Living in the past

In August of 1990, Jane's Addiction - Perry Farrell's alternative band and pet project - released their second album, which was perhaps most notable for the massive frat party hit 'Been Caught Stealing,' and for an extended track called 'Three Days' that features the guitar work of Dave Navarro (who went on to play for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose work is possibly known to even the most culturally isolationist of this blog's readers).

At some point in the mid-1990s, I sent my dad a mixed tape that featured a number of rather recent rock tunes, including 'Three Days.' Such gifts, as I remember it, necessitated at least a bit of contextualization, for a similar mixed tape sent by my brother, a year or two earlier, had been interpreted as a sampler of my brother's band's recent output. Given that that tape had included 'Been Caught Stealing,' the misinterpretation was a fun one: working on the assumption that my brother had co-written and played on the song, but not realizing that it was one of the decade's biggest hits, Dad seemed only mildly impressed. But dads can surprise, and months after I'd sent him my (clearly labeled and attributed) tape, he mentioned that he'd enjoyed cranking 'Three Days' in the old Reliant K wagon.

And, just this week, during a longish spell of Cleo-watching, I was looking for some background music, and found that same Jane's Addiction CD on our shelves. Hadn't listened to it in years, but popped it in, and turned it up. And Cleo and I played a chaotic, no-holds-barred, rules-waived version of backgammon while the bass quietly established a floor, and Farrell shrieked in his inimitable way, and Navarro's guitar soared, and soared.

Sure, context matters in the interpretation of art. (Unless you're the staunchest of New Critics, and in that event you're not new anymore: you're a half century behind the times). In fact, I still remember hearing about Kurt Cobain's suicide on MTV news while at a beach house with my parents - and, upon telling them, realizing that they'd never heard of Cobain. But, all of that said, context only matters to a degree. To a grad student making a mixed tape, to a dad driving in a Reliant K, to a dad on dad duty on a cold December day... something about the song works. And now, as it works, and as Cleo hears it for the first time, it carries me back, as well as forward.

Current hobbies

What's Cleo up to, you ask? Well, beyond fighting off the rather grim stomach flu that's making the rounds, a few things, on a daily basis. Pointing out, as soon as one of us enters her bedroom in the morning, that we should turn off the heater and the vaporizer. The advent calendar, made by a generous friend. A book called Where Does it Park? Shoes, still. Puzzles, as long as they don't have interlocking pieces. And, perhaps above all, a vigorous recording of Old MacDonald that we were given a few months ago and that has been in heavy rotation ever since.

You can see, and hear, two of those interests overlap in this video, which records a more or less daily ritual.

The view from a distance

As far as I know, there's no word in English for the combination of loneliness, liberation, and disorienting sense of an adjusted perspective that one can feel when stepping away and looking back, from a distance, at a group to which one nominally belongs. Presumably some existentially fraught Eastern European tongue - Slovak, perhaps, after the rather sad 1993 attainment of countryhood? - has coined a word for the condition. But in this blog post I'll have to do without a convenient, economical summary of my topic.

Here's what I have in mind. Today, at the little Roland Park library nursery rhyme group that Cleo and I been attending for more than a year now, Cleo suddenly grew a little tired of the song that I and the other 8 adults were singing: ironically, enough, The More We Get Together. So she simply stood up and walked off to another section of the large room - a section that featured a large rocking chair that was clearly more exciting than our plodding, methodical incantation. But, after a few moments of exploring the chair, she looked back towards us, with a sense of both curiosity and mild transgression on her face.

I knew, I think, what she was feeling. In my file of essays-to-be-written, I have one set of notes dedicated to moments in art and literature that detail a sudden cut away, to a distant view of the subject at hand. The best example I know of occurs in James Cameron's Titanic, during the long, cold sequence in which the ship breaks apart and sinks. For most of a half hour, we closely follow the actions of dozens of individuals, in tight, swamped settings. And then, suddenly, we're offered a distant view, from about a half mile off, of what seems to be a tiny, illuminated boat lost in the vast night. It is a remarkable moment: an intense tragedy becomes a momentary incident on the huge plane of the sea.

There are other examples of the tendency, as well. In Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube," and important piece of modernist criticism, he opens with an imagined, distant view of the modernist tradition, as though seen from space. And, more playfully, at the 10-minute mark of The Flying Guillotine, a martial arts movie, a long fight sequence is punctuated, at one point, by a middle-distance view from inside a rock wall: the efforts of the combatants reduced to mere abstract motion.

Is that, more or less, what Cleo saw, as she watched and listened from, as it were, offstage? Did we simply look small, and insignificant, to her, as we chanted our children's songs? Or did she feel some of the sense of adventure that I feel when I step away from the utterly familiar, and see it as anew?

To the airport

What is it that they say? Time flies when you're... in North arolina for Thanksgiving, and then juggling parenting, teaching, painting walls in West Virginia, and making revisions on a book? Yes, yes: those old folk sayings sure have a truth to them.

So my apologies for the hiatus - but, fortified by homemade pumpkin pie, visits with all four grandparents, and a shiny new first-place trophy in my fantasy football league, I'm back, and full of ideas. My first idea, though, isn't quite wholly new, since, as some of you may remember, I've written on airports before. That was long before, however, I had a cute little one-year-old in my charge, and so on a recent, raw Tuesday Cleo and I drove out to BWI to see what we could see.

As adults, we often think of airports as purely functional spaces. Signs direct us to the checkpoint and then to the gate. Maybe we dart into a newsroom and buy a paper; restrooms are always generously spaced. Got a laptop? There's an outlet. From the point of view of a toddler, though, airports are ridiculously sick playgrounds. Elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks: BWI has that holy trifecta, in spades. The large window in the observation deck peers out towards a number of planes that look just like the ones in the board books, and no one seems to mind if you just purse your lips and do your best, slobbering imitation of a plane in the air.

So you can imagine. Cleo rolled her stroller about, being careful to avoid the huge jet engine in the children's hall, and I tried to slide as far as I could on the highly polished marble steps. We squeaked, and she squealed, and we chatted, in a manner of speaking, and then Cleo made that great airplane noise again. And then we split a granola bar.

But even as I tried to give myself over, over and over, to being one, there was another sort of soundtrack in the back of my mind. Something much more deliberate, more meditative, more restrained. More abtract, and more adult. Something comforting, in an entirely different way. Perhaps you know which airport music I mean.

It's grand to be 18 months old, in an airport. And it's great to be 40, as well.

Babies

Some of you probably know that we live right near a Whole Foods; in fact, it's a pleasant 12-minute walk from our house, and right now that walk takes you past three constantly humming refrigeration trucks, full of organic turkeys that are gradually finding their way into Baltimore hums in preparation for Thanksgiving. It's a walk that Cleo and I have made, using various modes of transportation (Baby Bjorn; car seat stroller; jogging stroller) many, many times, and it's hardly surprising, then, that we've become pretty familiar with the store, and its generous employees, who always seem willing to coo over a baby. Cleo points to the muffins, arranged in a window, when we near the bakery; often, she'll ask for one. Over the months, we've learned, in a geography that loosely maps her development, the location of rice flour, whole milk yogurt, and cheese animal crackers. And, as we've walked about the store, we've also seen hints of what she might become, in the guise of other tiny shoppers.

Watching other children has become both sharply relevant and truly interesting to me, as they often suggest roughly comparable but also distinct trajectories of development. Infants, nestled and asleep in their car seats, recall the full, simpler early days of parenthood. Children who pull at their parents' shirt hems while pointing to the sushi suggest upcoming complexities and real delights. But, for some reason, it's often been the one-year-olds who point to Cleo and say, in an improperly loud and direct manner, 'Bay-Bee,' who have usually melted my heart.

And now Cleo, I'm happy to say, is one of those. She's been saying Mommy (or, more recently, Mama) and Dada for several months now. As I've mentioned, she has a relatively wide range of animal sounds that she can whip out when she hears a dog or (more rarely) sees a horse. But it's really only in the last month that she's begun to add nouns to her roster of words. One of those is mirror, which she's only used a few times. Another, in heavier rotation, is Papa, which she used to greet one of her grandfathers (as well as, somewhat confusingly, her grandmother). She asks, in any given day, about six or seven times to hear Old MacDonald by abruptly announcing, Eee-Eye-Eee-Eye-O. And a final emerging word, now, is Baby, which she has used in relation to a few other small children and, yesterday, in looking at a mammoth billboard picturing a baby on the way to Whole Foods. Yes, indeed: that's a baby. And, in pointing it out, you are, I suppose, now something more than a baby.

But that's not to say that all of her evolving words make total sense to us. One of her favorite terms is koo-kah, which has caused the two interpreters on hand - that's L. and I - some real confusion. On the one hand, it clearly means clock: when our grandfather clock rings, Cleo will often toddle over to it, and point, announcing koo-kah. She's also been using the same word to happily point out, over the last couple of weeks, all face clocks in the immediate environment. At first, then, I assumed it was perhaps a derivation of cuckoo clock - a term that we used, once, in a group nursery rhyme. But just yesterday she used it to refer to a round sign and, this morning, to a circular light fixture. And so our interpretations change: perhaps it's a rendition of circle, and is simply applied most frequently to clocks?

Much of parenthood, I'm realizing, is simply trying to find the order in the apparent chaos: is the child trying to articulate a distinct need, in her wails, or a known tune, in the apparent chaos of a violently played violin? And the frequent difficulty of answering such questions helps to explain the simple delight that comes from watching a one-year-old point to a baby and say, distinctly, Baby. Yes. Yes.

Before and since

Often I feel - often, I suspect, every parent feels - that one's life is essentially divided, once one becomes a parent, into Before and Since. Before, I sometimes had to use an alarm clock to wake up; I lived in a house that was relatively tidy, and dotted with guitar stands and novels; I went to places called movie theaters, and ate at locales called restaurants. Since, I wake in the dark to the sounds of my daughter; I carry her through a bracken of scattered toys and changing tables to the kitchen, for a morning bottle of milk; I read condensed reviews of films, and gobble down peanut-butter coated granola bars during nap time. It's not worse, but it's certainly different, and it's hard to avoid a sense of strict and absolute division.

Which is why I'm delighted to report that I've found a musical object that brashly bridges, with no apparent trace of self-consciousness, my two lives. Behold, folks, Rockabye Babies' Lullaby Renditions of Metallica. With free samples for all. And dozens of other CDs to choose from!

A clearing in the jungle

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that there's an imperfect analogy coming up, in about two paragraphs. So consider yourself warned - but let's see, anyway, where it leads.

Last night, still puzzling over Cleo's sudden rash and ragged moods, L. and I ate a quick dinner after putting the girl to bed, opened the door to our babysitter, and went out for an honest-to-goodness date. It was time for The Stoop, a series of occasional collections of live stories, with a house band and a generally reverent audience. With Veterans Day less than a week behind us, the night was dedicated to stories that centered on war and conflict. And even the band nodded to the evening's theme, offering an affecting song that opened and closed with a stirring version of Taps, on trumpet.

I hadn't heard Taps in a long time: it's just not something, I suppose, that you encounter if most of your time in the real world is spent on playgrounds and in libraries and sports bars. But my unfamiliarity with it only intensified my interest in the rendition we heard last night, and I was struck by the simplicity of the melody, and by its powerful use of repetition. It consists - and you may well know this, but I certainly had never realized it - of what you might call 8 three-note units. 7 of them rise; only the seventh falls. And, as the first and the eighth are exactly identical, the piece leaves a listener where s/he began, but, at the same time, slightly changed. Juxtaposed with the descending triad immediately before it, the final restatement of the opening notes is profound and newly rich.

And here's the leap in imagery, the straining in the metaphor. Today, in many ways, was a very ordinary Tuesday for me and Cleo (who has made a quick recovery from what we realized, late last night, was roseola): we dropped L. off at work, we took a brief walk, we went to Children of the World, a co-op for wee ones, and we lunched at Panera and spent an hour at the Towson library. Back home, we leafed through a couple of books, pieced together a puzzle, and shared a mozzarella stick. Nothing, for the most part, unusual: it could have been any relatively recent Tuesday. With the exception, that is, of two happy, jarringly unexpected moments. At the co-op, I was holding Cleo while we began to put away all of the toys, for song time. When I lifted the mirror that I usually carry to the back room, Cleo suddenly said, quite distinctly, 'Mee-uh.' I paused, never having heard her say that word before, and asked her what she'd said. 'Mee-uh,' she repeated, unimpressed by the fact that she'd more or less increased her roster of spoken nouns by 25%. Hours later, at home, we were playing in her bedroom when she gestured to the stuffed penguin in her crib. I fetched it for her, and then went to pick something else up. When I turned back, Cleo said "Hi,' and used her right hand to wave the penguin's fin back and forth at me. Suddenly my little daughter was using a doll as a vehicle for her own imagination.

As I said, the rest of the day was exceedingly routine. It was a Tuesday, you might say, of repeated triads. But while the familiar tableau that greeted L. when she came home - Cleo and I, on a bed, Old MacDonald on the CD player and a puzzle between us - may have looked familiar, it was seismically different, to me, because of what had come before. I was now playing with a girl who can say mirror, in a manner of speaking, and who can role play. The same triad is not the same, once we've experienced the entire melody.

This evening, in preparation for a class tomorrow, I was reading Carol Duncan's essay 'The Art Museum as Ritual.' In her deservedly well-known piece, Duncan quotes several luminaries on the experience of attending a museum. Among those quoted is Sir Kenneth Clark, who once remarked that exhibited artworks "produce in us a kind of exalted happiness. For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle: we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky." Yes. Yes, we do. Back in the jungle, back in the bedroom, or back at the side of another soldier's coffin, we are shaken and moved by the momentary exception.

Ars sine dolore nihil est

There's no doubt we've been having a rocky few days, as parents and as parented. Cleo, for reasons that are just as obscure as the reasons behind the popularity of 'There Was an Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly,' has suddenly begun waking up at 4:30, thus reverting to a schedule befitting a 17-week-, rather than 17-month, old. In the process, she's jettisoned her relatively civilized afternoon nap for two brief dozes that barely give this daddy a chance to check his e-mail and down a granola bar before a bottle of milk is requested, by means of loud sobs lobbed from her crib. She's also developed an enigmatic rash that has already inspired, in a mere half day, about as many crackpot theories as the Zapruder film. And, to top things off, she fell on her face while walking at the zoo yesterday, cutting her lip and then jarring me out of the soporific world of NFL halftime scores when she and L. arrived home, both crying and shaken up from the incident. In short, we've got a real one-year-old on our hands.

But what's beautiful about, well, an unbeautiful stretch like this is that there are still sublime moments of grace. Cleo, above, after eating much of a loaf of bread at Bonaparte, while watching the boats bob, and before throwing one slice, in tiny pieces, to the ducks of Patterson Park. Cleo, on a jungle gym, smiling while watching other, older children run and leap. Or Cleo finding the turning bookshelf at Barnes and Noble today, and laughing out loud, repeatedly, while managing to slowly turn it, a few inches at a time.

Jimmy Page didn't always feel his best, after visiting his various girlfriends on entirely separate floors of the band's hotel, when strumming his guitar before the adoring thousands. The online critics gave credit to American Idol aspirants in Season Four, when they sang through sickness ("The health-plagued group of Jaclyn Crum, Rashida Johnson, and Faith Gatewood," wrote The Trades, "sang well despite their problems"). And one assumes that Chopin likely played strongly through the various ailments brought on by Polish winters. Illness and obstacles are everywhere - and so, too, is beauty.

Instant zoo

If you're willing to accept that there is a genre that consists of vocal evocations of animals, then you might also be willing accept that the first 30 seconds or so of Bobby McFerrin's Blackbird represents one of the more ambitious entries in that genre. But where does one start, before arriving at such an intricate and rehearsed series of sounds? Well, with the basics, presented here by a 17-month-old Cleo, whose earnest repertoire, often available on request, now includes idiosyncratic renditions of cows, cats, mules, sheep, ducks, elephants, and:

Nature, nurture

Every now and then, in order to remind myself that there are in fact books that are made of paper, rather than boards, I take Cleo into Barnes & Noble. Usually we end up, in short time, in the back of the bookstore, and I thumb through the choose-your-own-adventure offerings and the atlases designed for middle schoolers while Cleo diligently works her way up and down toy stairs or plays with the sprawling train sets. Last week, though, I paused to look at the tables of recent releases, and found myself face to face with Keith Richards' new memoir, Life. And when I opened it, searching aimlessly for a good anecdote involving a 1960s supermodel or a trashed Parisian hotel room, I was soon rewarded in an unexpected way - with the photo, above. That's Keith, aged four, on his first tricycle, in Southend-on-Sea.

Who could have known - and who would have wanted to know - that inside that proud, serious boy was a leering, debauched smack user and blues lover, just waiting to get out? Not I, not I. And, in the same direction: in what way could a beachside ride on a pier produce a Rolling Stone? Eternal questions, in other words: to what degree did the childhood make the man, and to what extent was the man already destined?

They're questions, of course, without full answers - or, rather, with inevitably qualified answers. Environment matters, but so do genes. And yet, despite that, L. and I still find ourselves tracing the lines between ourselves, our house, and our daughter. Is her love of shoes (she'll sit happily, for ten minutes at a time, trying shoes on and taking them off) somehow inherited? Surely not from this half; I haven't bought a pair of shoes, I don't think, since Obama was elected president. But the way she devours bread and beans points straight to me, and strangers claim to see my face in hers. And yet, the way in which she mimics sirens and helicopters clearly, and also a bit sadly, points to the importance of environment. We learn from our surroundings, even if it feels something like a police state.

Or, I'm reminded, if it feels like a mansion. In 1972, the Stones recorded Exile on Main Street, which would become one of their most celebrated albums. They laid down some of the tracks in London, and then rented a sprawling mansion called Nellcote in France, where they lived for several weeks, strewing bottles of bourbon on neoclassical cornices and finishing the album. Years later, Mick Jagger was asked about the degree to which the decadent setting of Nellcote influenced the sound of the record. "It's probably true," he conceded, "that the atmosphere affected the feeling of the music, and the sound of the studio. But you've no idea how much or how little." And then, when asked if he could still tell which portions of the record had been recorded in Nellcote, he added this: "I've no idea which is the Nellcote stuff and which isn't, to be honest."

Which, of Keith Richards' traits, is the tricycle stuff, and which isn't? Which of Cleo's tendencies are my stuff, and which aren't? They're hard questions, and ultimately Jagger's almost certainly right: you've no idea how much or how little. But, that said, the moments in which the lines of influence do seem clear are riveting, if fleeting, and they are powerful in an abiding way.

Capriccio

I suppose that we all have, in our thoughts about any broad field, certain concepts that have never quite come into complete focus, or that remain only hazily defined. Reverse loans, value investing, chastity bonds: who really knows, beyond the brokers who share manhattans and alpha-male jibes at Trinity Place after a day of trading, what such terms mean? Or take musical terms: yeah, I'm pretty sure I know what a downbeat is, but a cantata? Scordatura? Not a clue. And capriccio? I've enjoyed many pizze cappricciose, but I had to turn to Merriam Wesbter to learn that in music the word denotes "an instrumental piece in free form, usually lively in tempo and brilliant in style."

Or, at least, that's the third meaning of the word. The first is more familiar: a fancy, or a whimsy. And, to learn that, I didn't have to open any dictionary. Rather, I just followed Cleo about the Patterson Park playground on a cool, sunny, windy Monday morning in mid-November. Clad in a flowered shirt, a white sweater, a pink hat and pastel blue pants over tights, Cleo wandered the largely empty playground in fine form. A couple of minutes were spent climbing onto a table and chairs that might have sat two large squirrels. She then tottered over to a rock, explored its cold surface, and next wandered towards an elevated bridge. From there we took a long detour to the playground door, an iron gate that occupied Cleo for about five minutes. Back again to the core of the playground, for a snack, and then a few minutes spent spreading a diaper cloth on the wood chips that surrounded the play area. None of the sequence following, as far as I could tell, any grand logic, but each of them in accord with a seemingly implicit inevitability. Rocks need to be felt, cloths spread. And, in the process, the meaning of capriccio became clear. Whimsical, lively, and brilliant in style. I wonder why it was ever less than clear to me.

Force of presence

Let's begin with an image. 1985, I think. I'd just bought Mr. Mister's Welcome to the Real World, on tape, at University Mall. Walking back home, along Willow Drive, I popped the tape into my cheap cassette player, which I'd scored at a yard sale on Long Leaf, and turned the volume up.

Way up. Way, way up, because there didn't seem to be any sound. Until, suddenly, there was - and not just sound, but a sheer sudden painful wall of sound that seemed to occupy the very core of my head. The album begins, I suddenly realized, not with a soft and subtle grace note, but with a violent sustain. Mr. Mister, in da house.

Four years later, I was in a music appreciation course in college. We listened to a wide range of pieces from the Western canon, and learned to pick out minor modes, and differences between movements. But one of my clearest memories of that class involves a curious composition that was, I believe, a French baroque motet or cantata and that began with a uniquely bright and forceful proclamation. "C'est mai," perhaps? I can't recall, exactly, but what I do remember was the streamlined boldness of the male voice singing the line.

Why the memories? Because they evoke, or resemble, how I've felt about Cleo the last few days that I've spent watching her. She currently seems so remarkably present, so wholly here, that I can't refrain from shaking my head at her, at times. If playing with sand, she's wholly focused on the tasks of pouring, and patting. If eating, she meditates on the taste; if steering a wheeled toy horse, there are no distractions worth mentioning. Bullet-shaped, and the weight of a generous sack of rice, she's a solid, real thing. She's a conversational partner, as well: we can ask her if she wants some milk, and receive a vigorous head shake in return. And she's autonomous; already she's walked up to us at several points, with a book version of Old MacDonald in her hand, and proclaimed, Aye Aye O, to get the singing started. Or paused, in a playground, and gestured upward to a quietly whispering airplane overhead.

So sing bright, troubadours. Turn up your knockoff Walkmen. Cleo is present. And presence is grace.

Transportation

As Cleo and I were driving to the Tot Lot for some autumnal playground time today, I turned on the radio, and heard a few minutes of an interview on David Dye's World Cafe with the Indiana-based band Murder by Death. A comment by the singer, Adam Turla, stuck with me: "If there's a cool, sort of, technique you can steal for just a moment of a song - a hint or a suggestion - it can really transport a listener to an exotic place," said Turla. "And that's very much what I like to do..."

Not five minutes later we pulled up to the long green mall, and Cleo and I wandered over to the bright slides, the solemn swings, full of promise, and the generous sandbox.

I've never been, in any meaningful sense, a musician. But transporting a 16-month-old to exotic playgrounds scattered across the city... That's very much what I like to do.

Like any other, but not

Today had the feel of a familiar room, of a space whose contours I knew well. Autumn Saturday: rise at 6:30 to Cleo's stirrings; carry her downstairs for a change of diaper and a cup of espresso - and then spend much of the day grading students' art history papers, while L. takes Cleo to the zoo. Oh, I've spent afternoons in this way before: a Midwestern college football game on, muted, in the background, while thesis statements come and go, and the pile of work to be read slowly grows a little slighter. And with the Miles Davis Quintet on, in the background, I pause and listen at the very same moment in Nasqualero where I've paused in years past: at the soft, delicate development of a piano motif, rising.

But of course it's never quite the same as in years past, either. A year ago, I read a similar stack of papers; Michigan State may have competed on the small field of our television. Perhaps Miles Davis blew his horn. But Cleo wasn't walking, last year, from room to room, having returned from the zoo and now kicking a red balloon and now sitting to leave Crayola skid marks on a pad of paper.

The same river, they say, is never the same. Nasqualero had a new dimension of domesticity, I thought today, and the students advanced, bless their hearts, new theses about works of art that are hundreds of years old. And Cleo, still an infant in our minds, totters up and indicates that her diaper is wet.

Thursday evening, and I've got film on the brain. Or, at least, I've got mistaken memories of a film in my mind. I'll get to Cleo in a moment, folks, but first, this: the other day I had a sudden flashback to what I thought was a moment from one of the Godfather films. Man in opera box, I thought, eating cannoli: a scene in which wealth, culture, and dessert come together. All in place.

But it turns out that I misremembered. (Or dismembered?). Now that I look it up, I find that the scene is rather more sinister. There's a montage in The Godfather III - the legendarily disappointing sequel to the two legendary original pendants - in which Coppola, the director, cuts rapidly between the melodrama of a Baroque opera, performed on a Palermo stage, and the real-life violence that stems from Vinnie's orders to kill the rivals of the Corleone clan. A musical vendetta thus parallels the actual vendetta. And, as if that's not enough, Connie offers an enemy named Altobello, seated in an opera loge, a box of poisoned cannoli: she then watches, from a distance, as he samples, and slumps over, dead.

Um, yikes. And here I'd begun to feel, about 20 years after seeing the film, that I wanted to be that guy in the stands, eating cannoli. In fact, now that I think about it, I once tried to recreate the image in my mind: in the winter of 1992-3, I attended a performance of Don Giovanni in Brno with two friends - and brought the closest semblance of a cannolu that Moravia could offer. Did I feel as cultured, as accomplished, as distinguished, as I'd hoped? I don't think so. But at least the cannoli weren't poisoned.

Anyway. The other day I took Cleo to the grocery store, at the end of a busy Tuesday. She's been big enough to ride in the cart for some time now - one of the small joys of fathering - and so I usually place a few items next to her, so that she can look at them, or feel them. Or, as on Tuesday, begin to eat them, to my surprise. Her little hand wandered into the bag of red grapes once, and again, and again, and as we moved up and down the aisles she continued to help herself, in a leisurely manner. And it occurred to me, briefly, that perhaps she felt as I had long imagined Coppola's operagoer to feel: in the right place, with a good seat, and all that is needed at hand.

Areas of the mind

Let's open today's meditation with a quote from Merlyn Mantle's memoir, A Hero All His Life, on her philandering husband Mickey: "He was married in a very small geographic area of his mind."

Remind you of anything? Yes, sure, you in the back. Of what? Of recent research into music? Can you be more specific? Ah, yes. Yes, there was a 2001 study that claimed that "the gamma band EEG over distributed brain areas while listening to music can be described by a universal and homogenous scaling." But can you put that in your own words? Okay, good. Yes, I saw that study, as well: a 2010 Stanford project that posited a link between listening to "obscure 18th-century composers" and activity in areas of the brain associated with decision-making and with memory.

And would anyone like to go further? Can these observations be applied in other directions? No? Nothing? Well, then, allow me to present my own findings, based on 16 months of research into the geographic areas of the mind of a girl named Cleo. Please observe, and then discuss, in small groups:

Orfeu

My dad's never been, well, a groundspring of film recommendations. Sure, he gets to the theater every now and then, and he never quite complains about being less than entertained, but one gets the sense that films aren't exactly his cuppa. A Bulls game on a July evening, or a string quartet at Duke - now you're talking. But he's likely not going to be the guy to tell you that you absolutely, positively have to see the latest Iron Man flick.

And that makes his filmic recommendations, when they do come along, all the more powerful. I remember, for instance, that when he told me that he'd once enjoyed the Brazilian film Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) I quickly found a copy and watched it especially closely. Indeed, indeed: it's a touchingly strong film.

Orpheus, Orfeu: regardless of the rendering of the name, you know the myth. But do we in fact agree on the moral? Orpheus, granted a second chance, looks back at his promised, ascending beloved, violating his agreement with the god of the underworld. From which, perhaps, we learn that we are not to doubt the pledges of gods. Or that we should not desire too much: given love, we must obey limits. Or, if space is a metaphor for time, that perhaps we should concentrate on what is to come, rather than what has been. Or on and on, if one trusts the collective mind of the Web.

There's no need, clearly, to settle on a single version, and in fact films such as Black Orpheus seem to show us that the myth is a wonderfully flexible and adaptable narrative. In thinking about it over the past few days, though, I've begun to believe that I prefer a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, reading of it. That is, I don't necessarily see the story as insinuating that Orpheus was mistaken in looking back. Rather, one can also see the process as inevitable, and as fated: we always look back, regardless of prohibitions or desires - and the result is always faint, and thin, and dissolute.

Again and again, over the past few months, I've been struck by how little I seem to recall of the first year of parenting. By how many gestures are lost; by the raw fact that Cleo will never be an infant again. Call those losses a first death. And so this blog becomes my deal with Dis: an effort to reconstitute, to give flesh to the lost, to make the dead alive. But I know - and you know, as well, if we're being honest - that even such efforts are temporary. You'll forget these words in an hour or two. I'll forget their theme in a week. The web servers that enable them are fragile, and shockingly temporary, in the larger scheme of things. And so an attempt to reconstitute can only point, all over again, to loss, and to memories.

Genre mastery

The d.j. was talking about Neil Young's new album, and his basic point was that Young has made a career of moving from genre to genre. Each album seems to imply a temporary commitment to, or a momentary immersion in, some musical tradition or another. "He had his country phase," argued the d.j. "He had his anthem rock stage. He had his rockabilly phase. One album was all about roots music."

Cleo seems to work in much the same way, although where Young gives each tradition a year or two, Cleo's usually satisfied with a week or two of intense exploration. For a time, it was thresholds: she would crawl back and forth over small changes in floor level, up and down, up and down. Then it was rocking chairs: she learned to climb onto her small, Mandarin red chair, and to propel it back and forth with a force that belied her tiny frame. Next up, swings: over the course of a week dedicated largely to swing sets, she learned to lean forward while swinging, and then to slouch; to put her arms up and to grab small objects while arcing back and forth. And in recent weeks, it's been shoes, as she has spent several happy quarter hours trying to put on and take off her tiny pairs of shoes, and slippers, and sandals.

Young just issued his new release, which is widely seen as a combination of several styles. And there, too, Cleo is just behind: like the grizzled rocker, she learns, and learns, and then tries to synthesize. Soon enough, she'll be strapping on shoes and walking coolly over a threshold to take a seat in her rocker.

Over and over

One of the smaller surprises of fatherhood, for me, involves that songs that come out of my mouth on a regular basis, as Cleo and I wander from playground to Panera, and from playroom to library. It's not simply that that songs come to mind; I've long found myself mumbling, in a weak and undimensional voice, the lyrics to something while driving, or walking, or showering. But with Cleo, a stable rotation of tunes has gradually emerged, and each has, I think, a certain lyrical appropriateness or relevance. There's The Beatles' 'Norwegian Wood,' with its obviously pertinent opening lines: "I once had a girl Or should I say She once had me." There's the quiet anthem 'No One,' by Alicia Keys, with its soft insistence that 'Everything's Gonna be All Right' - just right for, say, a Tuesday afternoon when I've been watching Cleo for six hours, have three to go, and the kitchen floor is littered with pots and pans. And then there's Seal's classic, 'Crazy,' with its open embrace of such chaos: 'We're never gonna survive Unless we get a little crazy." Go for a walk in the mud, in search of a swing, and spend 10 minutes sorting woodchips? Sure thing, Cleo. I'll just sing some Seal.

Although I'm thrilled that Cleo does recognise an increasingly large stable of words - today, when asked, she pointed to a diaper; familiar forms like house and car are by now second nature - I'll confess to being a touch nervous that she'll catch on, eventually, to the fact that most of the songs I to sing around her seem to be, in some sense, psychological supports. Should I be trying to find, instead, songs that teach the sorts of nurturing lessons that bright parenting books seem to favor? A French ditty, perhaps, about a little girl who learned to share? Compositions that suggest an openness to various forms of creativity? Tupac, about appreciating his mother? Well, perhaps. But at least I'm not, I think, singing Don Giovanni's aria regarding his sexual prowess, or Axl Rose's unfortunate screed against immigrants and gays. One could find a worse parenting theme, in other words, than Alicia Keys.

But, really, I'm not sure that the lyrics, or even the melody, matter much at all, when it comes to Cleo's purportedly delicate ears. One of the words that she knows is sing, and one of the most endearing things she does is, when asked to sing, to simply say, LA LA LA, in what seems to me to be a standard descending series of thirds, and a slightly dissolving intensity. LA La la. Which suggests, to me, that my amateurish singing comes across as nothing but babble, stripped of both sense and melody. The Beatles, Seal: La la la.

Sound improbable? Well, maybe - especially if you belong to the Babies Are Amazing in the Way That They Soak Everything Up school of thought. But, if so, did you see Alex Ross' piece on John Cage in this week's New Yorker? The last paragraph is a doozy. Cage is quoted telling the story of an African prince who went to London, and was honored with an entire program of orchestral music. "And," as Cage told it, "he said, 'Why do you always play the same piece over and over?'" Cleo's no African prince, but perhaps the lesson to be drawn is comparable. In a diverse world of noises, subtle differences may seem worth noting, or even treasured, to the weary parent. But to the newly arrived, they may seem completely unimportant: invisible distinctions in a rich, rich landscape.

What you can and cannot do in a blog

In an interview with Newsweek published about nine months ago - a reference that tells you, incidentally, all you need to know about my current level of organization - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offered the following thoughts on blogs:

"I believe that we learn different things from long form than we learn from short form. Both are important. If you read The Remains of the Day, which is one of my favorite books, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living in an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret. You can't do that in a blog post."

True dat, Jeff - unless it's something about regretting to quote you, in a timely fashion, until most of a year had passed. Perhaps a blog post can communicate that, too. But let's look, for just a second, at the flip side of your claim in slightly greater detail. Can long form writing offer a pleasure as succinct and as easily quickly accessed by distant grandparents as, say, this:

Novels and blogs: both have their niche.

All of the honors, status and privileges that pertain

What do you get, I hear you asking, with dreamy visions of pear pine-paneled secret societies and sailing regatta trophies in your mind, as an alumnus of Yale? What privileges pertain? What coded handshakes persist? My friends, I will tell you.

You get occasional letters of solicitation, asking you to add to the school's $6 billion endowment. You get invited to pay $7,000 to join annual alumni trips to the Galapagos. You understand the withering reference to Bridgeport, CT in Franzen's new novel. And you receive - and here's the real, honest-to-goodness perk - the Yale Alumni Magazine. Pick it up, flip past the predictable references to the Whiffenpoofs, and there's almost always, in fact, something rather riveting. Perhaps it's a photo of the now-demolished bar in which you spent, well, enough evenings over the pool table to seriously delay progress on the dissertation. Perhaps it's the story about the 81-year-old alumnus who now audits a full load of classes every term, reminding you from miles away of the sheer pleasure of being a student. Or perhaps, as last night, it's the article about a certain Kevin Olusola '11. Interested? Instead of telling, I'll show: you can see him at work here.

Beatbox and cello? The combination's far from a natural one - it's no granola with yogurt - but it seems to work reasonably well. Or, at least, given my current state of mind it feels right. Living with a one-year-old, though, may have altered my sensibility. Suddenly macaroni and cheese for breakfast seems like a grand idea; a gaudy chartreuse shirt with a saccharine text and pictures of lambs matches a pair of tiny striped pants; dippping crackers in juice makes sense. Toddlers offer, in other words, constant mismatches and weird combinations - and so they put you in the mood for some classically inflected OutKast.

Yale teaches; Cleo teaches. As an alum of both, I'm happy to report that occasionally the lesson is comparable.

Steps

So I think it's fair to say that Cleo can now, for all intents and purposes, walk. Sure, she often wavers and veers, as though she's navigating the deck of a galleon in gale conditions, and she sometimes still extends her tiny hands upwards, refusing to move until she can wrap her fingers around a proffered hand. But she's been tottering about for more several weeks now, and has walked, unassisted, across rooms, playgrounds, sidewalks, and at least one church crypt. Where we were used to a relatively static little playpal, we've now got an avid explorer on our hands.

In turn, I've caught myself, at several moments, feeling as though our job as parents is complete. We'd obviously been looking forward to this moment for several months, and now that it's here, there's a part of me that sees Cleo as complete, as autonomous. You can walk, kid: now get out there and see the world, and please remember to drop us a postcard from time to time.

But while Cleo may be good at dropping some things - she was honing her uh-ohs this morning while raining Crayons onto the dining room floor from a chair - postcards from exotic locales may have to wait. After all, as I'm finding out, the girl's still only one. And even though I feel a strong sense of attainment, on her behalf, she's still developing in a hundred other directions. Steps are nice - but they're only steps to other steps.

Thinking about it today, while she lurched across a wooden tie at the Tot Lot, I concluded that this precise stage of parenting feels like that moment in learning an instrument when a student learns scales for the first time. This white key is a C, this black key a C#; this fret on the second string is an F, and this one's a G. Learn those positions, and the whole instrument seems to snap into focus. But what feels like an accomplishment is also only a beginning. Now that the notes are familiar, it's time to compose melodies.

Tears for fears

Do you ever cry? Cleo, 15 solid months old and a stubborn toddler in training, is something of an expert in the art: today, it was the fact that I wouldn't let her filter all of the sugar in the sugar jar through her tiny hands, as if she were weighing grain, while yesterday it was my dictatorial insistence that we leave the zoo before its door closed and sealed us in with penguins, cheetahs, and lemur. In each case, a torrid protest, accompanied by heartbreaking pearls that course down her little cheeks. By contrast, I'm usually dry of eye: in fact, I can only think of one moment in the past month when I've followed my daughter's lead and let a tear run down my cheek.

It was at the pool, a few weeks back. For the second time this summer, I saw a father of about my age in the pool, with a boy of about 5. All well, I'd thought when I first saw them, as the father slowly guided his son through the mild chaos of water wings, beach balls, shrieking kids, and Pilate-toned moms. But wait: the boy's expression wasn't quite what I expected. His eyes rolling back in his head, mouth hanging open, he seemed vacant, inattentive, absorbed in some infinitely distant reality. In fact, he reminded me of this detail in Raphael's Transfiguration:

I won't diagnose - I don't know how, and it's not my place - but it was clear that the child was not entirely present. Repeatedly, his father lifted the boy's right arm, to prop it up on the side of the pool - only to watch it sag back into the water. Repeatedly, the father spoke, in soft tones, to his son - and yet the son never responded, never looked into his father's eyes. Slowly they began to move again through the water, father holding son, and son limp, unacknowledging, silent.

It's hard enough to parent a fully healthy, fully responsive child. Doing so without the small and precious rewards of an occasional grin, or a voiced 'Dada,' or a task tried, and tried, and finally learned, seems almost incomprehensible. I felt a deep, deep love for the father's patience, and was reminded of Kierkegaard's phrase: the knight of infinite resignation. But what fate decrees that he, and not I, was the one to be resigned? And would I really handle such a challenge with such grace?

The tear suggested perhaps not.

We'll always have Timonium

Cleo, wherever you are when you read this,if you read this - in printed form, perhaps, in an attic, as part of some distant spring cleaning; or online, through the potent search engine of some university library where you're supposed to be writing a junior high essay on John Stuart Mill - wherever you are, I want you to know that on this day, the last day of August, 2010, you were deeply loved by both your mother and your father.

There are many, many things that we enjoy and admire about you: your devil-may-care daring in approaching, and scaling, rocking chairs; the way in which you open your mouth so wide, when we extend a spoonful of hummus; your adorable and flexible collection of four tiny words (woof, hi, uh-oh, and duck). The way you extend your arms towards your crib, near the end of every evening's bedtime liturgy, as if to embrace sleep, and the way in which, when I asked you today where the pool was, as we played in the sandbox, you turned, and pointed straight towards the pool. As if every one-year-old knows that. And perhaps they do: but 39-year-old forget that you do, and we thus feel compelled to write it down, to remember.

But what I really wanted to say, Cleo, was simply thanks for today's 9-hour-date. Date? Really? Well, maybe that's not quite the word - and if it is the word, then I'm a poor date, for I do almost all of the talking. (Although, I should point out, I do foot the bill for everything, too; you've never once offered to pay). But, whatever you call it, on days like today we head out together, and see what this old city can offer us, from bread bowls of black bean soup to the Science Center's water guns. Or, on this 96-degree Tuesday, a visit to the State Fair, in Timonium, where you saw your first llama, spent about 10 minutes watching milk goats being judged, pointed vigorously to the largest, fastest rides on Midway, as though you'd simply take your seat on the roller coaster, and peered long and hard at the ducklings, which we'd seen in books but never in person. And damn if they aren't, some of them, yellow.

But the high point for me, it turned out, was simply taking the light rail there and back. I don't think you'd ever been on a train before, and watching your initial fear - you cried, I'll admit, for a minute or two - melt into something like a cool, studied comfort was wonderful. The trees passed in a green swath; houses looked like toys. We saw fields, a part of a forest, and a lake, and as we sat together you drew cold water from a sippy cup.

So much of your mother's life, and mine, has been in motion, across boundaries, in trains, and buses, and planes. We love the thought that we can share that with you, and that you, a city girl, will pet goats in the county, or watch tiny ducklings hatched from their static pages, before you.

The elusiveness of presence

Cleo and I have found what I consider the perfect playground. In Rodgers Forge, an enclave that's locally famous for its family-centeredness, there's an irregular rectangle, bounded by two small lanes and two rows of brick houses and punctuated by a large grassy area and leafy trees. Near the western end of the rectangle are two large swing sets, a slide, a jungle gym, a generous two-part sandbox (that's filled with more than a dozen communally owned toy dump trucks, in tomato red, and bulldozers, in standard-issue bright yellow), and a towering play set for the 5-and-over crowd. Nicely sited benches - just far enough; just near enough - gather around the playground. And sunlight, on most days, filters through the maple leaves. It reminds me of some of the greatest small-scale urban spaces I've ever seen: of Connecticut town greens; of the main square of Telc, in Bohemia; of the Place Halfaouine, in Tunis.

Still not impressed? Maybe I should have mentioned the Mary Poppins-like figure who moved through the crowd today, passing out her card, in case anyone should need a nanny. Or the ice cream truck that pulled up - almost laughable in the way that it completed the iconic picture - this evening, broadcasting its recorded melodies. Or the fact that the playground even seems to have an ethos of conversation: the neighborhood's website even boasts of the sociability of most of the comers. Sure enough, I've had several pleasant conversations - and, in one, learned that the current gossip on the playground involves the forced removal of a number of toy houses that had once dotted the grounds, in a sort of idyllic inversion of a shantytown.

So, in short: it's great. But, even so, as Cleo usefully erected small pools of mulch on the base of the slide, I looked around - and saw three caretakers on cell phones. No big deal, I suppose, but the image struck me, likely because I'd just heard, on NPR, a story about how the availability of cell phones and e-mail has dramatically changed the experience of Peace Corps volunteers. You used to have no choice but to integrate, remembered a volunteer stationed in Zaire in 1982. But now volunteers Skype with their U.S.-based friends in the evening, or follow a ballgame online, instead of attending the local pig roast. Or, similarly, moms and nannies converse with husbands, or partners, or doctors, over the phone, instead of talking to their children, or to the dad pushing the swing a few steps away. Even in the presence of beautiful play, we seem (and I do mean we: L. texted me while I was there, and I'll admit to reading her note) to want to be, on some level, elsewhere, as well.

But wait. Look at Cleo. There she is, pointing to a bucket swing, kicking excitedly, being put in... and then pointing, within a minute, to the next swing over. And then, moved to that one, yapping about the see saw across the lot, unhappy until she's taken there - at which point, she'll want to move on to the jungle gym.

It's hard, in short, to be completely satisfied with the present. Even given lovely surroundings, we wonder, quickly, how things might lie elsewhere. And, elsewhere, people likely wish they were on a playground, besparkled and lambent.

Around you, everywhere

Today, as Cleo and I marched up Federal Hill for our second Serious Playground Session of the day, it occurred to me that the scattered constellation of play spaces strewn across Baltimore is rather remarkable. Wedged into vacant lots, pressed into city blocks, or designed from the very start as sandy exceptions in a realm of concrete, the playgrounds are a great, unusual gift to the tiniest citizens of the city, and their caretakers.

Can any theory of capitalism really fully explain their ubiquity? Urban designers, public health advocates, and developmental psychologists may all have played a role - but it still seems simply improbable that plastic slides and bucket swings would ever triumph against, say, a skyscraper, or a block of row homes. And yet they do: gentle concessions to play dot the city like the network of Abbasid wells that punctuated the path from Baghdad to Mecca.

Middle Eastern desert oases offer one parallel, then, but so too does the public musical landscape of contemporary America. What I mean is this: as one moves through Baltimore - or, really, any American city or village - one's bound to hear, as one moves, snippets of music, here and there. Today a band performed a sound check in the Pier Six pavilion. A speaker in the infant room at the Maryland Science Center oozed calming electronica. Angry rap declared itself, from a nearby car window, at the intersection of Northern and Falls. And the P.A. system at Whole Foods was tuned to a pop soundtrack.

But that's not all, of course. One may stumble onto local pools of music - but simply by turning on the radio, one can immerse oneself in an entire sea. Yesterday, as I drove Cleo home from a walk and, yes, another spell at a playground, I happened to hear a part of Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 30. A wonderful piece: but even more wonderful, perhaps, that it should be playing, for any ears near a radio, on a Monday in 2010. It was, in a sense, everywhere.

"Oh, all is music! All has been turned to music!" wrote John Hall Wheelock in his poem 'Night Thoughts in Age.' Such a line reminds me, in turn, that, from Cleo's perspective, playgrounds never mark the limits of play. Sure, it's terrific that there are swings in every neighborhood. But, just as the blanket of radio-borne music knows no boundaries, the world of play for a one-year-old is unbounded. One can rock on a rocking chair, or play with a bottle top, with a delight equal to that offered by a slide. All is music. And all, for some, is a playground.

Order in chaos

Today when Cleo - pictured above, right, with her colleague Quentin - awoke from her nap, she promptly unleashed a storm of consonants, vocalizations, and seemingly urgent gibberish that sounded much more like the oratory of an impassioned Ewok than our normal one-year-old roommate.

As I listened, though, and tried to respond, I kept hearing sequences of sounds that seemed, suddenly, meaningful, in a way in which Cleo's sounds have not generally been yet. Cleo does do a nice version of a mild-mannered dog, when asked to, and she's been delighting strangers with a reasonable Hi for a week now. But those are single syllables. So could she really have said, while indicating her desire to be placed in the rocking chair, a mealy mouthed version of Up there? Did I really hear her say something like Aye pat de dat when she petted the cat? Or was I simply in need of a nap, as well?

I'm still not sure. But I am sure - primarily because I've read Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion, one of the greatest books of the 20th century - that we tend to seek order in chaos, and to find the familiar in the unfamiliar. Confronted with an enigmatic shape, we think of analogies with more common objects (It looks like an anchor, or a battle axe...). Facing a beached whale for the first time, Baroque draftsmen carefully gave the animal ears, turning lateral fins into forms that we expect on the animals that we see all the time.

I had a roughly comparable experience, in fact, today, when WBJC played, of all things, the Love Theme from Alex North's score to the 1960 film Spartacus. It's been years since I saw that film, and I certainly didn't remember this 3-minute piece - which, it turns out, is part of a celebrated score that marries Hollywood's lush mood to rough period instrumentation and to a surprisingly modernist approach. Played on piano - rather than on strings, as with the florid rerecording that is available on ITunes - it is a spare, touching composition that's well worth a listen. And yet, as I enjoyed it, I found myself comparing it to other works that I did know. The spare sense recalled George Winston. And the main motif certainly brought Bill Conti's effective First Date, from the soundtrack of Rocky, to mind.

But there I go again, right? Faced with something new, we understand it by forcing it into well-worn categories. And confronted with baby talk, perhaps we - or at least that hypercaffeinated minority of us who are relatively new parents - try hard to uncover words, and phrases, and sentences, in the noise. Did Cleo say what I thought she did? She may not have meant to. But flippers can sure look like ears, if you've never seen a whale before.

I had a dream

I had a dream the other night that I had made a post on this blog that consisted merely of a photo and a brief, no-frills caption. No forced reference to music; no attempt at gravity; no meditation on the medium of blogging. Just a photo, and a caption.

Solace

In the few scattered moments here and there, between playground appointments and edits on my book manuscript, between zoo visits and the gym, I've been reading Dean Olsher's From Square One, a loose series of meditations on life and crossword puzzles. On page 78, he dives into a discussion of Scott Joplin's Solace, which Olsher claims "will dislodge any repressed pain and force it from your body, through your tear ducts when necessary."

Well. Folks pay $99 to have the trained masseuses at Red Door do that, so I thought I'd spring for the 99-cent version on ITunes, and consider myself fortunate. (Feeling cheaper still? You can hear a piano roll version here). But, after listening to it, I'm not really at all sure that I agree with Olsher. It's not that I feel I have a great deal of repressed pain (although I'd prefer it if nobody ever mentioned, again, Sid Bream's winning run against my 1992 Pirates). But the piece simply doesn't strike me - despite its title, and despite Olsher's reaction - as therapeutic.

To each his own, right? Some prefer peas, as Stendhal noted, and some prefer asparagus, and you can't every gainsay the fellow who prefers peas. So when I say that Solace strikes me, above all, as whimsical and offhanded, I figure that Olsher and I are simply in different places.

That said, though, one wouldn't want to always be the odd man out, interpretively speaking. Laughing at Don Giovanni, crying at a Lady Gaga concert: you'd simply feel odd. Which is why it's nice to have a one-year-old who agrees with you on certain basic truths. Like the fact that a warm bath is a good thing. That cubes of fresh mozzarella are a perfect snack on a summer's evening. And that naps simply make sense.

Mr. Olsher, I respect your profound engagement with Joplin. From my point of view, though, it's Cleo's company that currently offers sufficient solace.

Attainment

Perhaps it comes to you, if you're like Beethoven, as you're walking through the woods and the thickets near Heiligenstadt. Beethoven's best ideas, according to the biographer George Fischer, came to him as he walked; "at such times his mind became serene and he would attain that degree of abstraction from the world which enabled him to develop his musical ideas." And did the ideas come as hints, or as fragments, or as full motifs? In any event, Beethoven made a habit of carrying notebooks, and jotted down thoughts as they came to him. When he got home, he then developed the ideas, working them into shape. A whisper, in a grove, developed into a full idea, and then given physical form, in a score.

Or perhaps it comes to you, if you're like Cleo, as you swing. Perhaps, suddenly, the sound dog is no longer simply a noise, an abstraction, but it now actually seems to mean. And so, this Sunday past, when your daddy asks you what noise a dog makes, you arc back and forth in your bucket swing, and think, and then say, as quietly and as deliberately as any dog worth his salt would be loud and spontaneous, oof. Your first word, of a sort.

And, two days later, as you concentratedly play with a gate in the Towson library, perhaps your body simply finally understands its own logic, and its own potential. And, with your daddy a few feet away, you fold your hands together, momentarily done with the gate, and totter over to him, unaccompanied, for your first five steps.

Who can describe the arrival of babies' firsts? Do they start in deep sleep, with a whisper of a thought? Do they come, as with Beethoven, during a stroll through the woods, in a backpack, on a shoulder? Do they suddenly arrive, as fully formed thoughts?

I don't know. But at least I can provide, in this case, the notebook.

The scene, in two Youtube videos

So my folks arrived yesterday, to help with Cleo during L.'s absence. And if you're of a certain age, their arrival might have seemed as though it were attended by a certain piece by Wagner - simply because Coppola's use of that piece has come to evoke a massive response to a call for help.

And they have been a huge help - even if homemade pies and dedicated grandparenting don't parallel, exactly, a liberal use of napalm. They've been walking Cleo up and down, up and down the house, taking her for private swinging sessions, and stepping in for this flagging daddy in the heavy hours of the afternoon. And I haven't even mentioned the two cases of Charles Shaw wine that emerged from their car.

That said, Cleo, when she's on her game, can leave even three adults weary - especially on a day, like today, when she decides to jettison one of her naps, simply because the world is too much fun to miss. So, after a full summer's dinner we're completely tuckered. And about to sleep, and to dream - as in U2's epitaph to MLK.

Familiar motifs

On this day in 1933, I just learned, The All-German Richard Wagner Association, meeting at Beiruth to arrange for the Wagner Festival, decided to amend its by-laws so as to exclude all "non-Aryans," and to instruct its branches throughout Germany to expel Jewish members.

That decision cemented, in some circles, the composer's reputation as an anti-Semite. But he's also famous - famous enough to leave a mark on even my shallow knowledge of opera! - for his use of leitmotifs, or musical figures associated with particular characters in his operas. Each time Tristan, or Isolde, appears in a production of Wagner, they're accompanied by a variation on a musical theme.

And so I wanted to write, today, about one of my favorite leitmotifs involving Cleo. And that's her little white UNC Tarheels hat, visible in the photo above (taken at the zoo, while staring at chimps). Cleo's now worn that hat, nearly daily, for more than four months. And of course one-year-olds lose things at a relatively constant pace: from plastic giraffes jettisoned from strollers to small pieces of banana dropped beneath a car seat, there is a wake of items behind nearly every toddler. Certainly, Cleo's hat has been cast into that wake repeatedly: she's elegantly extended a hand from her stroller and deposited it on a dirt road, and she's thrown it with an almost flamboyant vigor in the pool. It's been pushed to the floor of a Panera, and in fact Cleo offhandedly let it fall to the ground at the zoo, while riding on my shoulders, just a few minutes after looking at the chimps.

You might think, then, that Cleo's no fan of the hat. But it's not that simple. In fact, she also often enjoys putting it on, and will contentedly wear it for long stretches, without complaints. But she doesn't seem to realize that the pleasure of throwing an object away will often lead, in turn, to the permanent loss of that object.

Often. But not always. For, like a leitmotif, the hat keeps coming back. At the zoo, a friend walked back several dozen steps and spotted it. At Panera, when we returned a few minutes after realizing, in the parking lot, that Cleo was now hatless, a kind stranger had placed it on a ledge, out of harm's way. I've found it lying in the grass, and once I came across it while walking Cleo home from the pool - completely unaware that we'd lost it at all.

We may lose that hat for good, eventually; certainly, Cleo seems intent on making that happen. But for now I love the hat, and its patient, buoyant tendency to return.

Energy

So L. left Baltimore yesterday on a 10-day trip to Capetown, increasing my African readership by one (and likely, if we're being honest, to one), and increasing my dependence on playgrounds by tenfold, as I'm now Cleo's fulltime parent (with some big-time help from grandparents and our nanny...) for a good long stretch. And Cleo, it's increasingly clear, is all about swings. She points vigorously to them when she spots them, sometimes even starting to breathe rapidly as she gets closer - and sometimes she'll even point in the general direction of a swing that she's visited but that may not be in the current line of sight. Want more proof? This afternoon, she even invented a sign for swing: when she signed for help, I asked her , as I usually do, what she wanted. She responded by rocking her upper body back and forth in time.

So we went, and we went, and we went. And, as I pushed her during our second of four stints, I felt the familiar first wave of tiredness wash over me. It's a familiar feeling now: a combination of simple responsibility, of the wobbly frustration that comes from trying to communicate with an infant, and of the realization that one still has hours to go before one sleeps. In this case, about 15 hours: it was 9:15 a.m.

How to generate, then, enough energy to grant this little girl a creative day? Coffee, schmoffee: you know I love the stuff, but in this case I'm talking about something more existential; a more spiritual kick in the pants. And so my mind turned back to something I learned during my first teaching post, in 1992. The details (all-night party in Trebic; Pirates playoff victory on Armed Forces Radio, ending at 4:30 a.m.; consequent lack of lesson plan) don't really matter, but what I realized when I stood, exhausted, before my class has always stuck with me: a teacher can draw energy from the students, instead of always merely projecting energy. Throw a simple spark to teenagers, and it can catch, and turn into a fire that's actually hard to put out. A good question, honestly meant, can be as effective as 15 minutes of all-out lecturing.

I learned that much in 1992. And today I realized - belatedly, no doubt - that such a principle isn't limited to a classroom. The world is made of energy. Cleo arced back and forth; around her, trees arced upwards, the sun burned an arc in the sky, and dogs pranced in long, arcing curves about the park. Tap in, tap in: for a day, I thought, I'll simply try to act as a conduit for such arcs of energy. And here I am, tapping away at the keyboard, Cleo now dreaming on her back.

The Iroquois flautist Tsa'ne Do'se once said, I've read, "I don't 'play' the music, the music 'plays' through me." By the same token, I don't push Cleo, while she swings back and forth. She pushes herself, through me.

Cleo Comes Alive!

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Yesterday's featured guest on World Cafe was Peter Frampton, the man behind what has always struck me as one of the most mysteriously successful albums of all time. Frampton Comes Alive!, released in 1976, is a platinum record six times over, and apparently remains the fourth best-selling live recording of all time. And why, exactly? Well, there are a few potent tracks, including the timeless, 'Baby, I Love your Way.' There's that memorable, if kitschy, voice synthesizer. And then there was the $7.98 price tag - a real steal for a double album. And finally, if you trust Wayne, from Wayne's World, there was the fact that Wayne Campbell alludes to the album's popularity by saying, "If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

But on live radio, the aging Frampton was actually very modest and disarming. The interview was pleasant, and involved some interesting moments - such as when Frampton was asked how he approaches a song - like 'Baby, I Love your Way' - that he is expected to play every single time he goes on stage. "If you've got to do a number over and over again," he said, "I really get off on hearing what my band do to it. And when I look out and see the audience, it just triggers a memory... and I really enjoy just scanning the crowd and seeing how they enjoy it."

Cleo, riding in the back seat, seemed less interested in Frampton's answer than in a board book featuring images of kittens. But I wanted to think that she understood, on some level, the basic essence of the issue: the pairing of music and repetition. As we move through the house now, Cleo often points vigorously to certain items along our course. It's a relatively consistent roster of items - a small battery-operated fortune-telling machine; the stereo; the medicine cabinet doors; the smoke alarm - although it does gradually grow every week or so, expanding to include a new fetish object. And so we make our way from room to room like a superstitious athlete who feels compelled to touch a coaches' bald head, or a plaque in Yankee Stadium.

Or like a musician, I suppose, whose crowd will be disappointed if a certain standard isn't played. Cleo may seem, to the casual eye, superstitious, or obsessive. But perhaps she sees herself more like Frampton, enjoying an enjoyment that she feels she is spreading. And it's true, I now realize: I'm happy if she's happy.