz, while several of the German organs played by Bach played it at 480 Hz.

In 1955, A was officially standardized: since that year, it's been defined as 440 Hz. And, given modern technologies, a greater consistency has been relatively easy to achieve. Viewed broadly, though, the attempt seems naturally flimsy, or inevitably stopgap. Practices in labor rooms can change dramatically in a generation. Cleo can smile one moment, and frown the next. And so, as every parent pausing to look at a baby knows, nothing ever stays quite the same.

Father's Day

So it's my first Father's Day as a father, but it sure as heck feels like it should be a Mother's Day - as has pretty much every day over the past couple of weeks. L's been amazing, nursing at all hours, reading to Cleo at 4 in the morning, and gracefully receiving the pleasant parade of guests who have stopped by in recent days.

Compared to that, I've been doing very little, but I have at least enjoyed trying to give L some deserved rest by taking Cleo on long stroller walks in various neighborhoods. It's worked rather well so far; we rumble slowly along the irregular planes of sidewalks or the smoother asphalt of quiet streets, under the sounds of birds and, occasionally, a splash of sunshine.

It turns out, of course, that this means that I'm now part of a community of stroller pushers, and am slowly beginning to sense my place on this unfamiliar spectrum. For example, I'm not serious enough to gauge our progress by means of a splashy strollometer, even if that means that we'll never know, exactly, our maximum speed or average ambient temperature. On the other hand, I do enjoy trying to offer loose narratives as we roll along. Admittedly, these are often pretty mundane, and sometimes little more than descriptions of what we're passing. But the very fact that I'm talking at all to Cleo as we stroll, combined with the fact that we have a rear-facing stroller, seems to put me on one side (without my realizing it) of a fierce debate regarding early childhood development that recently played out in the New York Times.

Perhaps certain types of strolling may help or hinder a child's linguistic skills. Perhaps. Really, though, such claims seem to me fall into a pretty familiar genre: parents, after all, have long exaggerated their contributions. In 1777, Mozart sent his employer a letter that had actually been written by his father, Leopold, but was signed by the young Wolfgang. It read, in part, "I therefore owe it before God and in my conscience to my father, who indefatigably employs all his time in my upbringing, to be grateful to him with all my strength..."

All his time? Hardly, at least in my case. That'd be mom. And even the time I do spend with Cleo, of course, won't ever be consciously remembered by her. Still, there's something about these regular outings that feels right, and that, compounded with the thought of L sleeping for an extra hour or two while we're out, means that we'll probably hit the road again tomorrow, as well.

Reassurance

Everybody wants a little reassurance from time to time. For new parents and infants, though, it's a commodity in especially high demand. And the three of us have found it, happily, in a variety of places over the past few days.

For Lisa, a brief e-mail to the pediatrician lightened our modest concerns about a slight rash on Cleo's forehead. Turns out it's neonatal acne, a common and benign condition that affects most babies at some point. And it turns out, too, that our doctor really does read his e-mail, as he'd said he does, and he gets back to nervous parents quickly. A small relief, as every day seems to bring small symptoms, slight changes, or new behaviors, and we scramble to adjust, to process, to identify.

For Cleo, of course, the whole world must seem consistently confounding or vexing. Not knowing that one has two legs, or not being able to identify the feeling of hunger (let alone being able to feed oneself), has to be frustrating. We try to reassure her by speaking softly, by carrying her comfortably, and by trying to identify the quality of her voice when she does cry. "Everything's okay," we tell her, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but in time we assume that she'll learn that we're at least trying to help, even if we can't always read her cries.

And, as I've driven her various north Baltimore neighborhoods over the past two weeks, so that we can get out the stroller and really roll, I've found reassurance in the wonderfully composed, placid, and seemingly unflappable announcers on WBJC, our local classical music station. In accents that always carry at least a tinge of the Old World, the announcers calmly tell me that "It's seven minutes past one and in this hour the Queensland Orchestra will play Karl Maria von Weber's first symphony..." Or, yesterday, that "right now in Baltimore it's 79 degrees." There is no ambiguity, and there are no mispronunciations, colloquialisms, or sudden surprises; rather, the world is simplified and comprehensible, and revolves around nothing more complex than a playlist.

New parents, we're at sea in unfamiliar waters. But it's nice to know that there are other boats in the area, lanterns on their masts, willing to help.

Soft hands

My parents have been in town for the past few days, bringing a wonderful caravan of chocolate, pies, bourbon, pasta, and other goodies - including a CD of Chopin's Nocturnes, played by Arthur Rubinstein. My dad's been listening to them of late, and it's easy to see why: they're beguiling, reflective pieces.

In his 1900 book on Chopin, the American critic James Huneker approached the Nocturnes with considerable hesitation. “So much has been written," he wrote, "so much that is false, perverted sentimentalism and unmitigated cant about the nocturnes…" Hoping to straighten things out, Huneker wasted no time in issuing his own judgment: "There are pearls and diamonds in the jeweled collection of nocturnes, many are dolorous, few dramatic, and others are sweetly insane and songful.” But he didn't stop there. In 1900, it wasn't far-fetched to think that the average reader might actually want to play the pieces, and so Huneker offered a few thoughts on how this was to be done. Turning to his favorite Nocturne, one of two in E flat, he concluded that it demanded a certain restraint on the part of the player: too much energy could spoil the piece. Or, as he put it, "one may say that it is not for small hands, nor yet for big fists."

That's nice. And, as my dad carried Cleo about the house, quietly describing what they saw as they moved ("pie," I overheard, "is a wonderful creation..."), it felt especially correct. To carry a baby, neither small hands nor big fists are ideal. But perhaps care matters most of all.

Ambient noise

What would a sketch of the personality of the 12-day-old Cleo look like? Well, for the most part, much like an impression of pretty much any infant: likes milk; has a boorish disregard for social niceties (poops in public, in fact); acts with an inflatedly dramatic sense of self-importance. But even the littlest tyke does have certain proclivities that are not totally universal, and in Cleo's case one of these seems to be an interest in the outdoors.

It's quite noticeable: when she's carried outside, she tends to calm down quite quickly. Or, if she's already calm, she tends to peer about, and, eventually, to relax and sometimes even to doze off. Today, in fact, she slept for nearly an hour in a net-protected crib in the side yard, as bugs hummed overhead, birds chirped, and the cat stood silent sentry on the stoop.

Perhaps, say the contrarian readers of this blog, perhaps that's because outside she's finally given a respite from all of the classical music that she's forced to swallow while inside! Not so fast, though. She fell asleep to a broadcast symphony today, in the car, and for the most part music seems to interest her neither more nor less than, say, her blanket, or the sun. And, to be honest, she hears less than an hour of music in any given day. So it's not simply that.

So let's think about it differently. In the world of formal classical music, noise is traditionally viewed as a distraction: coughs are a nuisance, and anything louder is openly detrimental to one's enjoyment of the piece. (As an example, check out this peeved review by an Australian critic in 1958, whose enjoyment of a piano recital was marred by environmental noise). Or, at least, that was the common view before the arrival of John Cage, and his infamous embrace of ambient noise. Since Cage, environmental sounds are no longer necessarily viewed as simply contaminating; they're merely an inevitable part of any performance. Music isn't sterile; it's a part of the living world.

With that in mind, we're delighted to carry Cleo out through the back door, onto the porch, and under the trees. Last night, in the dark, I couldn't see my feet as we walked through the balmy late evening air. But I could feel Cleo's little body relax, beneath her receiving blanket: a placid listener at an early summer symphony.

Modes of Aspection

On Monday Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D (the celebrated 1955 recording: Jascha Heifetz with the Boston Symphony Orchestra) peeked out of our mailbox, and since then I've given the first movement a listen every day. Generally, I've held Cleo and strolled about our living room for the roughly 20-minute piece. But while we're in pretty much the same position, more or less, every day (she in a zebra muslin blanket, head in the crook of my left elbow), I nevertheless end up noticing new things in the music each time. On Tuesday I was impressed by a series of chords that somehow evoked ropes, twisted; on Friday the piece seemed a meditation on the tension between the collective authority of the orchestra and the individual voice of the violin; yesterday a second of silence about halfway through seemed especially pregnant.

Perhaps, you're thinking, that's just another way of saying that the violin concerto is great art: it rewards in different ways on different days. Perhaps. But as I walk Cleo around our house, and around my little vegetable garden, I'm learning that you could say the same thing about almost anything. Viewed closely, my tomato plants prove incredibly interesting: each day they extend forks whose logic is not immediately visible, and the small fruits have appeared without warning overnight. The vines differ in scale; the flowers range from full to thin; the plant toys with the trellis, always flirting with, but only occasionally touching, the wire mesh.

And then, of course, there's Cleo. Viewed simply, she's a baby, and can barely hold her head up for more than a second or two. She cries; she sleeps. But look closely, over a series of days, and you begin to see - at least we've begun to see, and I assume the same's true of all new parents - all kinds of exquisite details. Her long toes. The freckle just off her left hip. Dimples in the backs of her hands; floppy earlobes; belly like a little globe.

Concerti, veggies, bellies: how daunting to remember that these complexities are always all around us. Or, more so, that they are always willing to be noticed, if we can only find the time.

Authenticity

One of the larger questions in the field of aesthetics involves the notion of authenticity. Which composer's interpretation of Bach's St. John Passion most closely approximates the composer's intentions? Is a performance played on period instruments in 2009 somehow more authentic than one played on modern instruments in 2008? Can a performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in an air conditioned concert hall ever be considered authentic? Tough questions, and they soon give rise to wonderfully intricate, nuanced arguments. Here, for instance, is a portion of Stephen Davies' influential take on the issue:

"A performance will be more rather than less authentic if it successfully (re)creates the sound of a performance of the work in question as could be given by good musicians playing good instruments under good conditions (of rehearsal time etc.) where 'good' is relativized to the best that was known by the composer to be available at the time..."

And, well, you get the picture. But what, wonders the new dad, is the authentic Cleo? Is it the bodhisattva who crosses her little legs into a neat fold? Is it the recumbent diner, happy at her mother's breast? The prodigious producer of yellow poop? The girl behind the fleeting, lambent smiles that flicker across her face at random moments?

It's all of these, we say without hesitation - and more. Chew on that, aestheticians.

Lying-in

This afternoon, while L's mom cooked up a storm in the kitchen, I was working on a review of Elizabeth L'Estrange's Holy Motherhood, which contains an overview of a number of practices related to birth in the 15th century. At one point, L'Estrange describes the lying-in, a period of up to two months in which new mothers simply recovered, in their bed chamber, from the experience of birth, and during which they were often visited by friends and family members. And here's a passage from page 80: "Another way in which the lying-in ceremony provided care for the newly-delivered mother was the special attention given to the provision of food and drink... Poultry was often purchased during childbearing since it was considered easy for the mother to digest."

Well. Over the past week we've been the fortunate beneficiaries of a beautiful perpetuation of that tradition. Beyond the handsome chicken salad that Linda just finished preparing (and the several other meals that she's made during her visit), we received, on Monday, a whole roast chicken, as part of a wonderful spread that included a luscious shrimp salad and the season's first cherries. But there's more, and it's not all chicken-themed. On the afternoon of Cleo's birthday, a friend brought us smoothies at the hospital; on our first day home, another friend brought a tray of homemade enchiladas, with an exquisite cilantro sour cream. And one evening our neighbor wandered over with an armful of pitas and a bowl of tabouleh. We could have opened a small restaurant.

So we're well fed, but even more powerful is the sense that we're well cared for by friends and family. L'Estrange's study focuses on the aristocratic families of Anjou and Brittany, and her larger point about lying-in is that while it could function as an opportunity for familial display (through the use of silks, for instance, or multiple beds), it also carried real potential benefits for mothers. Amen to that: over the past week, we've been every bit as comfortable as a medieval duchess, and L's slowly feeling more comfortable taking short walks, and leaving the house. So thanks to all who have made this past week as easy, and as wonderful, as it's been.

Cries and whispers

Does Cleo cry? Of course she does: usually when she wants some time at the breast, but also (like many babies) in the early evening, when nothing seems to calm her. Last night I held her and played a section of the Concierto de Aranjuez (a 1939 composition by the Spaniard Joaquin Rodrigo) on our nursery CD player. Nothing doing; Cleo wailed until her bottom jaw trembled; she cried in waves, and she cried with eyes open, and with eyes shut.

Certainly it's hard to hear, but, trying not to avoid using pacifiers this early in her life, we've decided to simply hold her, rock her, and let her rip during such jags. Eventually, she always calms down, and in fact slept like a rock for 3 hours after her fit last night. This morning, though, I read a 1988 New York Times article on babies' cries that makes the simple point that babies' cries vary substantially in pitch. A normal baby's cry, for those of you keeping score at home, is roughly an A below middle C. If a baby's in sharp pain, the pitch rises - and in fact some babies occasionally issue an ultra-high wail (comparable, says the Times, to a whistling teapot) that indicates acute distress.

We haven't heard that last one yet, and I hope we never do. So far, her cries have been rather modest: they tug at our heartstrings, perhaps, but they certainly don't seem to indicate any real trouble. Which may be why I found myself imagining, as the Concierto played on and Cleo cried, that she was simply a really boorish member of the audience: seated in the back row, perhaps, in her a discount seat, cell phone not turned off, occasionally opening wrapped candies and talking in inappropriately loud tones about the performance. Untrained ushers, we don't really know how to handle such customers, and so - perhaps to the consternation of the other listeners (our neighbors) - we more or less let her go while we're at home.

It's okay, we whisper, it's okay. There's no need to cry, Cleo. You're fully loved.

The beauty of being startled

So it turns out that most babies are born with a startle reflex (or a Moro reflex, for you experts out there): when they hear a sudden, loud noise, they extend their arms, legs, and fingers, arch their back, and draw their head back, before finally drawing their arms back into their chest. It's really kind of neat to see: something like an anemone tackling a careless tropical fish, and then retreating for a meal.

Cleo seems to be used to the occasional crash of trucks hitting potholes on Falls Road, but today it was a passage in Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik that snuck up on her while she nursed. A sudden surge in the dynamics, and that was that: baby's limbs everywhere for a wild second or two.

Thinking about it afterwards, I remembered that my dad, when he's listened to pop tracks that I've sent his way over the years (hoping for his stamp of approval on that latest Pearl Jam song or Eminem tune), has occasionally mentioned that they don't have many interesting changes in volume. It's just full intensity, for three or four minutes, where he's used to the more extended compositions of classical composers, who often (perhaps because of the length of the piece) alter moods more often, and more fully. There must be exceptions, of course, and my dad certainly didn't mean it as a rule - but it is an interesting observation, and it leads to an implicit thought experiment, which I'll simply pose to anyone who's reading: can you think of pieces that feature dramatic shifts that are sudden enough to trigger the Moro reflex?

White noise

One of the arguments that Harvey Karp makes in his bestselling The Happiest Baby on the Block is that newborns are often calmed by loud shooshing sounds: by an extended Shhh, or even by a vacuum cleaner. Why's that, Dr. Karp? "The answer is," he writes on page 140, "this loud white noise imitates your baby's experience inside the womb and switches on her calming reflex."

For the last three years, L and I have lived in a river valley surrounded on three sides by busy highways. As a result, there's a constant white noise in the air about us: the tomato plants and rabbits and Japanese maples are all backed, whether we consciously register it or not, by the steady shooshing sounds of autos.

Today, late afternoon, we sat on the porch with Cleo for several hours, the invisible traffic whispered steadily. Did it resemble, as Karp claims, the sound of blood in the womb? I don't know. But Cleo slept happily for hours, in between nursings.

Compositions

Mozart, we read, took about two weeks at the end of May and the beginining of June in 1778, to write his 30th symphony. The opera Psyche, it's sometimes claimed, was composed - score and libretto - in a mere three weeks. And Beethoven authored his sublime string quartet No. 19 (opus 135) over a span of roughly two months, in 1826.

Above, a photo of L's composition, Cleo Dahlia, who took just over nine months.

Arrival

On Tuesday evening, full of a sense of imminence, L and I listened to the most imminent piece of classical music I know: the first section on Handel's Messiah. It's concerned, of course, with the coming of a son, rather than a daughter - and, really, with much more than a son, at that. But you get the picture.

On Wednesday morning, L awoke at 2 in the morning, feeling faint contractions during a violent thunderstorm. By 9, we were at the hospital, and by 11:30 in a room, where L began 13 hours of labor.

On Thursday morning, at about 12:15 a.m., our daughter was born. Small - 5 pounds, 13 oz. - but a fighter: she struggled with the umbilical cord, which was wrapped around her neck, and then let the delivery room know that she'd arrived with a brief cry, before quietly looking about her.

And the alto and the chorus sang, at Dublin's New Music Hall in 1742, "O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain..."

Name to follow.

Behind the screen

In Malcolm Gladwell's enjoyable Blink, there's a section in which he considers a recent change in the audition procedures for symphony orchestras. Traditionally, applicants simply played before the directors of the orchestra - a process which yielded very few female hires. Directors insisted that they were being fair, and commonly suggested that women simply lacked the strength or resilience needed for symphonic performances. Recently, though, a number of orchestras have had applicants play, instead, behind a screen, and suddenly the number of female hires soared. Confronted with nothing but the music, the directors were forced to abandon their stereotypes.

In a sense, L and I are in a situation that's a neat inverse of contemporary directors: our baby not yet born, we know her sex, but nothing else (beyond her regular rolls and kicks, I suppose). There's not any music, in other words, to judge, and maybe that's part of why the last week has been so odd. We're ready for her to play, but have nothing but the quiet, graceful curtain of L's belly.

Oh, but I suppose there will be enough chances for us to hear that. And there will be more than enough expectations levied upon her, on account of her sex, once she does emerge. Pink socks; fairy tales; unicorns; softball; home economics. Granting a shy player some extra time behind the screen, in which to compose herself, is not out of order.