Rating systems

May I stick with the ratings theme for a moment longer? Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responses to the solicitation in my last entry (two offline comments! one of which is now posted, and one of which was quite kind, but nonetheless steadfastly refused to answer the question), I've taken your message to heart: you clearly want to hear more about numerical evaluations, the arts, and parenthood. I listen, dear readers, I really do.

So: who's heard of Roger de Piles? Glazed eyes; tired stares out the window. One student scribbles something with irrelevant vigor in a notebook. Well, de Piles was the 17th-century painter and writer who wrote the so-called Balances, an early work of art criticism in which he divides the art of painting into four areas, and then assigns important painters scores in each of those areas. Whether you agree or disagree with those scores - and part of the joy of his work is that you will disagree at times - the list is a fascinating project, and a window into late Baroque taste. Raphael and the Carracci fare very well, for instance. But Caravaggio, who receives only 6 out of 20 possible points in composition, does not. De Piles mocks Michelangelo's color by giving him a 4, where the great Florentine's use of line merits a 17. And so on.

One could do something similar, of course, for composers, or for musicians. We might try, for example, to assign points based on a composer's originality (Bartok or the serialists might fare well here), general depth of feeling (Beethoven would be the gold standard), or structure (I'll give Mozart an 18 out of 20; as de Piles wrote, no one is perfect). Or take singers: Sinatra, the consensus master of phrasing, gets a 19; Billie Holiday receives high marks for tone of voice. But don't take my word for it; after all, the fun is in devising your own system.

Which is what, in fact, a lot of us did as 13-year-old boys. Dungeons and Dragons and a hundred related knock-offs are, at their core, comparable exercises. Imagine a small group (small, since nerds are always a slightly endangered species) of teen boys, Doritos at the ready, choosing their characters: an elf; a warlock; a U.S. Marine. And then each boy starts with a certain number of points, and creates his character's profile, allotting, say, 10 to intelligence, and 4 to strength, and 19 to charisma (which is how, you can see, we lived vicariously through such games. The girlies would flock to our orc, if not to us).

So the other evening, with points and parenting on the mind, I thought I'd frame a question for L in a similar vein. I wrote down six basic personal characteristics (kindness; athleticism; beauty; self-confidence; so on...), gave her 36 points, and asked her to distribute them, up to a maximum of 10 in each category, based on her hopes for Cleo. And then I did the same.

I won't go into the results in detail, although it's true that L's Cleo would beat mine at soccer, and that mine would kindly congratulate her opponent. But it did lead to an interesting conversation. And that, really, is the point of such ratings. It doesn't necessarily matter, in the big picture, if your elf can outthink my valkyrie. And it doesn't really matter if I rank Bach's use of tone color more highly than Vivaldi's. What matters is what such rankings reveal about the rankers. When we rate people, we're really only making concrete our own values and priorities.

Overrated

There are many, many differences between Chapel Hill, where I grew up, and Baltimore, where I've lived since 2002. Basketball vs. lacrosse, BBQ vs. crabcakes - and even, one wants to add, very different feels to the local violence. For instance, I recall a police blotter account in Chapel Hill that described one man throwing an Egg McMuffin at another in a McDonald's parking lot. In Baltimore, parking lot quarrels often assume a different form: across the street from a friend's house, one man recently stabbed his colleague in the head (a phrase, by the way, that becomes more and more spooky the more you think about it). Or you might phrase it in this way: in Baltimore, there has been a series of violent and possibly race-motivated attacks on city buses, resulting in at least one case in a city bus wrapped in crime scene tape. In Chapel Hill, on the other hand, the city buses are all completely free, and serve a ridership that includes a rather high percentage of placid university-bound riders who sometimes discuss classical music on the way to work.

No, really. My dad used to ride the F bus to UNC, and several colleagues of his shared his deep interest in music. One day, as a result, a general question was posed: who is the most overrated composer in the classical canon? Various votes were cast, and eventually, if I remember the story correctly, it was Mahler who walked away with the prize.

Which got me thinking: is there an overrated aspect to fathering an infant? Initially, one wants to say no, not at all - precisely because the bar seems to be set so low for American fathers in general. If we show some genuine interest in the child at halftime of the Ravens' first exhibition game, well, then we're doing well. But push further: in reality, there are certain stereotypes that might also be called expectations. For instance, a father is supposed to simply abhor changing diapers (a task that I'd call underrated: it can actually be really fun to clean someone up, kiss their belly, and get them back in the game). But he's supposed to enjoy, on the other hand, the act of passing out cigars to relatives in the hospital. Given that smoking in the hospital premises is now illegal and punishable by fine, you'd probably want to count that as overrated.

Are there other contenders? Ah, readers of the blog, that's where you can help. The link to the comments page is just below; why not click and add a candidate of your own?

Freak injuries

At night we place Cleo on her back, as all parents are now told to do, in the hopes of preventing the little-understood SIDS. There are no toys near her, to reduce any risk of strangulation or suffocation. The muslin cloth that lies over her tiny legs was chosen after we'd read books that advised against heavier cloths, which don't breathe, and can therefore be dangerous. And, just for good measure's sake, there's a baby monitor on a table near her, so that we can respond if anything happens.

It sounds like overkill, and yet I don't think we're at all exceptional: babies are especially prone to accidents, and these are simply standard ways of preventing harm. Still, sometimes it seems like we're spending so much time babyproofing that we forget to save ourselves. All around Cleo, the world injures itself in ridiculous ways, making a muslin sheet seem all too simple an answer.

For example: last fall, Minnesota Timberwolves center Jason Collins injured himself in a "freak golf-cart accident," rupturing his triceps tendon and thus missing training camp and the team's opening game. As embarrassing as that may have been, though, Collins' mishap is considerably more romantic than the rather serious injuries sustained by baseball players such as Sammy Sosa (who injured his back while sneezing) or Wade Boggs (also a bad back, caused by taking off cowboy boots). Glenallen Hill may win the prize for Oddest Injury to an Athlete, though; in 1990, while suffering from a nightmare about spiders, the Toronto Blue Jay crawled, while still asleep, up his apartment stairs, bloodying his knees and elbows on the carpet.

Hill, apparently, only dreamt of spiders the once, but odd injuries can result from repetition, as well. Tennis elbow is a classic example; so is carpal tunnel syndrome. And violinists know that playing for several hours daily can cause serious pain in the left elbow; in fact, that's why David Rivinus recently introduced the Pellegrina viola, designed to alleviate such pain through a novel change in the elbow's angle.

Which is what I've been experimenting with recently, as well, in a slightly different context. As Cleo's largely outgrown her interest in the stroller, we usually now walk her in a sling or Baby Bjorn. It's easier in many ways, but she's still small enough that it helps to hold a hand firmly on the outside, to support her back or belly. Walk her enough, without really thinking about it, and you've suddenly been applying a soft pressure with your right elbow for hours and hours, over the course of a week. All of which is a long way of saying that I woke up the other morning with some rather serious tendinitis. The result of a recent tennis match? No - like most new dads, I haven't exactly been prancing around the courts. Maybe it came from trowelling in the garden? No - since laying the garden in in May, we've done little but pick tomatoes, watch the squash flowers come and go, and root for the solitary pumpkin. I'm afraid there's no alternative but to say it: I hurt myself while walking my baby.

Oh, but even there I've got good company. Major leaguer Paul Shuey once fell asleep while holding his baby, and woke up with a knot in his shoulder that temporarily prevented him from playing. And Ruben Sierra once hurt himself while chasing his daughter on a mall escalator.

We try to make the world safe for our kids. But who makes it safe for us?

Haydn!

Franz Joseph, that is. Sometimes known as the Father of the String Quartet (much as Gillaume Duchenne is sometimes considered the Father of the Application of Electricity, or Pietro Aretino is sometimes called the Father of Pornography), Haydn is perhaps the best-known 18th-century composer after a certain Wolfgang Amadeus. He's also the composer who was badly scarred by smallpox and who suffered so badly from acute nasal polyps that he couldn't fathom (according to his biographer) how it had happened that in his life he had been loved by several beautiful woman. "They couldn't have been led to love," said the very modest Haydn, "by my beauty."

So what was it about him, then, that appealed? In an effort to find out, your intrepid blogger has been playing several of Haydn's string quartets for more than a week. There are 68 of them in all - or more, if you include several generally thought to be spuriously attributed to him. And they're very well regarded; the critic Bernard Holland, in fact, claimed that Haydn was a greater master of the form than Mozart, Beethoven, or Bartok, whose quartets are widely celebrated. In fact, both Mozart and Beethoven dedicated six of their own quartets to Haydn. Not bad: it's like Augustus paying his tributes at the tomb of Alexander the great.

But, again, what appealed so much? The critic Anthony Tommasini once claimed that Haydn's quartets delight in part because of a number of unexpected turns and changes in rhythm, and several simply virtuosic passages. And, as a good Neoclassicist, Haydn's pieces are highly ordered and logical: initial themes evolve into lush patterns which are nevertheless always related to their modest beginnings.

Okay: after a dozen listenings I can see some of that. But perhaps only some. In fact, I still have real trouble seeing beyond what Tommasini referred to as "a jocular, genial surface quality to the music that is often mistaken by listeners today, and even some performers, as being all there is." That's what strikes my ears, accustomed as they are to the considerably stormier quartets of Beethoven (and the acoustic shifts of, say, Radiohead), when I listen to Haydn. Haydn's quartets recall, to me, the entirely pleasant but ultimately unremarkable experience of driving along a slightly contoured interstate with the window rolled down. Like our highways, his works are smooth, nicely built, and bright. They're even well signed: as they roll by, you don't worry about getting lost. Or, rather, when you do get lost, it's because you realize you'd simply begun to think about something else entirely. Like an interstate, the quartets are constantly becoming the mere ground for more interesting thoughts.

Doubtless, that's too harsh, and there's no real need to push the point: I envy Holland his deep pleasure. But think about the context, too. Although composers had occasionally written string quartets before Haydn, they were mostly written for mere household entertainment. He was the first, then, to elevate the form into something broadly respectable, something canonical. That in itself is worth applauding - but let's also remember Dante's observation that "Cimabue thought that he held, but now everyone cries for Giotto, obscuring Cimabue's fame." Crowds are fickle, sure. But they're also onto something: innovations are often followed by further developments. None of this diminishes the importance of the innovation, but it does change our relation to it.

Two weeks ago we cheered when Cleo, while on her tummy, held her head up off the mat at all. Today she confidently lifted it up to a 90-degree angle, looked around the room, and seemed to think little of it. Haydn has his place, but it's a place that's worth much in part because of what he made possible.

Muses, part II

Across the street lives a little girl - that's her, holding a finicky, pouty Cleo last week - who's at the age where she really enjoys greeting people. I might be working in the garden, or reading on the sun porch, or walking about the yard wondering why the Pirates traded their entire starting lineup for minor leaguers: regardless of where I am, and how many trees, walls, or meters stand between us, her voice will somehow reach me from her yard: "Hi, Kerr!"

The other day, the effect was touchingly silly. L and I were setting out on a drive, and we passed by our neighbor's back yard, with our windows down. From the other side of a solid, six-foot-tall wooden fence we could hear the call as we drove by: "Hi, Kerr!"

I've had that image in mind as I've thought about how muses and Cleos communicate. The first thing you realize, perhaps, is that it's on their terms. You might be thinking about something else entirely, or you might be (like Coleridge) enjoying a good opium-induced sleep, or you might be fiddling with the radio in your car - and then, bang, a signal comes to you, unexpected and often unsolicited.

Of course you can try to solicit the signal, or to invoke the muse, as dozens of poets have done. And you can certainly try to get Cleo to tell you what exactly she wants. But such attempts are feeble, and they're rarely rewarded. Babies communicate in their own way, at their own pace. Muses descend upon the bard's shoulder when they're good and ready.

The point? I guess it's simply this: try to be ready when the voices do arrive. Have your pen at the ready; have your car window down. The little girl across the street is only a little girl for so long: enjoy her pure joy and inclusiveness while it's so fully in the open.

Muses

Over the past week, in between the occasional nonsense syllables, the bewitching smiles, and the jarring thumb-sucking bouts that violate pretty much every basic code of decency, Cleo's been throwing out gestures that seem to be attempts to communicate something. A wrist rubbed rapidly across an eye; the tongue, extended; a little arm, swiping at the bottle with which I'm feeding her: it's increasingly clear that there's another citizen in the house, trying to convey her needs, desires and frustrations with some specificity.

We can read some of her signs, of course: the swipe, for instance, pretty clearly means that she's eaten enough. And the specific significance of most of her cries is now recognizable: a wobbling moan implies exhaustion, while a breathless cry signifies hunger. But in some cases, I still feel like I'm at sea: a translator who doesn't know a particular idiom, or a diviner who encounters an unprecedented pattern in the auspices.

Cleo shares her name with the muse of history, and muses, of course, also speak from the far side of familiarity. Poking around, I found a couple of interesting books on musical composition. Ann McCutchan's The Muse that Sings, for example, offers interviews with 25 recent composers on the compositional process. Unsurprisingly, these 20th-century artists speak less frequently of muses than, say, their Neoclassical colleagues might have, but the idea's still occasionally in play. Shulamit Ran, for instance, notes that "I think there is a muse, actually, but you have to make it come visit you - you have to find a way to invite it, and then find a way to work with it."

Well, we've had no problem getting Cleo to visit us: pretty much every day, in fact, we realize all over again that we're bound to spend every day for the next few years with this little gal. But it's in finding a way to work with her that the challenge lies. And yet, it's clear that the rewards for close attention might be considerable. In his Music and Imagination, Aaron Copland refuses to use the term muse in analyzing the creative process, but he does allow that "One half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates."

We're trying our best, Cleo, to listen and notate. Feel free to keep on dictating, and let's see where it leads.

Leibniz' sand

Reading Diderot's delicious Salon of 1767 this morning, I came across this:

"You've never heard the same melody sung more or less identically by two different singers. The text, the vocal line, rhythm, pitch, so many restrictive guidelines, would seem to collaborate in assuring an identical effect. But in the event things work out very differently..." And he goes on to recall the philosopher Leibniz' contention that no two grains of sand - and, by extension, no two things in the universe - are exactly alike.

Most of our days over the past two months have been pretty comparable. Wake to a squirming Cleo; feed her and play with her; take a walk; feed her and try some time under the mobile, or on her belly; naptime; another feeding; a big afternoon siesta; maybe an evening stroll around the neighborhood; and pretty soon it's nearly 8 p.m., or bedtime. With few exceptions, the days seem organized around a comparable template.

And yet, they really don't ever contain quite the same melody: despite the superficial similarities of forms, there are all sorts of little differences and evolutions. Last night, out of the blue, Cleo reeled off an uninterrupted 7 1/2-hour band of sleep. Gadzooks! And today, after several weeks of crying rather miserably when we set her on her belly, she simply raised her head and peered about her. Frustrating boundaries suddenly give way; seeming routines are suddenly banished.

"Never," wrote Diderot, "since the world has been the world, have two lovers said 'I love you' identically." Circumstance and individuality, in other words, preclude any rote repetition or sheer duplication. We loved Cleo on Friday. But we love her slightly differently (and not just in a more rested way) today - just as all parents' love for their children evolves, and waxes, and is over time burnished.

Music box

It's been a while since I actually paused and listened closely to some music while holding Cleo. And so yesterday morning, with our tiny daughter sacked out in the Baby Bjorn after a walk to Mount Washington Village, I was actually pretty excited to cue up a CD that arrived recently, via the Mom Mailing Network. Classics for Babies: a 1999 disc featuring 13 famous classical excerpts arranged for music box "and gentle orchestra."

If we can measure the intensity of earthquakes, if there is a term (smash factor) for the ratio of the ratio of a golf ball's speed to clubhead speed, if we can seriously say that Johnny Carson's Q score now stands, posthumously, at 32, then there ought to be a rating for The Usefulness of a Particular Piece of Music in Lulling Babies to Sleep and in Keeping Them Asleep. And, if there was such a factor, I can now vouch that Classics for Babies would merit a pretty perfect score. I stood and swayed and listened to nearly half of the CD, and Cleo slept on; I ambled into the office and fired up the computer, and she continued to snooze; I put her in a swing in the dining room, and with a music box version of the Moonlight Sonata playing beyond us, she woke not. Cheers, Mom.

There are, though, only so many things one can do while holding a baby, and so, while listening to the CD, I started looking more closely at the packaging. An intriguing document! Turns out this CD was part of a 12-CD series; an insert urged me to "collect all twelve," but I'm not really sure that we need Baby Cowboy quite yet. Or that I could afford it: a sticker on the back of the jewel box of our CD referred to a suggested retail price of $49.99 in Canada. Wow! I handled the liner notes with heightened care and looked more closely.

It was produced, I learned, by one Andreas Lonardoni. And what's his story, you ask? Well, he's also the member of an eponymous group that released, in 2006, a driving industrial track called Techno Metal. Damn right! That was Andreas, beleaguered, on the phone a few years ago telling his tattooed techno friends that the Classics for Babies disc was almost a wrap, and that he'd get to rehearsals in the warehouse as soon as he could.

But perhaps it's too simple to assume that Andreas saw the Sweet Baby Music Collection as no more than a way of paying the bills. After all, the liner notes note that "great care was taken to monitor the tones, beats per minute and structure of the chosen melodies." Moreover, while some of the choices of tracks on our CD are rather obvious - the inclusion of Peter and the Wolf will not surprise many students of two-month old consumers' habits - Andreas did not simply rely on the tried and true. For example, our CD includes a string quartet by Luigi Boccherini. He was a relatively little-known 18th-century composer, whose stylistic similarities to a much more famous composer prompted a contemporary to label him "the wife of Haydn." Boccherini! One imagines Andreas, exhausted after a night of trance music, slowly walking into the Sweet Baby Music Collection main office at 10 a.m., distractedly holding a cup of coffee, trying to decide if a Boccherini quartet could hold its own on Classics for Babies CD. And would the quick strings be too much for a baby? Would the longish composition fail to hold the attention of your average infant?

No worries, Andreas. You did your job well. Now fire up those soundboards and effect pedals.

Fear, love and swimming

A couple of mornings ago, I came across John Biewen's Scared, a radio montage featuring years of samples of conversations with his daughter that illustrates, in rather touching style, the idea that parental love involves a collapse of, and then restoration of, the basic distance between two people. A father fears for his daughter, and then learns, painfully, to let go.

This afternoon, though, both Biewen and letting go were far, far from our minds. This afternoon, folks, was about time at the pool, and about putting Cleo in some damned fine swimming diapers and introducing her to the simple joy of a cool swim in hot August. Thanks to a neighbor's invite, we rolled into Meadowbrook like the Beverly Hillbillies into California, lost no time in setting up shop on the artificial beach, and let Cleo have a quick look around. And then it was pool time.

Oh, sure, there' ll be times in the future when we dicker about curfews, buy the wrong puffy stickers, and fight minor battles over things like Fruit Loop Cereal Straws. No doubt. But today, for a few minutes, was pure pleasure: Cleo half-floating in the shallow kiddie pool, our hands under her arms but her solid little body still seeming to bob in the water like a cork, she unsure about the sensation but perhaps somehow recalling ancient moments before birth and moving her legs like a runner in place, the sun falling, falling, and other children - children of five, and six, and thus of seemingly infinite age and experience - coming over to ask her name or even to stroke her tiny head, and our hands still under her arms, and the back of her head now wet, and not a smile but not a cry - more like a stoic, gutsy willingness - and then up, and out, and into a dry towel held by mommy.

Collapse, boundaries. Collapse. We'll have ample time to restore them in the future, if we really have to.

It all happens so fast

So last evening, with Cleo in bed and a first coat of Valspar Sunrise Beach interior eggshell drying on the walls of the guestroom, I had a few minutes for a book that a friend recently gave me: Lewis Thomas' 1983 Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. Given our ridiculously early bedtimes of late, I guess that this entry can qualify as early evening thoughts on Lewis' late night thoughts.

In the title essay, Thomas adopts a rather Cassandra-like tone: worried, in good early 1980s fashion, about the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, he reacts to a stretch of Mahler's piece by thinking about death, and finality. But that only leads him to recall how differently he had listened to music when he was a much younger fellow:

"I can remember with some clarity what it was like to be sixteen. I had discovered the Brahms symphonies. I knew that there was something going on in the late Beethoven quartets that I would have to figure out, and I knew that there was plenty of time ahead for all the figuring I would ever have to do. I had never heard of Mahler. I was in no hurry."

That actually sounds about right to me - even if it was EBN-OZN, rather than Brahms, that I'd recently discovered. That sense of time on hand, of infinite futures, of things to come, though: that was one of the sweetest things, looking back, of being 14, or 16.

Now that I'm a dad, though, I'm learning a different sensation. The dental assistant yesterday was the fifth, or sixth, stranger to tell me recently that it'll all go so quickly in the coming years. Sure, Cleo's only two months now, but before you know it, these well-meaning strangers say, she'll be off to college.

And that's probably right, as well. In fact, I can already see the truth in such a claim. For the first couple of months, time moved slowly, and Cleo wasn't really very different, on the outside, than she was when born. She grew, of course, but still seemed to move randomly, and to barely interact with her surroundings.

But suddenly it's all happening at once. She grasps fingers purposefully. She follows us as we walk across the room. She laughs occasionally. And, in the past few days, she sucks her thumb - and sucks, and sucks. She can even put herself to sleep after a few shockingly loud sucks on her favorite digit.

When we were 16, time seemed to stretch out before us like a cross-continental interstate. At 38, the end is always, in some sense, in sight, no matter how much we're enjoying the trip. And at two months and counting? Changes occur before the notion of time even makes sense.

The Mendoza line

Because it's Sunday, and because that means that Dad may have listened to some Prairie Home Companion while studying the Sunday baseball stats and standings, let's dedicate today's column to a brief consideration of fatherhood and the Mendoza line.

What's that? You don't know what the Mendoza line is? Well, although there are various alleged origins of the term, it's universally agreed to refer to the meager annual batting average of the all-glove, no-bat Mario Mendoza, a 1970s ballplayer. Since Mendoza generally carried a meager average of around .200, players who were performing even worse then him were in real danger of being demoted. Hence the desire to hit above the Mendoza line.

But while statistics-heavy baseball lends itself to such statistical thresholds, fatherhood would seem - wouldn't it? - to resist easy numerical analysis. Nevertheless, in the recent avalanche of popular writings about fatherhood, there have been occasional similar efforts to measure and to articulate a satisfactory level of performance. Perhaps the most obvious example can be found in Michael Lewis' Home Game: in a draft of the book, Lewis estimated that he did roughly 29% of the parenting in his household, with his wife doing the (considerable) rest of the work. In his final version, he bumped his share up to 31%. Why the change? Well, Lewis is a big fan of baseball and statistics (an earlier book of his, Moneyball, detailed the value of a certain statistics in measuring player performance), and in baseball terms hitting 31%, or .310, is a lot better than carrying a more mundane .290 average. Through a slight editorial change, Lewis made himself into an All-star.

But, really, he probably didn't even have to massage the stats. Just a week ago, papers around the world carried the results of a recent study by an Oxford professor who found that fathers in America, Great Britain, and Scandinavia do more household work than men in any other society. Australians, bless their surfboards and their barbies, finished last.

I thought about crowing over the story to L. - until I realized that I was reading it online, while she was taking care of our daughter. And, when I paused to do a little analysis, I had to admit that while I feel like I'm pitching in, things are hardly even in our salmon-colored household. L.'s up twice in the middle of the night, providing a banquet for Cleo, and she does the lion's share of the parenting during the day, as well. I think we'd both say that the division of work has gone well, for the most part, over the first nine weeks, as I've been writing and working on classes in the cracks provided by L's dedication, and I will be doing double duty come September, but even so, I'm probably hitting about what Michael Adams hits.

Which means, I'll point out in concluding, that L. is hitting about .690. Better than Mays, better than Ichiro, better than the weirdly outsized kid in your local Little League. And steroid-free, on top of it. You go, girl.

Gaining ground

In her 2004 novel Shebang, Valerie Vogrin briefly mentions an Austrian music scholar "who had worked himself into a street-wandering dither as he struggled to complete the final movement of his symphony." And even Mozart, in composing La clemenza di Tito, supposedly experienced a rather severe case of writer's block; with the premiere approaching, several messengers arrived at his door, hoping for the long-awaited overture. "Not a single idea will come," the beleaguered Mozart reportedly told them.

Only nine weeks into parenting, I'm already familiar with a new form of creative impasse. Where to walk Cleo today? Can I simply rehash the mumbled narrative I offered yesterday? And since these shorts felt fine yesterday, screw it, they'll work again today. And, sure, let's just have pasta again.

But, magically, a baby then provides breakthroughs on her own. Four days ago, Cleo offered her first laugh: an unexpected blossom. And last night, out of the blue, she slept for seven straight hours in the night, leaving L truly well rested for the first time in a long while. Suddenly she can grasp a rattle. Her head rises higher. And so on. The seemingly static trenches that run through the Belgian countryside suddenly give way, and new frontiers are established, new beach heads visible.

With Mozart at a loss regarding his overture, it was the soprano Josepha Weber, his sister in law, who finally solved things, when she shouted at the composer "Then for heaven's sake, begin it with the cavalry march!"

Cleo doesn't shout so effectively yet, but new movements are constantly beginning nonetheless.

Unselfconsciousness

In 1947, Virgil Thomson was struck by the stage presence of Edith Piaf. "There is apparently," he wrote, "not a nerve in her body. Neither is there any pretense of relaxation. She is not tense but intense, in no way spontaneous, just thoroughly concentrated and impersonal."

Do babies have a physical expressiveness? If so, it's a complex one: a paradoxical combination of constant physical activity (Cleo's feet are almost always tensed as we walk; her head is rarely still) and occasional drop-dead relaxation (sleeping while being carried like a sack of groceries). Babies can work a crowd with their mercury smiles even as they ignore the most basic social conventions in voiding their bowels while in the hands of a well-meaning grandmother. They're spontaneous - that's for sure - but weirdly predictable at the same time (8:20? probably wants to go to bed).

Above all, though, what's fun about them in this direction is their sheer lack of selfconsciousness. Dressed in laughable clothes, they announce their hunger with an imperious cry. They roll up to strangers in their strollers, drool threading down their cheeks. Sour milk condensed in the rolls of their necks, they look about them as though they would be jealous gods, rather than babies. It is a strange calculus that results from an id without an accompanying superego.

I'm sure that in time Cleo will develop that superego - and with it, too, both a more conventional politeness and (sadly) some degree of the stage fright that runs through nearly all of us at one point or another. For now, though, let's enjoy the show: it's rare that one sees such unmediated personality. Piaf was intense, rather than tense. Babies are present as soon as they're sent.

What comes to mind

Dante dreamt of Beatrice; Homer Simpson dreams of donuts. On my first night away from Cleo, I dreamt of... Cleo. In a Holiday Inn Express in Lynchburg, VA, happily tired after a day of golf, baseball, beer and catching up with old high school friends, I found myself convinced that Cleo was in the nice large white bed with me, sleeping in her trusty car seat through the night.

What brings things to mind? In this case, habit, absence, and a large dose of simple love created the dream. She's on my mind, even when she's not in the room. But how to explain the songs that come tumbling out as I carry her, or play with her? Me and Bobby McGee was one of the first to come to me, and I still don't know why: maybe it's the simple theme of companionship that appeals. Sometimes it's embarrassingly literal; today, after L walked with us for a spell and then peeled off to write some thank-you notes, it was Separate Ways. And in other cases, it's more nonsense than anything: a rambling, spontaneous tune and words that don't mean much beyond their simple sounds. Magma that bubbles to the surface.

We like to imagine that as parents we'll offer an environment that appeals to and that shelters our children. But as often as not, the environment that we create is the result of subconscious urges, native feelings, and sensed continuities. Things come to mind, unsummoned.