Signs

In early 1968, the Grateful Dead began - after an encounter with Alla Rakha - to hold lengthy practices in which they experimented with a range of unusual Indian time signatures. The band played for hours at a time in cycles of seven, and eleven, creating melodic phrasings that could overarch such unconventional time signatures. And, according to Peter Lavezzoli, in The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, they eventually learned to improvise in those cycles "until it became second nature. As with Indian classical music, freedom was attained through discipline."

Freedom through discipline. The chaotic household that L. and I run these days probably doesn't qualify as disciplined in any sense of the term, but we have tried, in our scattershot manner, to teach Cleo a few works and a few signs over the course of the last half year. Teach, how? Well, through simple repetition: I remember saying 'hands up' to Cleo, and extending her tiny arms upwards, when she could barely sit up - and if I did it that once, I'm sure I've done it a dozen times, at other moments. On Mondays, we always attend a reading group for tots at the local library that culminates in a chant that asks the kids, among other things, 'Can you stomp with two feet, two feet?... Can you wave bye-bye, bye-bye?" And the ridiculous number of times that L. and I have simply clapped for Cleo, when she's done something cute, has also acted as a prompt.

And today, it all came together, for a brief moment. While holding Cleo in my lap on the rope swing in the meadow (at 1202 Sabina, we swing even when it's 90-something out...), I babbled my usual nonsense rhymes and songs, and then wondered what might happen if I asked her to clap. She clapped (my hand around her little belly). Arms up? She raised her arms. Asked to stomp, she waved her feet in the air, as we arced back and forth. And can you wave bye-bye? Sure: we'd just done the same at the library, two hours earlier. Overjoyed - in the predictable way of a father - I tried to recreate it, when we got home, and the result is visible above.

Cleo can't talk yet. She still growls like a wampa, when excited. But it's awesome to realize that she can communicate, in a rather nuanced way, when she wants to. Limited discipline, in this case, has yielded at least a degree of freedom.