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.