For four hands

While Cleo and I were driving to a playground the other morning, WBJC offered up a welcome helping of Mozart: specifically, Mozart's sonata for four hands, which he wrote when he was nine, after experimenting on a keyboard with his sister, Maria. Not knowing the piece, I later looked it up online, and soon came across Wikipedia's entry, which was enjoyable for a few reasons.

First: the piece is catalogued as K.19d. In other words, it was Mozart's 19th scored work. At the age, again, of nine. I think that I might have watched The Electric Company 19 times by my 9th birthday. And perhaps I owned 19 baseball cards. But sonatas? For some reason, I never seem to have written them down. But I also liked, for different reasons, the entry's summary of the work's style: "His father's harsh demands are clearly portrayed in this early work, but despite this, Mozart's independence was still in a vague stage of development."

I don't think that I make many harsh demands on Cleo - though I will, at some point, make damn sure that she respects a good strawberry-rhubarb pie. This past week, though, I spent a few moments showing her how to make a small tower out of blocks. I'd erected many earlier towers in her presence, as she played or rolled about, but this time she seemed interested, and alert. And, a moment later, took things into her own small hands. One block on another, at a jagged angle: it stands! And then a third, equally canted, like a wobbly turret in a book by Dr. Seuss: and the tower falls. But Cleo, undeterred, starts again, and again, pausing occasionally to look at me or to give herself a small round of applause. And soon enough there's a shaky tower of five little blue cubes, erected by a 13-month-old.

If there was a Wikipedia entry on Cleo's tower building, then, I suppose it might claim that her approach is "still in a vague style of development." We haven't yet reached six blocks. And such an entry wouldn't, I don't think, attribute such work to a father's harsh demands. But if it was truly accurate, it might well note that there was a beaming father only a few inches away.

Permanence

The New York Times Magazine featured, this past Sunday, an intriguing piece entitled "The Web Means the End of Forgetting." Essentially, the article argued that websites have become such efficient storers of data that virtually all users of the internet inevitably leave numerous traces - in the form of blog posts, or Facebook updates, or photographs - of their online activity. And, since there's no easy way for a user to delete a public page that's been archived, that rant that you wrote in June of 2006 or that compromising photo of you at the Phi Epsilon bash may keep coming up in Google searches for... well, for as long as there IS a Google.

As the piece pointed out, this has various consequences. A job interview may take a mortifying turn when the employer studies an interviewee's online footprint. And so the very American conviction that we can constantly reinvent ourselves is giving way, argued that article, to a more venerable mindset in which our actions and mistakes are always, on some level, remembered by the community in which we live.

Such implications are, at the least, concerning, and they do trouble me, as I've been throwing publicly accessible images of Cleo onto the Web now for more than 13 months - without, of course, her consent or understanding. As a student of mine put it once, when we were chatting about blogging during a break, But couldn't she be embarrassed, someday, by your blog?

She could, she could. But are things really as dire as the Times implied? Maybe not. The article mentioned, as a primary example of the consequences of posting personal data, a site called LOL Facebook Moments, which collected examples of, shall we say, indiscrete Facebook pages. Ka-ching, I thought, full of anticipatory Schadenfreude, and went directly to that site. But wait. A visitor to that site now finds nothing but a smiley face and a message: "As of July 11th, 2010, lolfbmoments.com has reached it's end of life." It seems that the Web doesn't quite remember everything. Rather, data on the Web can disappear, as well - and be replaced with nothing but poor spelling.

Certainly, the Internet has changed the way in which many live, and interact. But claims that it represents the end of anything (of reading, of face-to-face conversation, of forgetting...) are still probably overblown. Think, for example, of AOL, which dominated a huge swath of online traffic in the late 1990s. Nowadays, it's more or less... well, forgotten. Websites end as easily, or more easily, than the practices that they threaten to replace. Memory on a lively frontier is not, in fact, very long.

That said, though, I think that I'm not alone in feeling that I want the Web to act as a sort of vicarious memory, as well. One thing that all parents seem to recognize, sooner or later, is that their child grows up quickly, and that the moments spent with a six-month-old, or a two-year-old, or even a grown child, are fleeting. And, once gone, they're hard to recall.

Hence this blog. And not simply so that I can remember, in years to come, what parenting tiny Cleo was like. But to share, as well, so that there is might be sort of small communal memory, by extension. Perhaps it will embarrass, at some point, but perhaps it will also document what was real, and important. And perhaps Cleo might even read it - if, that is, Blogspot doesn't follow the lead of, say, Flooz.com.

And I know I'm not alone in the urge to record what is fleeting, or ephemeral. The alphabet, the camera, the tape recorder: we want to remember. And so we keep trying to perfect systems of memory. Unsatisfied with conventional musical notation, Hector Berlioz once created, I read, an idiosyncratic shorthand , written in layers of light pencil in the margins of his compositions, so that he could record his ideas as quickly as they flew into his head.

But think about it. Berlioz' shorthand was a quirky, personal tactic that was never meant to be public - and yet, due to scholarly interest in the composer, facsimiles of it are available, in most large libraries. His grave in Montmartre, on the other hand, was always meant to be public, and it speaks in a grave, familiar tone of his many accomplishments. His personal record, in other words, lies no more than a few hours' drive from most people. And a public memorial can only be seen in Paris. And yet it's the grave, rather than the revealed personal material, that draws the hordes, and that stands just as it was meant to.

Prodigy

Cleo and I were leaving the Towson Public Library yesterday afternoon, after a good romp on their rocking chair and slide kit, when a magazine cover caught my eye. A headline at the top of BBC Music asked, Which composer was the greatest child prodigy?

Child development! It's on all of the minds of virtually all of the new parents that we know. And why not? When every chapter in What to Expect: The Toddler Years ends with typical month-by-month accomplishments, when perfect strangers assume that Cleo is ten months old, because of her petite size, when the pediatrician of a friend hypothesizes a speech delay because her 13-month-old isn't talking yet... it's hard to avoid thinking in terms of norms, and exceptions.

But I've been working hard to swim against that tide, of late. Clearly, Cleo's taking her sweet time when it comes to walking (which she does, lurching, only when supported by two hands) and talking (although the range of syllables is intensifying, and growing more specific, and feels like a cloud about to rain). On the other hand, she is something of a minor expert in navigating stairs and slides; the other day, I was surprised to see two other mothers lurch towards Cleo as she crawled towards a series of steps at the weekly reading group. Oh, not to worry, I said. She'll be fine - and was, as she carefully paused, turned, and clambered down them.

Perhaps it's disappointing to simply fall back on a cliche: we all develop at our own pace. But that feels true to me - and, in any event, a liberal cliche is probably preferable to a prescriptive chart of developmental averages, which only cause insecurities. So, whether or not we agree with BBC Music verdict that Felix Mendelssohn was the greatest prodigy among all of the composers, we might at least acknowledge that he skewed many of the parenting expectations of the day. As did, I'll add, David Mitchell, the novelist who received so many accolades this past month, in conjunction with his new book - despite the fact that he didn't speak until he was five years old.

Fast, slow: one can be magical in so many ways.

Shostakovich

Cleo regularly ransacks the CD rack (CD rack, my young readers ask? Yes, back in the day, we actually had to buy music stored on small, shiny plates), pulling out an array of jewel cases, and then generally scattering them. In the process, she often unearths a disc we haven't thought of in years - as when, this morning, a recording of two pieces by Shostakovich suddenly lay face up on our family room floor.

Interestingly, there was a receipt accompanying the CD, and so I know that I bought it in late March of 2000, at Cutler's Record Shop in New Haven. March of 2000! I was still a graduate student; I hadn't met L.; Clinton was still president. And Cleo, of course, wouldn't be born for another 9 years and change.

So I thought I should introduce, on a more involved level, Cleo to Shostakovich, and on our way into the city, to drop L. off at work, we listened to most of his fourth string quartet, written in 1949. Cleo's head turned slightly, every minute or so, as she took in the morning from her place in the back of the car, and the sharp strains of the opening movement jabbed the air about us.

By the time we dropped L. off, though, I was thinking that in at least one way the quartet was not that foreign to the realm of parenthood. There is a lovely central motif in the quartet, which flickers just beyond reach for most of the piece; we hear variations of it, and shadows of it, but Shostakovich is careful, too, to create a consistent air of anticipation and frustration. Which is something like recent communication with Cleo. We've seen really exciting hints of a maturing intelligence: this morning, as we looked at a complicated picture of a farm, I asked her where the pig, the duck, and the cat were - and she pointed, in turn, to each. She's signing consistently and fluently now when she wants assistance, and when she's hungry, and when she's finished with an activity. But, often, it still feels as though we are communicating through some awkward opaque medium: through water, or through a veil.

In the quartet and in spending time with Cleo, there is an incandescent flame that one wants to hold, and nurture. But one's view is consistently occluded and obstructed by minor obstacles.

Cannonball

And then Cleo learned how to splash.

No, I mean really splash. At least, as vigorously as a 20-pound baby can manage.

For most of her first year, Cleo was - well, not tentative, but not exactly ambitious in the tub. She slowly migrated from end to end; she spent a lot of time filling tubes and buckets, and pouring them, and she showed occasional interest in the water spout. And from time to time, when she was learning to climb stairs, she'd simply try to heft herself clean out of the tub.

We joined a local pool in May, and Cleo's maintained her studied cool when near the water. She's vaguely happy, it seems, floating about in her inflatable yellow ring, and she's certainly content practicing her pouring while sitting on the side of the children's pool. Occasionally, if you hold both of her hands, she'll take a lurching stroll about the shallow end. But no big splashes.

Until this week, when she suddenly realized, apparently, that she can move a considerable amount of water. Hands fly, palms patting the surface with all of the force that she can muster. She stands, only to suddenly allow her legs to go rubbery and fall - sploosh! - into the water. Drops arc across the bathroom; a puddle forms outside the tub; her hair is glossy with small rivulets.

I didn't know what to expect, in many ways, when I was about to become a dad. But I did know that I'd always vaguely envied parents for being able to attend the baths of their small children. Cleaning up after meals, or reading the pages of a board book for the nth time: those are duties, as much as pleasures. But watching your daughter learn to do the rough equivalent of a good ol' cannonball, in the confines of a bathtub? That's what it's all about.

Helix

With Cleo now more than a year old, I'm growing used to the idea that we have a real history together. I remember days from last summer, and can compare them to this, or I can recall pushing the stroller on the same stretch of sidewalk, months ago, that we walk today. What's really striking about such thoughts, though, is that while this July may bring the same angles of sun as last July, and the library reading group may still chant the same lullabies as we did six months ago, everything has changed, as well. Nothing, as they say, really remains the same.

Here's what I mean, in more specific terms. I just got back from taking Cleo to a playground near Loyola University. We've been there before, several times: it's a pleasant, leafy place, and nearly always has a few kids romping about. In the past, though, Cleo's been more or less limited to the bucket swings. The normal swings were too tricky, the slides too high, the stairs too forbidding. But today, suddenly almost everything was in play. She climbed up a slide, gradually worked her way to the highest point in the castle-like core of the playground, and then tried to skid down the spiral slide on her belly.

Same playground, same kid - but a few months make it an entirely new experience.

Academics sometimes talk about time as a helix. For instance, in The Sociology of Work Keith Grint writes that "it is possible to consider time as something of a helix, a spiralling motion in which there are apparent returns to previous forms but at a different level from before." Make sense? Okay, then: let's get even more philosophical for a moment. In a book about American avant-garde music called The Object of Performance, Henry Sayre argues that "there is always, in the repeated occurrence of a thing, a reference to some former occurrence..." In other words, a motif, when repeated, is not quite the same as the motif when first played.

But I like Brian Eno's summary of the matter best. "Repetition," he has said, "is a form of change." Indeed. Same playground, same kid: but where I once looked down at Cleo, in her stroller, she now looks down on me, from her tower in the playground.

High summer

The last week has seen some full-on summer temperatures in the Greater Baltimore Area: on Tuesday, in fact, the city broke a local record when the mercury rose to 105 degrees. That means, in turn, that Cleo's getting to know her neighborhood pool rather intimately -but is also becoming acquainted with some of the other special pleasures of summer. She's now also floated on the Chesapeake, on the 4th of July, and tried her first ice cream, on a spoon held by her uncle (cherry vanilla, for the record, which evinced a thoughtful scowl and, rather suprisingly, little else). And, although she didn't quite realize it, as she snoozed in the back of the car, she's also moved slowly, on an I-95 bridge, through a remarkable galaxy of firework shows: on the way home from Annapolis on the night of the 4th, we saw at least a dozen series of starbursts, in various corners of the vast city sky: Baltimore's fireworks, and Glen Burnie's - and was that Pigtown, in yellow and red?

Maybe the most memorable part of that last episode, though, was the train of cars momentarily parked on the side of the interstate, simply paused to take in the show. A scene of sheer, sudden appreciation that vaguely resembled descriptions of the scene in London, on April 21, 1749, when Handel's music for royal fireworks was rehearsed. According to one report, "So great a resort occasioned such a stoppage on London Bridge, that no carriage could pass for three hours. The footmen were so numerous as to obstruct the passage, so that a scuffle ensued, in which some gentlemen were wounded."

We didn't see, happily, any wounded. But the bangs of bursting shells continued to report in the darkened sky even as we lay Cleo down to bed in her crib, on getting home. And the next night, they gave their place back to the fireflies that crowd into our river valley.