Orchestra at large

This past weekend happened to include my 39th born day, and so we set out, the car packed like a camel prepared for the Silk Road, on our first real family vacation. Cape May! The very name sounds like a siren's song, and its position on the map - on the very southeastern tip of New Jersey, a land's end, a hanging chad - suggested exoticism and remoteness. Or, at least, remoteness by our current standards: while it's true that a friend was flying to Tajikistan on the same day, and that another will be leaving for Addis Ababa on Friday, three hours still seems, to these new parents, like an Epic Journey.

But it went well. The hotel was lovely and the town truly quaint, with tree-lined streets and a bevy of 19th-century Victorian homes. Louie's Pizzeria kicked out a delicious pie for us, and the box in which we took it home exhorted us to "Love America": advice that really wasn't hard to take as we strolled about, taking in the sights. Thanks to Cleo, we were up for a lovely sunrise on Sunday, and for flapjacks at Uncle Bill's at 7 -see above - and the weather was fantastic, making walks on the beach seem, well, beachy.

Even the familiar pleasure of the sand meeting the sea, though, is now different. The relatively narrow strand suddenly looked infinite and Saharan: an immense plain across which the stroller cannot be rolled, and in which Cleo seems subsumed. But if the beach's vastness was novel to me, think about the sight to a four-month-old who's been a landlubber for her whole life. The incredibly distant horizon line; the feel of sand; the visual rhythm of waves: what to make of such a spectacle? Cleo responded by lying on her back, smiling broadly, and stuffing three fingers in her mouth.

On some level, though, she must have been struck too by the sound of the sea. We could hear it through one of the partly opened windows in our hotel room, and it's such a basic pleasure. I suppose that it may not have been entirely unfamiliar: isn't the rush of the mother's blood in the womb somehow sealike, too? But novel nonetheless. As were the sounds of shod hooves on the streets outside, as horse-drawn carriages led tourists about the town. As L. noted, Cleo must be used by now to the sounds of sirens at night: what to make of this clipped rhythm, though?

Ah, she'll make whatever she wants to out of it. For now, it's enough to think that the world is an orchestra, and that each section begins to play at a different moment. First are parents' voices, and then the incidental sounds of home; soon the whisper of trees, and the quiet purr of the car. Strings, and then reeds, and then brass. Crash of breaking waves; clop of horses' hooves. Each month sees the composition grow more complex.