Traces

One of the strangest aspects of caring for an infant is the realization that they won't remember - in an hour; let alone a year - whatever it is that you're doing with them. Oh, sure, perhaps the walk that you're taking on them will somehow build trust, or perhaps the time you spend holding a windup toy above them creates certain new nerve endings. But on a more obvious, discernible level it's something like visiting, I imagine, a relative with advanced Alzheimer's. The visit may be quite lively and delightful, but in the mind of the patient it may also evaporate completely by the evening hours.

Or in the mind of the supposedly lucid visitor. Already I'm finding that I can't remember certain basic things about the first couple of months of parenting. What was the grunting sound that Cleo made while sleeping, when she was just a few weeks old? How small was she, exactly? I really don't remember. And whether it's because I was simply exhausted while it was happening, or because memory is simply imperfect, the result's the same: you throw a stone into a pond, and there are temporary ripples, and perhaps the surface of the water rises very slightly, but any visible trace of the stone's entry soon disappears.

Perhaps such thoughts help to explain why I was so delighted to come across, in planning a lecture this past Saturday, a website that includes links to a large number of Soviet-era popular tunes. Just click on any of the years on the left, and then on Music Box, and you're in a dance hall in Kranoyarsk, or in a flat of newly urbanized farmers in Stalingrad, listening to Leonid Utesov's latest.

Who knew, beyond a few Russian nonagenarians, that such music existed? And yet, in its day, it must have been on the lips of dozens of tram drivers and coal miners' wives. Music is so simply powerful, so viral in the present. And yet it's also ephemeral: the singer falls silent, and the note of the oboe dies out, and is gone.

Right now I'm listening to Konstantin Sokol'skii's Cigarette Smoke. And isn't the title, really, a perfect metaphor for both music and parenting? Temporary, ethereal, and given to give way: what's visible, or audible, before us is beautiful in the moment, and yet soon no longer perceived. And yet perhaps it leaves, be it a melody or a day spent with a baby, deep and consequential traces.