Flying

If I was a contestant on Family Feud, and Richard Dawson had just kissed all of the female members of my extended family, and the next category on the board came up, and it was Why People Listen to Music, well, my top answer would probably be, To Relax, or To Feel Good. But if I was answering for myself, rather than trying to predict the tastes of the hoi polloi, I might go with something a little more subtle - such as, to be carried away from the immediate present, and, often, into the past.

For isn't that part of the reason that 97.9, or WBJC, or whatever's in your CD player right now, appeals? Turn it on, turn it up, and you're suddenly somewhere else - either in an abstract sense, as you ride a wave of Bollywood polyphony, or in a nostalgic sense, as you listen to that old Chris De Burgh song that you loved when you were 13.

But of course music's not the only tool that allows us to travel in such lovely vicarious ways. I'll resist the temptation to point out that you're doing something similar in simply reading this, but you can probably think of other analogies, as well. Really, such options are all around us. Just last week, for instance, Cleo and I peered down into the Jones Falls and saw a small group of male hooded mergansers (see the picture above). They were simply preening, and floating, but their very presence in Baltimore in late November suggested migrations and flights south. And then, too, I drove Cleo out to the airport recently on a rainy late morning, as we simply looked for an interesting place to walk, and to learn. But once in an airport, even as a mere pedestrian, who can resist looking at the large tables of outbound flights, and thinking, That could be me, on the flight to Miami.

I chatted briefly with the server at Starbucks this morning, and she mentioned that the turn in the weather had her thinking about going south. Where would you go? I asked. Somewhere, she said, south of the equator.

A fair answer, to be sure - but in small ways, isn't she already there?

Thanksgiving

I've learned a lot of neat things about my wife's capacity for generosity and love over the past five and a half months, but one of the most concise and indelible images of her natural tendency towards warmth came to me on the very first day that we were parents. I left the hospital room to get some coffee, I think, and returned to find Cleo asleep and L., still in bed and still pale from the delivery, and clearly exhausted after having been awake for roughly 40 hours, beginning to draw up a list of the folks at the hospital to whom she wanted to send thank-you cards.

Since then, that list has only grown longer, as friends, and family members, and even relative strangers have been remarkably generous towards us and our tiny daughter. And while we've tried to be good about thanking everyone for their thoughtfulness, of course we've sometimes, in the haste of the day, not quite phrased things as fully or as creatively as we'd hoped to. Or, in a few cases, we may have forgotten entirely.

So let's devote this day's blog entry to a few further thanks. Thanks, Holly, for the lovely knit wool hat, and thanks, Robin, for cluing us in to the late-night virtues of a pink lightbulb. Thanks, Tasha, for the Baby Bjorn, which - although you'll remember I was completely flummoxed by it last Christmas, when I tried to put it on backwards - I've now worn for at least 150 hours, with Cleo pressed tight against my chest. Thanks, Tripp and Mara, for late summer invites to the neighborhood pool, and thanks, Shannon, and Melissa, and Steve, and Liz, for giving up your evenings to babysit and let us remember what a city's like at night. Thanks, Dillon, for the fat tub of Boudreaux's butt paste: we may buy stock in the company. Thanks, Jaro and Linda, for being understanding when we've been less than competent hosts. Thanks, Monica, for the suite of baby clothes; your generosity overwhelms. Thanks, Helen Ann, for the many creative gifts, and for a terrific Halloween costume. Thanks, Darran, for the handmade baby food, and thanks, Jessie and Geremy, for your early visit and your colorful gifts. Thanks, Julie, for socks that keep baby feet warm in the grayest of weather, and thanks, Jane, for the heartbreakingly beautiful little blanket. Thanks, Mike, for the thoughtful gift of a bannister, and thanks, Jenn, for your kindness to a little girl who was a complete stranger only three months ago. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for a stream of delightful gifts and for your fall visit, and thanks, Young, for passing it forward. And, heck, while we're at it let's even thank Chris for not lighting that sixth firework last Saturday night at 1 a.m.

But above all, of course, thank you, L. Since day one, we've never had quite enough time to do all of the things we wish we could. But, given that, the best that you can do is always, in my eyes, much more than enough.

Confessions

In the rare moments that I actually think about what I want this blog to be, instead of simply scrambling to shape a post before Cleo wakes from a nap, or before L. and I sit down to dinner and the evening's dose of Jeopardy!, I sometimes worry that my posts are unfairly optimistic, or rosy. They seem to suggest, that is, a dad who knows what he's doing, and a household that runs smoothly and without hiccups. (Or, at least, without major hiccups; Cleo's still cursed with small bouts of them at regular intervals).

Well, as any of you who have visited the Pink House in recent months have seen, or as any of you who are parents have known since Day One, any sense that I am fully competent in this calling is simply a veneer. Set into neat paragraphs, and accompanied by a smiling image of Cleo, all may appear easy, and smooth. But let's be frank: there's often as much airbrushing behind these posts as there is behind a standard edition of Vogue.

Should I name names? Well, why not? After all, it was me who wrote a piece just a few years ago on how the computer seems to prompt a certain confessional spirit. So, with the warning of the backwoods preacher in mind ("Son, that ain't a confession; that's just bragging!"), here's a brief and humbly intended list of three recent Awkward Parenting Moments.

1. Using the men's room at Starbucks, with Cleo strapped to my chest in the Baby Bjorn, seems to me only a minor violation of some rule of perfect parenting - and an unfair rule, at that. Hey, at least I made it to the men's room - not always a given when one's toting 20 pounds of infant and groceries, and an umbrella, from store to home on foot. And my aim, I'll add, was still true.

2. Was that me scrambling to complete an online fantasy football transaction while Cleo began to cry after waking in her swing? Guilty as charged. But, Cleo, someday you'll understand: Santana Moss just wasn't getting the catches that had been projected, and there were better options out there...

3. Oddest, though, was certainly the moment last week when Cleo was happily chomping on her Whoozit on the futon next to me, and I was actually able to do a little reading, while nursing a bottle of hard cider at the end of a 9-hour day of child care. I opened the Washington Post magazine, and came across an advice column featuring a letter from a clearly conscientious grandmother who often watches her daughter's child. Trouble was, the grandma was used to enjoying a glass of wine, or two, in the evenings, and wondered if she could continue to honor such a tradition in her own household, now that her daughter was prevailing on her for even more childcare. No dice, came the answer from on high, along with a coolly worded absolute law: You should never, never drink while watching a child. And so, sheepishly, sheepishly, I put my cider down, and put the magazine down, and turned back to Cleo...

But wait - I hear her waking just now. And in every slight moan upon waking, there seems to be the possibility of absolution. So enough for now, and I'll walk to cribside, and begin all over again.

A different focus

If you've waded through a few of my previous posts, you know that over the past few months I've been listening - often with Cleo; often, in fact, with a sleeping Cleo in a car seat - to a good deal of classical music. And while the pieces I've been listening to - Schubert's lieder; Satie's piano compositions - are hardly obscure, they're also not exactly the big men on the classical campus. If the canon of classical music is a country, I've been visiting pleasant towns, and well-preserved regional cities.

Until a recent afternoon, that is, when I was suddenly thrown back into the capital city. Driving home from lunch with L., and with Cleo nodding off behind me, I turned on the car radio and suddenly heard the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth.

Wow. I'd known the piece, of course, for years - everybody's known it for years. But when I'd heard it in the past, it was usually against a more chaotic and clamorous backdrop: it competed, implicitly, with anthems by Guns 'n Roses, and the brassy theme to NFL Today, and the blips of PacMan, and all of the other jangling sounds that make up the soundscape of a teenaged boy, or a 20-something still partly convinced that he's a teenager. But now, hearing it against my recent memories of Satie's subtle variations and Schubert's delicate, wistful odes to winter, I was blown away. Beethoven's reputation suddenly made sense; so, too, did the alleged drama of Romantic music. Placed in a fairer context, the music's original boldness suddenly stood out in high relief.

Is it a stretch to say that that, in a sense, is how I feel about babies now, as well? Six months ago, I saw babies as babies: as tiny little folks whose evolution was unclear to me and whose varied appearances, abilities, and moods I barely registered as I walked past them on sidewalks or in coffeehouses. I had other things on my mind, and saw them through broader frames. But now, with an infant of my own, I suddenly see them through a narrower lens: through, you might say, a more baby-appropriate lens. And suddenly the myriad variations are much more apparent. The baby in the Baby Bjorn at Whole Foods is so small that she has yet to unclench her fists. The baby in the stroller on Roland looks to be about nine months old; she's probably learned to sit up, on her own. And the baby in the back seat of our car? Well, we just learned that swinging her in a large arc while making a staticky sound can make her giggle.

Viewed against the wild variety of the world as a whole, music, and babies, and all things, are seen only coarsely. Viewed within their class or genre, though, their contours become much clearer.

The more things change...

In the second edition (published in 1941) of Florence Brown Sherbon’s The Child: His Origins, Development, and Care, Sherbon approvingly offers an anecdote involving a couple who taught - both of them, husband and wife - at a small college, and who had recently become parents. "From the time that the baby was three weeks old," writes Sherbon, "to the end of the school year, the father took care of the child during the hours when the mother was carrying on her work on the campus."

I drop L. off at the Hopkins greenhouse three days a week, at about 8:25 in the morning, and then Cleo and I motor north, usually stopping for a stroll in Roland Park, of late under falling leaves. Perhaps we wander the aisles of a grocery store. Cleo naps. When she awakes, we walk - she bundled in her Bjorn - along small streams and rivers. Coffee plays a role, at some point, and then there are more naps, and time with blocks, and time yelping, and nuzzling, and tickling. We have been known to check the state of the stock market, briefly, on TV. And one of us usually gets a bath. But back to Sherbon:

"The father said that he wished to do it, he enjoyed it, and he thereby ‘felt that it was really half his baby.’ When the infant was five months old, the mother said proudly that John could and did do everything for the baby quite as well as she, except for the one item of breast feeding."

Well, I wouldn't go that far. L.'s the master of putting Cleo down at night; she's also the one who's tended to Cleo in the quiet middle of the night, putting fears and hunger to flight. And, man, you should see the peals of laughter she can get in playing with Cleo, by pulling a cloth over her tiny face. But why compare, in any case, or why divide the baby into halves? I too wished to do what I've done, and enjoyed it - and if Cleo can fall asleep against my chest while we walk through the city, as on Monday, then enough, enough.

Or enough as far as I'm concerned. And what of others? Well, here's Sherbon, one last time: "It was reported that the whole matter of the arrival and care of the baby was of great interest to the campus and that the young father lost no prestige with faculty or students.”

Well, with no comments extolling or mocking my fatherhood yet surfaced on RateMyProfessor, I can't really speak to the current status of my prestige on campus. But of interest? Everyone's been more generous than I could have imagined. And that includes you, reader. The forms change, then - I'm guessing my 1941 predecessors weren't blogging about their infant. But so much remains, so much remains the same, as I hand Cleo back to L. and get ready to teach my Friday classes.

De gustibus non est...

The idea that personal taste is somehow predictable, somehow reasonable, is an appealing one. Appealing, for example, to modern Wall Street: hence the rise of a fleet of programs designed to interpret your musical tastes, and to recommend further music that you'll presumably enjoy, and want to buy. Hence, too, the wide popularity of dating sites that use algorithms to promise a fully compatible partner within six months. But the idea doesn't only appeal as a business model; thinking of taste as predictable also feels, well, friendly. If we know someone, even only slightly, shouldn't we be able to forecast their tastes with some accuracy?

That's what one of my generous first-year students, no doubt, was thinking when she suggested that I listen to a band called Of Montreal. I often play some soft music before class, and, based on what she'd heard from my laptop, she offered what she felt was a likely match. And so, later that evening, I checked them out - who could be a better musical matchmaker, after all, than an open-minded and well-traveled 18-year-old?

But no dice. No offense to Of Montreal, who seem to be flourishing without my interest, but their tunes just don't do it for me. A little too offhanded, or informal, or weightless, for me, in the end. It sounds like music that one might actually make, rather than music that one might walk miles to find. So: thanks, Zara, for the hint, and keep them coming - but in this case what we've got is just another proof that it's never easy to know exactly what someone might enjoy.

Of course, I hardly needed any proof in that regard. Although a weirdly high percentage of my conversations with L. now involve the evolving tastes of Cleo - like 17th-century courtesans, we try to parse the queen's mood - we're also consistently taken by surprise. Baths, once a source of delighted splashing, now yield tears. That rough William & Mary pillow, uninteresting for five months, is now a magnet for her small hands. And the elegantly vanilla-scented yellow squeaky toy that Cleo's grandparents generously brought her this weekend? Only time will tell, folks: if there's a formula, we sure don't know it. And, if we did, do you think we'd blog about it? Nah - we'd be too busy trying to call Wall Street.

Because you can

Every so often, it seems to me, the too-familiar routines and unthinking habits of our lives suddenly come into focus, and their limits suddenly seem clear, and alternatives, completely fresh alternatives, present themselves. What if I took a left turn, instead of the right turn that always leads me home? Or what if I walked? Or what if, while I walked, I did a somersault on that neatly manicured lawn? And then kissed the grass, or simply rang the neighbor's bell, and asked if I could join them for dinner?

You can call it thinking outside the box, or you can think back to Joyce's epiphanies, or you can shake your Teutonic brow and label it all merely foolish, but such a sudden reconceptualizing seems to be a rather natural consequence of spending a lot of time with a five-month-old. Sure, Cleo and I do many of the things I've always done: we walk the dirt path near our house, and the number of times I've taken her to Starbucks is probably better left unmentioned. But, on the other hand, even really familiar activities are now given a new quality. What if, while walking, we simply grabbed a maple leaf and popped it in our mouth? What if, whenever we were hungry, we simply wailed, and waved our arms? What if we took three naps a day?

Giving such possibilities room seems to me to be one of the basic charges of parenting. It's natural to try to impose our own order on the infant - but it's also occasionally rewarding (and, quite frankly, inevitable) to let the infant's logic guide us. And so we reach compromises that could never really be predicted, or perhaps even justified. Yesterday, Don Giovanni played (with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing; he's become a real presence in our home) while Cleo slobbered on the stringy hair of a wooden puppet, and rolled about on her back. And why fight it? I lay on my back, too, and tried to find out if I, like Cleo, can fit my toes in my mouth. I can't. But it was worth the try.

The emergence of variety

Is it a sign of my waning creativity that I've begun the last two posts with quotes? Well, perhaps - most of my creative energy these days goes into coming up with noises that might make a five-month-old giggle - but it may also be due to my recent of diet of reading for classes. Pick up any issue of Artforum from the 1960s, and you'll likely find at least one article - and, more probably, several - that opens with a high-octane quote from Wittgenstein, or Jonathan Edwards, or some opaque minimalist. After you read enough of them, the habit simply becomes second nature, and one simply sees all of one's actions and words as prefaced by the floating wisdom of one's elders. It's a pretentious variation on Quoyle's habit, in The Shipping News, of thinking of his own life in terms of corresponding newspaper headlines. Man Lives Ordinary Life Framed By Ostentatious Quotes.

In any event, in his 1955 book The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck discussed the music of Eric Satie, a composer I've mentioned before in this blog. Here's Shattuck: "Satie frequently scrutinizes a very simple musical object; a short unchanging ostinato accompaniment plus a fragmentary melody. Out of this sameness comes variety."

Out of sameness comes variety: amen. For roughly 160 days now L. and I have been living days that are, for the most part, marked by regular patterns: wake to Cleo's cries; feed her and wolf down a bowl of Cheerios, or oat bran; walk, follow the course of a mobile, and try to live a rather full life during those three 30-minute naps. Of course there are occasionally dramatic variations, but for the most part our recent life has been lived in a comfortable set of well-worn grooves. And yet, just as the pattern begins to feel rote, or too familiar, Cleo throws us something new: she smiles. Or she rolls over. Or she puts her left foot in her mouth.

Out of sameness comes variety. Hercalitus said that we can't step into the same river twice, and the reason's clear, in music and in parenting: motifs heard twice are different than those heard for the first time - and those heard for the first time are, against a backdrop of rough sameness, sometimes completely disarming.

Mail call

"Fatherhood," Hugo Williams has noted in an essay on parenthood, "is a mirror in which we catch glimpses of ourselves as we really are." Well, yes, in some ways - as Williams notes, with the pressures of fatherhood come a series of inevitable prioritizations that can reveal one's true values. (Which seem to be, in my case: swinging from tree swings is good, and a consistent flow of espresso even better). But if fatherhood is a mirror, it's a funhouse lens: it distorts part of our lives, and eliminates others. We babble, we applaud pooping - and we forget what it was like to read a novel over the course of a weekend, or what it was like to go out with friends after 6 p.m. A parent is a wacky rubbery simulacrum, in other words, of a once-normal adult.

But even in the funhouse, there are occasional, insistent reminders of the more reasonable world outside. In their most dramatic form, such reminders might take the form of a fugitive running across our lawn; in more quotidian form, however, they're the national news, or a weekly chat with the parents, or the week's reading for class. Through such lenses, even the newest parent can see that all is not changed, that all is not warped.

And then there's the mail. So much of what we give and receive now - this blog included - is digital, but every weekday at around 10:15 our mailman happens by and leaves the daily haul in our old milkbox. Sometimes, admittedly, it's a thin harvest: a catalog, or a fundraising letter. On most days, however, it's a more interesting yield: on Thursdays, for example, Sports Illustrated arrives. And, you wonder, what's so special about that? Well, for me it means a quick contact with a world whose rules and patterns I once knew very well. But for Cleo, it means something rather different: the thin paper stock and the bright colors make a wonderfully chaotic toy:

And so I read the first few pages quickly, and give them over to my daughter, who fights them like Hercules fought the Hydra, reducing the beginning of the magazine to a scattered series of leaves. And then, after she's in bed, I finish reading the issue, and on Friday we go at it all over again.

But if Thursday's always thus a fun mail day, this past Wednesday was a virtual miracle. Three packages appeared, like three magi, and they held a range of wonderful contents. From Mom, a cute little outfit for Cleo, with frills and long legs. From an old friend of my parents, a truly lovely handmade sweater, with a breathtaking blue bow. And from an old college friend in Illinois, a jar of Boudreaux's Butt Paste, which we'd first encountered in the Harper's Ferry hostel, before either one of us had any real need to combat diaper rash. Add 'em up, and throw in the bright yellow hat and mittens a colleague had left on my desk, and we had a full outfit for our daughter - and enough butt paste for pretty much everybody in our zip code. Cheers, y'all.

Fatherhood may be a mirror in which we catch glimpses of ourselves. But it's also a frame through which we see others. And others, it's clear, are wonderfully generous and creative. Thanksgiving is still three weeks away, but, really, why wait? I'm already feeling thankful.

Amicitia

A few months ago, Dad recalled hearing a traditional definition of a new parent: " A new parent is someone who can sleep anywhere, at any time, for any length of time."

Well, how does a parked car on the north side of Colorado Avenue, at about 1:25 p.m., sound? Good enough, yesterday, for both me and Cleo; after visiting with L. during her lunch hour, we both passed out in the Prius - Cleo for a good 40 minutes, and I for a pleasant 25, which ended when I awoke to the rhythm of her tiny snores and to the voices of construction workers in a nearby lawn.

Is a joint snooze in a car bad parenting? Probably, probably - but I take solace in Tim Hilton's observation, in "In Tandem," that "Nobody can be an interesting parent all the time." I try to offer, when I'm watching Cleo, a relatively diverse course of activities. But sometimes, dammit, you just need to sleep. Especially after the clocks are rolled back, and your unaware baby is suddenly rising at 5 in the dark morning, rather than 6.

But here's what struck me about the nap afterwards. I've found myself in similar circumstances - that is, coming to in a car, groggy and unalone - only a few times in my life: with an old college friend near Urbino, in 1993, for example, or with my brother, in an Oregon parking lot, in 1998. In each case, it's been with someone I've known for years, and the rather squalid aspect of trying to grab some Zs with legs scrunched under the dashboard has thus been offset by the sense that all is forgiven, from the start. No, it's not luxury; but friendships don't always demand luxury.

Could I call Cleo, then, a friend? She had no say in the situation, of course - but at the same time she certainly seemed content, as she sawed twigs in the back of the car. And while all parents want the best for their children, sometimes, maybe, the best is simply answering what's needed with what's at hand. That's what friends do, after all, as a matter of course. Even as they iron the kinks out of their necks.

Winterabend

Sometimes in the mornings, as Cleo writhes and wriggles on her play mat and the sun rises, or near the end of a day, as we wait for L. to get home from work, I place a CD of Schubert lieder into the CD player in the nursery, and I forward to track 11. The machine whirs briefly, and then a varied, ruminative piano motif quickly takes shape, and we hear the baritone Dietrich Fischer's Dieskau's voice from across the decades.

Entitled Der Winterabend, or The Winter Evening, the song was written in 1828, and based on an 1825 Karl Gottfried von Leitner poem that begins like this: "It is so still and secret all about me. The sun has set, the day has gone; how quickly now the evening grows grey. I like it so; the day is too loud for me. But now all is peaceful; no hammering from the blacksmith..."

While it evokes the pensive mood of dusk, though, Schubert's song isn't necessarily restrained; as John Reed wrote, in The Schubert Song Companion, "A mood of stillness and serenity can be established either by music that scarcely moves at all or by music that is constantly in motion, like a dance. In this song..., Schubert uses the second method." And the result, I'd add, is quite bewitching: a texture of melancholy and gratitude, interwoven.

Cleo dances, in her way, with her Whoozit, and I think about the advent of the coming winter, and Fischer-Dieskau sings: "How good it is to have this blessed peace."