Warmup

Back in the heyday of deconstruction, when Charles Moore was throwing up broken pediments and you could take a seminar on Derrida and feel more or less completely contemporary, I had a suitemate who began a paper with the phrase, 'Openings are always difficult.' But he didn't stop there, with the written assertion: he actually stapled the paper on all four corners, making the physical form of the essay into a demonstration of its opening line.

I suppose that you could say that, in doing so, John was employing an ancient idea: the idea, common to Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, that beginnings are struggles. Momentum is hard to gather; muses need to be invoked. But I like to think, too, that he was also ahead of his time, in another sense. In the years after 1989, a number of hip-hop artists began to include rather brief meditative opening tracks as preludes to albums; these short tracks, never meant to be released as singles, were more a matter of gathering energy, or finding one's voice. I think, for instance, of "Genesis," on Nas' seminal Illmatic, which offers - with its sample of an elevated train, and soft voiceover of two men arguing - a hint of the singer's urban roots, a taste of the beginnings of his career, and a chance for him to establish a mood, a beat, a tone, before launching into the rest of the album. Or put on Jill Scott's wonderful 2000 album, Who is Jill Scott?, and listen to the short Jilltro, at the outset: you'll hear the flickering registers of a series of radio stations, as though the singer is flipping through options, before settling on her own style.

All of which has little, and everything, to do with Cleo. Cleo's never written an epic poem; never laid down a hip-hop track. She's stapled once or twice, but never with a clever conceit in mind. And yet, when she wakes up, and pads down the hall to our room, she's always faced, be it at 5:09 or 6:36, with the same problem that confronted my friend John, and the poet Milton, and the rapper Nas. How to begin? And, some days, it takes a few moments: Cleo simply breathes, heavily, at the door. On other days, she confidently strides in, announcing that she was thinking that maybe she'd like some warm milk. Or, recently, she's asked if she could climb into bed with us for a few minutes, before beginning her day.

Openings may not always be difficult, on one level (after all, how hard is warm milk, really?). But they always involve choices, and they define, in their way, the rest of the day. Toddler, rapper: a first sound is a getting started, a launching, a mark in the world.

Attention must be paid

It's Arthur Miller's famous line, but I'll appropriate it for the moment, because it more or less summarizes an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy that washed over me as I drove home a few minutes ago. I'd been at the gym, trying to shake off the scrim of a week of lethargy and trying to rejoin the adult world, at least momentarily, after a day spent with Cleo. I turned on the local classical radio station and heard the clean, exact brilliance of a composition that could only be Haydn or Mozart. Yes, confirmed the host a few minutes later: Mozart's sixth serenade, played by the Academy of Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields. But wait, I thought. I'd enjoyed hearing, entirely at random, the piece, which I didn't know. But the thought that such works -such works of worth and value - are constantly playing, for the 23 hours and change when I don't happen to have the radio on, suddenly seemed overwhelming. We refer to the corpus of classical music, as thought it were a single body, or individual: someone, or something, we could know. In reality, though, the world of interesting classical music sprawls, and includes thousands upon thousands of works. It's a body, all right: but one composed of legions of cells, rather than one familiar face.

And that, in turn, reminded me of my day with Cleo. With L. back at work, the nursery closed, and my semester not yet begun, I got the rare chance to spend a full Wednesday with my local toddler. For the most part, it was much fun: her Santa hat drew smiles wherever we went, and she shared her applesauce at lunch, like a true lady. But by 4 p.m., she still hadn't napped, and I was wishing for a few minutes of my own: a breather, in which I could clean up, check my e-mail, and try the next page of my new graded Arabic reader. I put out glue, and tape, and paper, for her, and asked her if she'd like to make a collage - and headed for the kitchen sink, and its pile of dirty dishes. And within three minutes, I heard a little voice, from the next room: Daddy! You're not paying attention to me.

I didn't even know she knew the phrase - and certainly didn't imagine that she'd level such a charge. Hadn't I just paid attention to her for eight consecutive hours? And yet, now I know just what she meant. Each moment is its own. You may have read, this very morning, the complete series of Laura Numeroff books to your toddler - but she's moved on, and wants to show you something now. Likewise, you may have enjoyed that serenade that was just broadcast - but now there's Smetana on, and he deserves your attention, as well.

The current is unrelenting, the well unfathomably deep, the animals voracious. Your attention may be limited, but it's in infinite demand.

Mimesis

In one of Cleo's current favorite books, Angelina Ballerina, Mrs. Mouseling comes upon Angelina in front of a mirror, trying on her mother's hats and making various faces, while checking out her reflection. It's actually a rather interesting moment in the book's narrative arc, because it feels like a moment of pure, private vanity - but then becomes, we discover, a rather important part of the girl's training, which pays off when she ends up on the big stage. What seems like self-indulgent play, in other words, is actually useful practice, directed toward a specific end.

Because, after all - let's face it - all artists dissemble. The cave painter pretends, and asks us to pretend, that the ochre on the wall is actually the living, pulsing hide of a beast. The bluesman pretends, night after sweaty night, that his baby has just done left him. And the film editor, cooped up in a dark room, enables us, through a splicing of shots and countershots, to imagine that we are peering over the shoulders of the lead actor and actress. And why such dissembling? It's a necessary part, I suppose, of the project of mimesis - of the basic goal of so much Western art since Plato first used the term. Those violinists, with their bows hopping on their instrument bridges while playing Debussy's La Mer? They're doing their best to recreate, in our minds, the tremble of the sea - and, in the process, pretending that wooden curves are frothy waves.

And so, along the way, every child learns the process, as well. Perhaps they stand in front of a mirror, and try on costumes. Or perhaps they begin to sketch, with chalk or crayon. Or maybe, as Cleo did this week, they begin to mimic countenances associated with various moods. So, for your consideration: above is Cleo, asked to do a happy face. And below, Cleo again, imitating crazy and sad faces. Sure, it's simple fun. But when Angelina makes a career of her interest, it then seems like more than mere fun, as well.

Order and chaos

Two nights ago, on a balmy December evening, L. and I walked Cleo up to the Homewood House, the stately villa that was built by the locally important Carroll family in the early 1800s, and that now stands at the middle of the Johns Hopkins campus. The building's a museum now, and it was tricked out, on Monday, in its holiday best: glass-enclosed candles lined the front walk, a wreath colored the door, and a number of volunteers offered brief tours of the interior.

So much space, so much order, so much clarity. One gets the sense, in such preserved spaces, that our wealthier forefathers lived in a world that was not unlike that of Le Corbusier's clean dreams. A bed, a bedpan, a dresser - and no scattered clothes, or dust motes. A central table in the dining room, with a crystalline array of silver - and no half-finished magazines, or misplaced sippy cups, or CD jewel cases. It's as though such people lived in an environment that was simply not yet overwhelmed by the surfeit of things that's now so familiar to all of us: that the harp in the drawing room was significant precisely because it was one of a mere handful of made objects that could be used for entertainment.

Perhaps, perhaps. And images from earlier centuries only confirm such a hunch: the insistently moral interiors in De Hooch's paintings, for instance, suggest that the 17th century, as well, was simply a cleaner, simpler time. But the historian in me wonders, nonetheless: mightn't this have been, to an extent, a curated impression, or an editor's decision? De Hooch worked for clients who wanted to project an air of Calvinist propriety, and no doubt unseemly complexities were thus eliminated in the final painting. Indeed, doesn't something similar happen in the pages of a modern architectural journal like Dwell? We admire the clean lines and immaculate surfaces even as we recognize, simultaneously, that a cleaning crew likely worked to produce such a look, moments before the shoot.

And yet, as we wandered through the Homewood House, we encountered a piece of evidence that suggested that pure, geometric simplicity has in fact always been, and will always be, at hand. In a small chamber a quartet from the Peabody Institute played the final movement of a composition by Haydn. Drawn by the dynamic, energetic sounds, we stepped into the room and took seats in the back, and allowed the music to wash over us. Ascending motifs, competing lines and complementary passages - but all of it arranged, it seemed to me, in strict accordance with a deep, abiding respect for mathematics and ideal symmetry.

The music, I want to say, cut through me. The rougher, more ambiguous contours of the day dissolved; all seemed cleaner, more precise, more obvious. And so, refreshed, we moved back into the rest of the house and its precise, ordered rooms, before leaving, a few minutes later, and driving home. But even when we opened the door to our own house, and entered a more densely populated world of plastic toys and CD jewel cases, Haydn's lesson persisted. Played live or heard in reproduction, the music bears a powerful reminder. Beneath the scrim there are deeper and more elegant tides.

Relax

As I type this, I'm listening to an 8-minute composition by Marconi Union that I saw mentioned in Time a couple of weeks ago. Called 'Weightless,' it's garnered a reputation for being incredibly relaxing - indeed, it was apparently written in conjunction with a panel of 'sound therapists,' and was found to be, in a study commissioned by a bubble bath company, more relaxing than a cup of tea or a massage.

In other words, it's dangerous territory for this dad, who was up at 5:50, who swam against the current of the Towson Christmas traffic today, and who just read his daughter a pair of nighttime books, including one that ended with Olivia, a pig, being tucked in. If 'Weightless' is soporific, it's merely overkill, at this point: I was yawning deeply with Olivia. Adding a tune forged by sound therapists, at this point, is like downing a valium after reading for four hours, in front of a fire.

My larger point, though? It's simply this. In a country that offers vast ranges of products that can keep you awake - from Red Bull to No-Doz - and that can put you to sleep - Nyquil, anyone? - it may still hold true that in fact the most reliable stimulants and relaxants are packaged in the same convenient container that they've occupied for years. Yeah, I'm thinking of your common toddler. At least, when I hear Cleo's labored breathing and surprisingly heavy footsteps coming down the hall, something in me leaps awake: on an almost animal plane, I become alert. At least, I'm temporarily alert. But by the same token, later in the day, when Cleo manufactures pretend cupcakes in her pretend oven, and spends time delicately arranging the baking tray while giving a murmuring commentary, I tend to think that nothing could be more relaxing, more satisfying.

Not even, I think, if you consulted an entire army of sound therapists.

No trace?

If you're at all like me, you may have caught yourself at some point in the past year mistakenly assuming that virtually all of our actions are somehow recorded, or registered, or filed away on a hard drive somewhere. My alma mater is currently interviewing, in the wake of a hate crime, all of the individuals who used their electronic ID card to swipe themselves into a campus building at a particular time; meanwhile, a lawyer friend of mine recently relied on months of Wal-Mart security camera footage to document the presence of a client at a particular time. Looking for that e-mail that you mistakenly deleted? Gmail can likely retrieve it. And, as you wait in the cafe chair for it to do so, you may well form an unintended background element in a cell phone photo taken one table over.

But I'm here to tell you, friends, that in fact it's not all preserved, in pixelated form. On Tuesday, I took Cleo to Druid Hill park for a nice play session before we headed to the zoo to look for Curious George in the monkey house. (He wasn't, it turned out, in on that particular day). We watched oak leaves drift down from their lofty branches; we made tiny hammers out of sticks and tried them out on the benches. And then Cleo wandered over to the adult swings - swings that have always been, since she learned to talk, for "older children," and thus inspired a deep fear - and asked to get on.

Say no more, daughter. I lifted her up, rooted her tiny body in the center of the depression, and watched as her hands easily found the chains. I pushed her gently, only to learn that she wanted to go higher, and then higher still. And suddenly, there were were, a dad pushing his little girl on the real swings: graduates, with little fanfare, of the bucket swings intended for infants and the fainter of heart.

I felt like whooping - until I realized that the camera was in the car, instead of in my pocket. But didn't this moment deserve to be preserved? I wondered, for a moment, what to do. And then I knew: even if we left the playground without some sort of photographic proof, we would hardly be empty-handed. Lived moments can be indelible, after all, in several ways. They may leave a trace in wandering strings of ones and zeroes, in digital documents or JPG files. Alternatively, they may leave a much simpler mark: call it on the heart, or in the mind.

She swung. I type it, click on Publish Post, and the fact is stored on a server somewhere. But it was already stored, days ago, on a more fragile and more loving vellum.

No smaller interval

In his sprawling, engaging - and very, very French - book The Arabs: Their History and Future, written in 1960, Jacques Berque devotes a few pages to a consideration of the differences between Arab and European musical traditions. He quickly realizes that longstanding Arab musical scales are more subtle than their Western counterparts. Or, as he puts it,

Our scale recognizes no smaller interval than a semitone. It climbs the ladder of sound by degrees which shock the Eastern ear by their crudity.

That is, to a Baghdadi or a Cairene raised on the airy, snaking melodies of an oud, or used to the winding rhythms of the muezzin, even the leap from a fourth to a fifth can seem coarse, or overstated. And yet, Berque insists, this should hardly be read as a criticism of Western music. One adapts to the system at hand, and symphonic composers, he writes, have used rhythmic discoveries to perfect the Western octave, as an instrument. Arab music, he's happy to admit, is wonderfully subtle. But if major and minor scales can support a Mozart, then they are probably also sufficient.

Such an observation's been on my mind of late, as Cleo has started to bloom as an artist. For most of the past year, her drawings and paintings have consisted of roughly controlled and seemingly randomly applied marks. Left hand, right hand: she didn't seem to care, and the joy of applying color seemed to be enough. In the past month, though, she's begun to articulate a style, and then to work representatively, rendering forms that clearly convey intent and even meaning. The painting above, for instance, is one of several in which she left a half of the paper - a diagonal wedge - unpainted, while sparsely filling in a lower corner. Such images suggest, to me at least, an interest in compositional balance - even as the brilliant blue mark upsets any easy symmetry. Just yesterday, though, she stunned me by dragging a magnetic drawing board out of a thrift shop bin, and by drawing a series of motifs clearly identifiable as figures. Here's one of them:

Sure, I couldn't tell if it was Daddy, or Mommy, or Cleo, or Joe: only she seemed to be aware of the figure's particular identity. But look closely, and you'll see, next to the toy car, a dominant head, four limbs, hair, and two eyes.

Berque, of course, could say that such an image shocks us with its crudity. But I think that he would add, again, in a subsequent sentence, that Cleo is learning - slowly, perhaps, but learning - to perfect the coarse magnetic pen as an instrument.

The reasons why

Ah, Cleo: never imagine, please, that the sustained moments of online silence correspond to moments of distance between us. Instead, as I think I've mentioned before, the opposite is often true: it's those days that are full of shared play and exploration that offer the least in terms of time for blogging. One can only tweet about the revolution when one isn't storming the king's barricades, right?

And, happily, the past week has been richly full of family activities. You have a wonderful mom, and a generous set of scattered supporters, and their love for you was manifest, for instance, in your school's Halloween parade on Friday, where you marched into public with your fellow Bluebirds in your handsome black spider outfit. Sure, you broke into tears when you saw me, in a storm of confusion - Is school over now? Why would Daddy be here in the late morning? - but your willingness to keep walking, nonetheless, had us full of pride.

So, too, did the generous, inclusive, and energetic spirit that you brought to our late Saturday afternoon play date with Juni. While we chatted - at length! - with her parents, and made bowls of chili on a snowy night, you shared your paints with your friend, and hugged her, and let her sit with you for a semi-private screening of Blue's Clues. So, no, I wasn't blogging - but the very reason for that is that I was catching up with friends, as you hosted a friend of your own.

Perhaps my favorite memory of the past week, though, is from this morning: you choosing a CD of Billboard hits from 1982, extending it to Mommy - and, then, when the slick melodies wound about our dining room, breaking into your personal dance style. Arms up, like chicken wings, and little torso bending forward and back, you were a vision of happy kinetic energy. I'd have to be a fool to ignore such a scene, and to spend the time blogging, instead.

And in fact, now that you're in school, and my students' essays are almost graded, and I have a little time for blogging, I wish that you were right here next to me, dancing in that crazy mode.

And once more

Baa-baa, black sheep,

Cleo has a new favorite song.

Have you any wool?

She first heard it at the library, when she was tiny, during story time.

Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.

Recently, though it's resurfaced, as it's sung at her nursery school. And on car rides through town, Cleo likes to unleash a version of it, unaccompanied.

One for my master, one for my game.

Does she get the words exactly right? Well, no. But does that really matter?

Baa-baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

Hard to think so. At least, it certainly doesn't diminish her enthusiasm. Another round, perhaps?

Endless melodies

Frequently, in composing a blog devoted to music and fatherhood, I've been forced to seek out rough comparisons between the two subjects: to spin thin parallels, or faintly gesture toward common ground. Certain moments, however, bring full overlaps between the two, and in fact yesterday was characterized by a number of those moments. For some reason, Cleo was simply shot through with music on October 19.

As she often does, she spent some of the drive to school singing her ABCs; over the past month, her version of the song has gone from a plaintive recitation characterized by a droning rhythm that called to mind chants uttered in the slave galleys of Roman warships to a relatively bright and rapid celebration of the letters. Part of the reason, of course, is due to her growing sense of familiarity with the letters; indeed, we spent a few minutes after school noting familiar forms in the text of a historical marker at the Mount Royal train station. But surely the change is also due in part to her evolving realization that there are, in fact, different types of music. On the way home from school, she curtly announced, "I want to hear Motown and then jazz" - in other words, her two favorite CDs.

Happy to oblige, Cleo: and happy to see that Motown can still put you in a good mood. In fact, the good mood lasted the entire evening; after an episode of Blues Clues, we all decamped to the play room, where Cleo, after issuing pretend shots as a pretend doctor and after forming a human wicket through which we could roll balls, decided to issue musical instruments. L. got a washtub and a drumstick; I got the colorful xylophone; Cleo took the little tom tom for herself. And damn if we didn't put on a family concert for the next 10 minutes. Overlapping rhythms, simple melodies, and some big smiles: granted, we weren't as tight as the Jackson Five, but we did have some fun.

And then it was time for bed, which meant a new diaper, a round of pajamas for Cleo and her growing stable of stuffed monkeys, a reading of a Curious George story... and the nighttime CD that's played at bedtime for more than a year now. With the soft, swirling notes of a lullaby in the air, then, I said night, night, and closed her door - just a little bit, as per her instructions, at 8:31.

Degrees of recall

In 1779, Mozart traveled, as a young 20-something, with to Rome. During Holy Week, his father Leopold took him to the Sistine Chapel, to hear Gregorio Allegri's well-known Miserere. A relatively complex choral work for nine voices, the Miserere was considered to be the sacred property of the Vatican, and copying it was strictly forbidden; conventional transcriptions were supposedly punishable with excommunication.

Mozart heard it performed once, and then returned to his room, where he wrote down, from memory, the entire piece.

Instead of provoking the fury of the Church, though, Mozart's feat fanned broad interest in his abilities. In fact, he was allowed to return to the Chapel several days later; after this visit, he corrected a few minor mistakes in his original transcription, and the score of the Miserere was a secret no longer.

We don't spend much time - in fact, I can't remember spending any time - wondering if Cleo is a little Mozart. It seems pretty clear, though, that recalling, in the sense of retelling, any rather complicated event still lies beyond her powers. Often, when I pick her up from nursery school, I ask her what the day had brought. Generally, there's a brief report on any scrapes she may have accrued in the playground - "I got an ow-ee on my knee" - and sometimes there are big, broad summaries: "I played." And yet, when we talk to the teachers, or receive the week-end e-mails from the school, it's clear that she and the other kids are leading relatively rich and varied lives during the day. Just two days ago, in fact, there was apparently a rather emotional farewell to Yertle the Turtle, who had lived in an aquarium in the Bluebirds' room for months, before giving up the ghost over the weekend.

But if Cleo is unable to tell us about such episodes, I'm not convinced that she doesn't - and that all of the kids in her room - don't, in fact, remember them. The memory of a toddler is clearly dynamic, and weirdly selective. But it's clearly potent, as well: a fact that's made clear as she and I move through Baltimore on a daily basis. Yesterday, she pointed to the apartment in which her friend Quentin used to live - until June, when he moved to Texas - and announced that it was his. And as we waited for L., on the steps of her building, Cleo suggested that we play a game that we'd last tried, on the same steps, a few weeks ago.

So: so far, no transcribed Miserere. But, still: signs that the past is always with us, in forms that are almost as beautiful as divine music.

Vicarious travel

On Saturday I spent much of the day in the Hopkins library, while L. took Cleo, a friend, and the friend's toddler to a sprawling orchard, where they went on a couple of hay rides, raced toy boats, and picked out Halloween pumpkins. When we met up at 4, they were clearly buoyed by a day in the fall sun, and L. spoke happily of live music and a petting zoo. Having spent my own time simply reading, I struggled slightly to imagine the scene - until L. revealed a camera full of autumnal pictures, and until I saw the back seat, littered with the small stickers with which the girls had played. The back seat was the tonal opposite of a stock crime scene: instead of a grim consequence of violence, it was the aftermath of an enjoyable ride in the car, and I felt almost as though I could live vicariously through the residues of little girls' decisions.

For some reason - or perhaps for an obvious reason: I haven't been very far afield of late - all sorts of vicarious travel have appealed to me over the past week. Last night, I finished Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, and enjoyed picturing the small Cairene cafe around which the novel swirls. On Saturday evening, I made a big batch of foul, a common Middle Eastern bean soup, in an attempt to evoke the aura of an Aleppo restaurant where I first tried it. Yesterday, while a colleague described his upcoming trip to Buenos Aires and Rio, I imagined the drama of flying into seaside Brazil. And the Sunday Times travel section, with pictures of a Patagonian ice bar? Sure: let's go.

But perhaps the simplest example, in this vein, involves our morning commute. These days, the routine is rather simple: drive the lovely, tree-lined avenues of Roland Park, glide along the park-like University Drive, and drop L. at Hopkins; then merge with the sclerotic rush-hour traffic, and drive southwest, through gritty Remington, to Cleo's nursery school; walk to my own campus. It's an interesting, varied drive, and we certainly can't complain about its length: at around 20 minutes total, it's a fraction of many local commutes. Still, though, it can use the occasional augmentation. And so, when I recently bought a batch of classic recordings of the Muslim call to prayer and pushed them into the car's CD drive at 8:05 on a recent morning, the result was surprisingly stirring. Suddenly we were not merely waiting for a green light; it was as though we were also in Fez, or Medina, or Mosul. The muezzin's voice wrapped around us, suggesting a pace very different from the staccato motion of the traffic, and even as we drove to our familiar workplaces and schools, we seemed to already have arrived somewhere else quite different.

Special offer!

As you may have guessed, from the trickle of recent posts, the sledding's been - well, not exactly difficult, but certainly busy, in recent weeks. A small mountain of papers to be graded, a happy weekend with my brother's family, a birthday party for one of Cleo's fellow Bluebirds, a bit of yard maintenance, research for a talk at February's CAA conference... rather rare, it seems, are the unplanned 30-minute blocks that can result in blog entries.

But now the grading's all done, and the meditative quiet of Fall Break has arrived, I've got 65 pages of notes toward the talk, and my fantasy football team has elbowed its way into a tie for first - and so it's time to get back, if only briefly, to the blog. So here, dear readers, is my offer to you: as a means of trying to reward or win back your steady readership, I'll post at least an image of Cleo each morning of this workweek. Obscure musical references and openly strained analogies may, in some cases, accompany the images. But you can simply ignore those, if you'd rather simply know what the girl looks like.

Above, that's Cleo with her friend Susanna at the B&O Railroad Museum.

Stepping out, and finding

I recently bought a copy of a series of songs - some of them solos, and some duets - by Harry Belafonte and the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri. Apparently, Belafonte had just finished a show in Athens, and decided to hit the town, late at night: as chance had it, he and his small entourage wandered into a club where Mouskori was singing. Struck (as were many, at the time) by her honeyed voice, he later pursued the possibility of a joint project, and the result was this ten-song compilation, which features a few lively traditional Greek standards, and a haunting, lilting song called The Baby Snake.

How many of life's more potent moments come from such chance meetings, and such impromptu decisions! And how much beauty lies, it seems, at hand, just down an alleyway. Such ideas have been on my mind of late, as Cleo and I have been enjoying the lovely fall afternoons after school by simply wandering the streets of Bolton Hill, and seeing what we can discover. Occasionally, we fall into brief conversations with students of mine, or with other local residents. Once, we spent a half hour using sticks as improvised rakes, to brush fallen leaves into a pile that reached Cleo's little knees. And then, too, there are the acorns: fallen jewels scattered along our path, which beg to be rolled into storm drains, or scraped on a sidewalk, or thrown up in the air and cracked.

We have yet, I'll admit, to produce anything in our meanderings that rivals The Baby Snake in its pure grace. But the irregular courses of broken acorn shells on Mosher and Brevard Streets are, rather like the recordings of Belafonte and Mouskori, residues of happy moments, of chance encounters, of a city explored.

Halloween soundtrack

On Tuesday, bellies full of soup on a rainy late afternoon, L. and I led Cleo into the local Party City, to show given her an idea of what Halloween is all about. She's read about it, of course - in one of Cleo's books, Maisy throws a costume party; in another Curious George causes a ruckus when he mistakenly dresses like a ghost. And, in fact, Cleo's already been in full costume, twice, due to the generosity and handicraft of a certain Florida-based well-wisher. But, still: she's two now, and two-year-olds tend to want direct, concrete things before them, rather than memories or sketches.

So, Cleo, meet aisles 7 and 8. We spent more than half an hour trying on silly masks and plastic props. L., for a few minutes, was a Venetian carnival-goer; moments later, she was Papa Smurf. And soon Cleo was in the spirit, as well; in fact, she doubled down on the spirit, taking a large foam beer stein hat off of the shelf, and donning it at a rakish angle, to our delight. Even I, in an oh-so-serious water buffalo headdress, had to smile.

In that sense, then, Party City easily delivered. But it also surprised me, with a certain level of intensity for which I wasn't prepared, as a parent. Next to the entrance was a fully life-sized, animated Freddy Krueger in a cage; equipped with a motion sensor, he turned to face anyone who entered, and delivered gruesome bon mots (which justified, to an extent, his $250 price tag). Cleo was rapt. A moving man, in a cage? She wondered what was going on, even as I wondered how, exactly, to explain. I mean, it's a big leap from the polite bunny world of Ruby and Max to the blood-spattered realm of Nightmare on Elm Street, and I wasn't quite ready to make that jump.

But then we heard the music. As in the film upon which the installation was based, children began to chant a twisted version of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Perhaps, if you were a teen in the 1980s, you'll remember:

One, two, Freddy's coming for you.

Three, four, better lock your door.

And so on. I could just see Cleo, who rolls through the alphabet song a few times a day, and who's got her numbers down pat, perking her ears. And so we whisked her away, to an aisle stocked with bright knick-knacks, before she heard the final verse (Nine, ten, never sleep again). A few minutes, later, though, I began to wonder: why are children's songs so darned scary? A week earlier, I'd shown my freshmen the first shot of Halloween, which is preceded by a ditty chanted by a choir of children: Black cats and goblins and broomsticks and ghosts... And, too, a few days before that, I'd been remembering Omar's whistled refrain in The Wire: while on the hunt on the streets of Baltimore, he'd often issue a bedeviling version of The Farmer in the Dell.

So, readers, I'll ask you: why the conjunction between children's songs and terror? Is it a simple inversion of our associations of the tunes with innocence? Do the songs recall, on some level, the intense nighttime fears that we felt at that age?

You have until October 31 to answer.

Gloom and doom - and light

Looking back, it now seems somehow fitting that my copy of Nirvana's Nevermind - an impulse buy, on Amazon, meant to take me back to September 24, 1991, when the seminal album was first released - arrived in our mailbox this past Monday. On the first day, that is, of a week that was characterized by a litany of tragic details and morose happenings. In a sense, there couldn't have been a more fitting soundtrack than the plaintive, restless sounds of Nirvana: sounds now all the heavier, due to the band's frontman's eventual suicide.

Early in the week, L. and I awoke at about 2:3o in the morning to the screams of a woman, a few hundred feet from our house. I called 911, and the sounds soon receded, but I was up until at least 4:00 merely wondering what had happened to her. Several days later, Cleo and I returned home from a morning of play to find a neighbor's house boxed in by police cars, ambulances, and a fire truck - the institutional response, apparently, to a drug overdose. Shortly after that, while crossing a city street, I peered into the windshield of a car stopped at the light, and saw a woman weeping, while speaking into a phone and wiping her eyes. And today, as I walked to get Cleo at school, I passed by a father who pushed, in a stroller, a tiny boy with an oxygen tube running under his nose.

Everywhere, then, it seemed a fallen world. Which is why I was so happy to come upon Cleo, as she and the Bluebirds were walking back from their playground to their school, singing to herself while her classmates merely trundled along. From a distance, I couldn't quite make out what she was chanting, and then, suddenly, the sounds came into focus: next time won't you sing with me.

Yes, yes I will. In fact, given the overcast aspect of this past week, I'd be absolutely delighted to.

Psychosomatics

Here is how Kurt Vonnegut, jr. describes a combo singing 'That Old Gang of Mine' at a party on page 148 of Slaughterhouse Five: "the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords - chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again." And here, in turn, is how Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, experiences the music: "Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque..."

Fortunately, our reactions to music aren't always quite that powerful. But, nonetheless, you can probably relate, on some level - for, as we're coming to understand more and more fully, our reactions to art are often visceral, or embodied. In fact, so too are our responses to the world in general: think of the acidic taste of fear, or the hint of iron in the throat that can accompany raw lust, or the queasy weightless tingling spurred by acrophobia.

If that's familiar ground for us, though, I wonder if it's also familiar to my toddler-in-residence. Certainly, Cleo, like most 2-year-olds, is deeply attentive to her body, constantly noting boo-boos, frequently digging for nuggets in her nostrils, and practicing tiny leaps, and dance steps. And, too, she can react vigorously, and physically, when presented with certain options; earlier today, a proffered cucumber prompted a hyperbolic shake of the head. But what does such a shake mean, exactly? I'm not sure, but my sense is that Cleo's disgusted by the thought more than by the actual taste, or its recollection. After all, she actually downed a healthy bite of the cucumber just a few minutes later. In other words, the shake of the head isn't psychosomatic as much as it is emphatic, or, if you want, expressive. It's a choice, more than a reaction.

So, sure, Cleo can make her face every bit as grotesque as Billy Pilgrim - and does, sometimes. But the underlying mechanism, I think, is different. Billy ultimately realizes that his extreme feelings are generated by a repressed war memory. Cleo, of course, has no war memories - and, similarly, has little in the way of comparative experience. She simply likes or doesn't like, while those of us who have been around a bit longer like and dislike less directly: we do it, you might say, through the lenses of history, and through the lenses of our bodies, which we've come to know so well. A madeleine, to Proust, is a door to a world of memories; a cucumber, to a toddler, is a chance to practice autonomy, or a temporary alternative to plunging finger, again, into nose.

Recognition

In his 1881 book The Violin and its Music, George Hart tells an interesting story about Mozart. Apparently, the composer was in Berlin in 1788, and he decided to attend a performance of his own 'Die Entfuhrung aud dem Serail.' Seating himself near the orchestra, he listened, more and more despondently, as the second violins played D sharp, instead of the natural D specified in his score. Finally unable to remain silent, Mozart began to mutter to himself, and then burst out: "Confound it! do take D." The musicians, hearing the comment, glanced into the audience, and were startled to recognize the composer himself.

At the Green Space (a local playground) yesterday, I was witness to a similarly jarring - if less historically significant - moment of recognition. I was pushing Cleo in her favorite blue swing, and a mom next to me pushed her own 3-year-old in the adjacent black swing. The mom looked familiar to me, and I to her, and we fell to chatting, trying to figure out exactly why we knew each other. From work? No, that wasn't it. From previous play sessions at the playground? Well, that struck us as possible - until, suddenly, her daughter pointed to Cleo and said, clearly, "She's a bluebird."

Well, yes, indeed. Cleo's nursery divides the kids into flocks, by age, and she is indeed a bluebird, like all of the 2-year-olds. And the observant Charlotte, it turned out, is a yellowbird - a member of the next class up. So now we knew how we knew each other. But Charlotte wasn't done - for, she realized, Cleo wasn't holding a certain stuffed monkey, who accompanies her to school every day. "She has George," added Charlotte confidently. Yes, she does, I responded. She brings him to school every day. And Charlotte soon confessed, in turn, to having a favorite blanket.

A pointed comment about the performance; a coincidental moment on the swings: it's surprising what can spark a recognition. Even if a telltale monkey is missing.

Into voices

For the past ten days now, I've been carrying about, in my satchel, an increasingly worn copy of the September 11 New York Times Sunday Review section, folded to page 2. Was that perhaps, you ask, a particularly affecting piece on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks? Well, not exactly. Rather, I keep looking at a brief interview with the French shoe designer Christian Louboutin - and admiring the clear, bright simplicity with which he speaks of his tastes.

I was particularly struck by his description of what he's been listening to, of late. "I listen to my stomach," he begins, in jest. "It tells me when I am starving." Well, okay: at least he's not overly serious. But then, lest he seem merely trivial, Louboutin then quickly offers a crisp answer to the interviewer's query. "I like Adele, Mika, Natacha Atlas, and a beautiful old record, 'An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskori." An interesting list, I thought: I've long enjoyed Atlas' work, and it's been hard to avoid Adele's bluesy anthems in the Hopkins weight room over the last month. So I read on, and came to this: "I am very much into voices. I would say I'm a fan of voices, not of sound. I'm a fan of singers, not of bands."

For some reason, the confident directness with which he could articulate his tastes (and rule out entire fields of musical endeavor!) appealed to me. No hemming and hawing here: the man knows, or seems to think he knows, what he likes. And while I like bands, as well as singers, his list was intriguing enough to move me, today, to order the Belafonte album.

Why only today? Well, because it's been tough to find much free time of late - precisely because there's an emergent voice in our house, too. Cleo - or Jo, as she now prefers to be known - has been talking enthusiastically, and increasingly ambitiously, of late. The past tense? She's got it. The future's harder, but she occasionally nails it, too. She'll say "I need some oatmeal," and then, having eaten it, announce, "I must go." She asks to go to particular playgrounds, questions the appeal of others, and tells her pet monkey to smile, for the camera.

For the first time, then, we can have reasonable, extended conversations with our daughter, and plumbing the depths of her mind - her likes, and her pains - is fascinating. Fascinating enough, in fact, that I wind up carrying fragments of newspapers about, as yellowing reminders, and take more than a week to press purchase, and order an album full of allegedly promising voices.

The sounds of missing you

Cleo, we've occasionally been further apart, I guess, than we were this weekend; once I was in Milwaukee, while you were snowbound in Baltimore, and once you were jetsetting in Chicago while I remained at home. But this past weekend, as you smelled roses in Care-line-a, as you call it, I missed you more than I remember having done before. And so, in the absence of your tiny voice, and padding morning feet, and occasional shrieks, I tried to listen a little closer, every now and then, to the world around me. Here is what I heard: the thrum of dragonflies, in a cloud in West Virginia. The thin wheedle of a chain saw engine after it had been turned off, but still spun. The burble of shoppers strolling on the sidewalks of an outlet mall; the creak of sagged planks in our house. And then, on Saturday evening, your voice, when I called your mother, and in a near squeak of a voice (perhaps prompted by mommy, perhaps not), I love you, daddy.

I was reminded of Basho's haiku:

The old pond.

A frog leapt -

The sound of the water!

Staid stillness is shattered, and the sudden noise a revelation.

Just Motown

Every now and then, while driving Cleo about town, I manage to slip in a few minutes of ESPN Radio. Maybe I hear a slice of the kerfuffle surrounding Miami football, or a fraction of a heated analysis of Reggie Bush's prospects for the coming year. Usually, though, before I manage to get any rounded picture of the issue being debated, a small but insistent voice briskly cuts through the prattling announcers, saying, play music. And who, really, can object? Someday, I assume, Cleo may learn the appeal of a good debate about Yankees and the BoSox, but, sure, for the most part we have been trying to nudge her towards more cultured sounds.

In that vein, we've relied rather heavily on the sage advice of more experienced parents - such as Cleo's aunt, who steered us towards the nifty compilation CD Jazz for Kids. Featuring, as you may recall from an earlier post, a stirring version of Old MacDonald, that was a huge hit, but it's recently been eclipsed by a companion CD from the same warehouse. That'd be Motown for Kids, featuring seminal works by Stevie Wonder, the Jackson Five and others - and offering enough musical energy to meet your average toddler at least halfway. Every now and then, the sheer intensity of the music can feel slightly inappropriate: I prefer, for instance, to take my commute a touch slowly, without Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in the background. For the most part, though, the compilation's a winner, and can even open onto further discussion. When The Marvelettes plead with Mr. Postman, for instance, it's a chance to explain to Cleo exactly why mail used to be so important. And why exactly ain't, I imagine Cleo wondering, as Marvin Gaye sings, no mountain high enough? Explaining that, in words comprehensible to a toddler, is harder than you might think.

But anyway: I begin to digress. The point is, now you've got enough background to appreciate, I think, my favorite recent exchange with Cleo. While driving:

Me: Cleo, would you like some water?

Cleo: No, just Motown.

What leads to what

File this post under Seemingly Unpredictable Series of Causes and Effects, Wonder At.

It's been a theme in this lovely post-hurricane week: rather unremarkable moments generating, in turn, larger ripples, or broader consequences. For instance, while Cleo played at the toy train table (complete with roundhouse and loading crane!) at Barnes & Noble this morning, I sipped a coffee and flipped through the latest copy of Harper's. An essay by Garret Keizer, a Vermont schoolteacher whose work I've enjoyed in the past, caught my eye. For the most part, it focused on his impressions of his school community, after more than a decade away from the classroom, but at one point he happened to mention that he sometimes plays John Coltrane's 'Welcome' on a small CD player as students trickle into his classroom. I'd never heard the piece before - and yet now it will now greet my two sections when they first gather for tomorrow's classes. Coincidence begets history.

And sometimes in majestic ways. Earlier in the week, I read Robin Wright's Rock the Casbah, an overview of what she terms the counter-jihad movement. One chapter, interestingly, is given to a discussion of Arab hip-hop, and it's there that she discusses a grainy video of a Tunisian rapper named El General that was posted on YouTube in November 2010. Filmed with a single video camera, a young man makes his way into a recording studio and begins to lay down the lyrics to 'Rais Lebled,' a four-minute condemnation of the Ben Ali regime:

We're suffering like dogs,

Half the people living in shame.

Misery everywhere,

People are eating from garbage cans...

In Wright's words, it's a "haunting and raw" video. But it was more than that, too. A few weeks later, a government official demanded a run-of-the-mill $7 bribe from Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor. Bouazizi refused, and, after seeing his winter apples confiscated, made his to two local offices, to complain. When he was greeted with stony silence, he set himself afire - and, in turn, sparked the first revolution of the monumental Arab Spring. In turn, El General's song soon became an anthem to the revolution, attracting hundreds of thousands of views. One man's anger generates a reinvented nation's song.

And, today, a much more modest variation on the same theme: events and chance encounters pointing forward in a manner that would be nearly impossible to predict. Heading home after a good spell with the train table, we happened to see the stepped fountain outside the aquarium. Sunny day, no one but a few distracted tourists, an hour before naptime: it was too good to pass up. And so I helped Cleo take her pants and shoes off, and let her splash about on the top step. Soon, she found a seedpod that happened to be lying on the rim of the fountain, and began to dunk it in the water. And just then, the Urban Pirates pirate ship sailed into the harbor, taking a cocky turn and deeply impressing Cleo - who began to daub the concrete steps with her wet seed pod, announcing that she was painting the pirate ship. 'This green, she contended, pointing to one small puddle, and 'this red,' pointing to another. 'Pirate ship!'

An impromptu stop at a fountain yields a painting of a pirate ship; a play session with toy trains shapes the next day's classes. Parenting isn't ever only parenting; it's also husbandry, as each moment gives birth to another.

Imagined soundtrack

If Cleo's life thus far were made into a film, I think it's fair to say that much of the footage of her first year would be accompanied by a predominantly restrained classical soundtrack. That year proceeded, for the most part, at a slow and stately pace: I remember a lot of lying next to Cleo as she rolled gently on her belly, and I remember longish walks with her in the Baby Bjorn. A soft piano etude - the sort that documentaries on The Nature Channel use when showing time-lapse imagery of a flower growing - might work well.

Right now, though, the images demand something livelier and less predictable: bee-bop jazz, I think. Yesterday morning offers a nice example. We sat down to a relatively rare formal family breakfast: each of us had a little bowl of cereal, and Cleo was armed with tiny spoon and bib. Within two minutes, though, she had used the spoon to chop the cereal into hundreds of tiny pieces, and then somehow turned herself entirely around in her chair, so that she looked like a prisoner on a hunger strike, ignoring her meal and staring through the back rails, as if in a cell. It was like eating with Houdini, perhaps - and biographies of Houdini, of course, always get the Jazz Age treatment.

Each age, then, gets the soundtrack it deserves. But when, I wonder, do we get to the glam metal phase?

Inventiveness

Every now and then, if you spend enough time with Cleo, and you listen closely, you might catch her singing an original composition. Usually, it's little more than a phrase that she's heard lately, repeated over and over in a soft voice, and a very high pitch. There's no real melody; rather, it's a comforting, relaxed rhythm or chantlike aspect that qualifies the utterances, in my mind, as music. Pink house, pink house, ran a typical composition, which floated up to us from her back seat.

Yesterday, we had to smile at the latest song. Cleo spends, as I think you know, a good deal of time with George, a stuffed monkey who has now attended nursery schools on two continents, and who often wears a tight tee shirt with a small hole through which his generous tail can be threaded. Thus, as we drove to school yesterday morning, it wasn't completely surprising - but was somehow still deeply endearing - to hear Cleo chanting George's hole, George's hole, as she idly played with his shirt and tail.

No, we're not the most discerning audience. In fact, we're downright biased. But even biased and easily satisfied listeners can experience real happiness at hearing the debut of a new song.

Words and music

Occasionally when I was little I wondered if perhaps each of us was allotted, at birth, a certain number of words to be spoken. You get a million and a half; I get, say, 834,802. And if we say that many, in our life, we simply run out: we go mute.

Hopefully, that's not the case - because I've been using words like water over the past week. Not, as you'll know, on the blog, but on book revisions, which occupied an unseemly number of hours: 6 a.m. editing stints at Starbucks, and a long stand in a West Virginia McDonald's. But now that's done, and the manuscript - a book on art criticism - is back in the publisher's hands, and so I can get back to spending my allotted words in a more enjoyable way: on Cleo.

Cleo, that is, who is blissfully uninterested in word limits. To the contrary: she's speaking often, and with increasing accuracy, now. She uses pronouns relatively confidently, she notes that there will likely be mosquitoes (kee-tos) near the red swing in our back yard, and she happily reports that she cried in school. Like this, she then adds, and breaks into a rather comic imitation of a toddler crying.

But words aren't the only sounds she's making. Increasingly frequently, she's also playing music. In West Virginia, she spent several minutes drumming, with one stick, on her big plastic drum - and insisted that I keep time with her. A touching experience for this father: a chance to weave my rhythm in and out with my daughter's. And then, back in Baltimore, she ambled confidently over to her little xylophone and plinked out a melody that was, if unplanned, rather palatable. Even the piano sees an occasional improvisatory experiment.

All around us, then, are the sounds of a little girl coming into her own. And so perhaps it wouldn't very bad at all, really, were I to use my last allotted words. I could simply sit back, it seems, and listen.

Round and round

Yesterday at about noon a snoring Cleo and I pulled into our Baltimore driveway, bringing our three-day dad-and-daughter road trip to a happy end. It was, by most standards, a relatively modest trip: we drove a couple of hours west, to West Virginia, and also spent nights in nearby Winchester and Alexandria. But, still, it more or less fulfilled a longstanding parental dream of mine - to throw some clothes (and some diapers, and some fruit bars, and some picture books, and enough equipment to provision a small army unit) in the back of the car, and to set out with the girl, to see what sorts of small adventures might await us.

A number, as it turned out. We waded in a lake, floated in a mock Roman bath, and tried out swings in the blazing Virginia sun. We dined on sandwiches at an outdoor table on the handsome Winchester pedestrian mall, split a milkshake on the Berkeley Springs green, and shared tacos at the King Street Chipotle. We saw tiny fish swimming in schools, observed a stuffed squirrel, and fended off the advances of hungry geese. We chatted with a number of Little League ballplayers gathered in Winchester for a tournament, and spent a happy few hours and a night with friends in D.C. All in all, a grand time.

Inevitably, though, the best moments on such a trip are often the ones that arrive completely unplanned. And in this case, there were a few. The teller at the chain saw repair shop offering Cleo her first lollipop. The furious drunk who staggered down the pedestrian mall, prompting Cleo to comment, 'That man need long time out.' And, too, the musical accompaniment. Cleo's now old enough to ask, with some specificity, for some of her favorite songs. As we drove south in West Virginia, for instance, I heard a small voice in the back seat, requesting Old Man Farm, or Old MacDonald. More than willing to play DJ, I put the CD in right away. But she's also old enough, by now, to offer her own renditions of some tunes. They're stripped down, sure, and so you end up with lyrics that are compressed or streamlined, as though forged in a wind tunnel: Wheels on bus go round and round all through town. And, of course, they're sung without any discernible sense of melody. And they are often curtailed prematurely, and followed immediately with a hearty, self-congratulatory yay, sometimes accompanied by the enthusiastic clapping of the singer herself. But, still, the short performances can delight - or, at least, can delight this less-than-impartial observer.

Especially when this observer had already been driving for 15 minutes, and still had 25 miles to go, and the wheels on the car were going round, and round, and round. Sing on, little Cleo: it's a welcome sound.

The same, but not the same

One of the more magical aspects of sustained travel abroad is that, upon return, the old and familiar world of home can look transformed, or new - even, in a sense, foreign. That, at least, has been my experience over the past week. The aquarium, which we'd visited at least half a dozen times last winter and spring, now looks different, in relation to Cape Town's; the local grocery's offerings are startlingly different from the prepared foods, curry powders and pricey grapes to which we'd begun to grow accustomed. Heck, even driving on the right side of the road feels mildly exotic.

None of this is really a revelation. In fact, it's the stuff of cliches: you can't go home again, and so on. But it was really brought home for me when, as L. and I watched Cleo in her playroom the other evening, Satie's meditative Gymnopedies came on the radio. I've written about them before, and I still enjoyed them, but they now sounded slightly different: less spartan, and a bit more lush. In fact, they were slightly different: the recording was a new one to me. But the real point is that, regardless of who might have been playing them, they likely would have struck me as different.

Cleo still remembers how to climb up to the top of the Cold Spring playground tower; she still remembers where the Green Space is. But I, and I assume she, now also see those familiar spaces in a new light.

Many happy returns

Like the large, two-storied plane that carried us from London to Baltimore, we've been slowly circling, encountering occasional turbulence, and preparing for landing for a little while now. The first few days back were challenging for rather mundane reasons: Cleo, still on Africa time, awoke repeatedly in the darkest, quietest hours of the night. (It is a surreal, but not entirely awful, sensation to down one's second coffee of the day at 3 a.m.). Thursday then proved especially challenging: little girl awake at 1:40; my PC's hard drive crashed, irreparably, at 7; Cleo diagnosed with her second ear infection at 9. Since then, though, it's been relatively smooth sailing, as we wheel our family towards the docking gate that is normalcy, and a return to work.

In all of this, however, there have been a number of moments of beauty. I'll focus on one neat coincidence that occurred over the span of the last 24 hours. I stole an hour today to work out at a posh boutique gym in Mount Vernon: surrounded by wood paneling and sleek squat racks, I was surprised and delighted to find the club's stereo system locked on to a satellite station that played only 1990s rock and rap. Motley Crue? In the house. And so, too, with LL Cool J, and Metallica, and Alanis Morissette, and... well, I felt like I was a third-year grad student. I'm not saying that the era was a pinnacle in the history of music. But it damn well may have been my pinnacle - especially given the anemic amounts I managed to lift today.

At least in one sense. Coincidentally, we got a lovely package yesterday from my parents; in it were, among other things, some of the very books that I owned as a child. And a note, stuck to the worn copy of Helen Piers' The Mouse Book: "Kerr, I think this was the first book you ever read by yourself, on a train trip at the age of 4." A relic! And a sight easier than the Arabic text on Ibn Batuta that was next on my reading list. So Cleo and I sat down, and followed Mouse's efforts in finding a house, a friend, and some food.

Back in the 90s; back in 1975. We're told to remember to live in the moment, when possible. But when the moment is 4:50 (today's reveille), living with at least one foot in the past can be pleasant, as well.

Aquarium soundtracks

Today Cleo, L.'s parents (visiting us in South Africa for 12 days) and I went to see the Two Oceans aquarium, which has become one of my favorite child-friendly spots in Kaapstad. Or, rather, three of us went to see the aquarium - for Cleo fell asleep minutes before we entered, and snoozed in her stroller for more than an hour as her grandparents looked about and I sat vigil, near the excellent two-story glass wall that fronts the predators exhibit.

That quiet hour was deeply pleasant, as it gave me a chance to look closely at several animals whose forms I'd previously noted in passing, but had never studied with any real patience. The whispering wings of the rays; the graceful arc of underbelliers of mid-sized fish; the dull, remote eyes of the ragged-toothed sharks. At the same time, I also had a chance to observe the ebb and flow of the museum space itself: the lull between groups and the delighted shrieks - joy in terror viewed from safety - of children gaining their first glimpse of the sharks.

And underneath that varied hubbub, a further soundtrack: a slow, ethereal, regal, and spectral composition played over the speakers, as an accompaniment to the organic circles described by the fish as they swam. That rang a bell, for the Baltimore aquarium also plays such music - New Age music, at root - in their largest display space. And you can see why, rather easily: it fits the bouyant, stately rises and falls of the school about you. Moreover, it seems to suit toddlers as they sleep: Cleo snored on, the music around her.

Just before she awoke, though, we happened to see something completely unexpected. One of the sharks - who are fed once a week, and are allegedly sated for the other six days - suddenly turned abruptly on axis and crashed its jaws about a 30-inch Cape Yellowtail. In less than a second, the back third of the fish was simply gone, and the Yellowtail began to sink, even as it tried - still momentarily alive - to swim, to the bottom of the tank. In vain: soon the shark had reappeared, and it took the rest of the fish in its mouth, slowly swallowing it while still circling the tank, to the delight of a gaggle of preteen boys.

What soundtrack could accommodate both the peace that preceded, and the violence that had occurred? Whatever it would be, I can't recommend it - if only because I sense that it certainly would have woken up the one spectator in the room who slept through the whole affair.

Personal preferences

When is it proper, or possible, to speak of the emergence of a child's aesthetic sense? Do young children perceive beauty, in a meaningful way? Do they really prefer this to that, on a level that differs from mere whim, or instinct, or random choice?

Cleo, well into her third year, sometimes spends discernible effort in arranging items in rather neat ways. A spoon will be placed virtually parallel to a yogurt container; her monkey George nudged and jostled until he sits upright. But only sometimes: it's easy to find examples, as well, in which she seems clearly content with chaos, with disorder, with canted angles.

Do her choices in clothing reveal much? Again, not really. We often hold up a couple of possible outfits, allowing her a degree of input. And she seems, at first blush, to be decisive: Cleo wear flower pajamas, or wear red heart shirt. But more often than not such courses of action seem driven more by rote routine rather than taste; today's outfit is chosen because she wore it two days ago, and so on.

This morning, though, a hint of something more personal, more meaningful. In the car, before heading to campus, Cleo asked me to turn on the radio, for some music. I did, and we heard a d.j. on the classical station giving the news, in a restrained voice. Cleo let a few moments pass, and then said Better music. Um, okay, and I showed her how to operate the tuning buttons. We soon hit upon a bouncy, lively pop song. She listened, and then, again, lowered the boom: too loud. Want quiet music. And so again up the range of frequencies, until we found the classical station once more, now playing a meditative piano piece. Is this okay, Cleo? Yes, she assented. And we rode to school, accompanied by music that was both quiet and better.

Speech patterns

Feeling momentarily cultured, I dropped a few lines of opera in a recent post, forgetting that 18th-century Italian isn't necessarily a lingua franca. One reader, bless her heart, asked for a translation, and I was happy to oblige - and will try to be more democratic in the future. While we're on the subject of difficulties in understanding sung Italian, though, let's push at least one step further. It's worth noting that one of the complexities in comprehending spoken Italian is the relatively common use of contractions - that is, of dropped letters. Because Italian words often begin and end in vowels, one's often faced with consecutive vowels, and since Italian, like many languages, tends to simplify or collapse adjacent combinations of vowels, one ends up with a number of spots in which one vowel is simply omitted, for reasons of fluidity and ease.

Take, for instance, a portion of Cherubino's aria in Act 1, Scene 6 of Le Nozze di Figaro. He sings of love, and wants to say that he speaks of it when he is awake, and asleep. Parlo, he intends to claim, di amore vegliando. But that i-a combination in the middle is a touch awkward, and so it's simplified, or contracted, and becomes d'amore; at the same time, the final -e of amore is also undesirable, in the rhythmic structure of the song, and so it's merely dropped. And the rest of the sentence features further examples of the same idea:

Parlo d'amor vegliando,
parlo d'amor sogliando,
all'acque, all'ombre, ai monti...

But don't blame the Italians. After all, we do it, too. Note the similar contraction, in the English translation:

I speak of love when I'm awake,
I speak of it in my dreams,
to the stream, the shadows, the mountains.

I am becomes I'm.

Cleo's learning to contract, too, in a halting, lurching fashion; she'll sometimes announce that "That's Cleo's." But she also contracts in less conventional ways, as well, for apparent reasons of ease. For instance, it's not too difficult to voice words that begin with s and a vowel, and Cleo often speaks easily of our sofa, or crying babies who appear to be sad. But an opening s that is followed by a consonant is trickier, and Cleo often deals with that combination by simply dropping the s-. So stool is tool, and sometimes she asks to tand on that tool. Point to her belly, and she'll identify her tomach.

Such a tendency can make Cleo-speak a little opaque to the outsider's ear. But, viewed in the right context, it has an impeccable logic of its own. After all, it's the same logic that's governed singers playing the role of Cherubino, for centuries.

Mille e tre

Generally, the past couple of weeks have been a relatively smooth sea, as far as parenting is concerned (and a downright miracle, as far as a certain baseball team is concerned). Cleo now approaches school with something like neutral acceptance, she's willing to try out new foods (most recently, cashews and figs), and she goes to bed quite punctually, between 7:15 and 7:30. She's pleasant most of the time, she actually says please on her own relatively often, and her recent abiding interest in Tibor Gergely's Busy Day, Busy People approaches the attitude of a Talmudic scholar. Really, the only major hiccup involves the start of the day, because lately she's taken to rising between 5 and 5:30, and happily announcing that she's ready to watch the latest installment of Ruby and Max, her cartoon peers.

So, feeling exhausted, we had to draw a line. Yesterday I explained to her, several times, that there would be no morning screening today. And when, sure enough, she rose and began padding about the house at 5:03 a.m., I quietly reviewed the plan with her, and told her I was going back to bed. Given her affection for Ruby, I'd say that she handled that news well, and she actually played quietly by herself for 30 minutes. But by 5:40, she wanted her oatmeal, and I was up, again, with the girl and a few fishermen, to our south.

I'm a morning person by nature, and I know that the pre-dawn black has its beauty. But, still, the idea of blowing balloons and studying Gergely's interpretation of a restaurant before six in the morning can strike even an early riser as ridiculous. And, today, for whatever reason, that sentiment took the form of some of the few lines of opera that I know. "Notte e giorno faticar," I mumbled to myself as I made my coffee. "E non voglio piu servir."

But they also serve, as Milton taught us, who stand and wait, and there I was, waiting on Cleo's warming milk, and then working her into the day's first new diaper. Happily, though, Mozart came through again. There's a point, early in Don Giovanni, where the titular Lothario's servant is commenting on his master's sexual prowess by enumerating his conquests. "In Italia," sings Leporello, "seicento e quaranta; 'n Alemagna duecento e trentuna; cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna; ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre."

Mille e tre. And, still dazed from the early wake-up call, I imagined a father's version of the same boast - involving changed diapers, rather than loved beauties. Can you sing with me? In North Carolina at least twenty-five; in New York a handful or two; a hundred in Cape Town, in West Virginia several score; but in Baltimore, already a thousand and three.

A thousand and three. And soon to become 1,004.

Love and parked cars

Friday morning in Cape Town and the sun's shining brightly, and so it's easy to feel ambitious - and I feel like trying, a bit improbably, a bit of concurrent socioeconomic and literary analysis. Sounds daunting, I know, but I promise it won't be very high-falutin' at all. Or, if it does veer too much towards the serious, you can simply return your eyes to the less abstract photo of Cleo at the Worcester train station, above.

One of the more interesting, and revealing, aspects of Cape Town's geography is the virtually ubiquitous presence of parking lot attendants. Yes, a few parking spaces downtown are governed by posted rates, but the vast majority of lots and busy streetside spots in the city are manned, for much of the day, by men who purport to keep an eye on your car, in the hopes that you'll pay them a few coins when you leave the spot. Sometimes they wear orange vests, and sometimes not; sometimes they seem actively vigilant, and sometimes they loll under a tree until a driver returns to his car. They're rarely hired, as I understand it, by the local businesses, but they are generally tolerated - partly because, as everyone knows, they're among the millions of poor and unemployed who are still, arguably, a result of decades of apartheid. And so, over several years, an informal wage scale has evolved: as an employee of the Tokay library told me, when I asked about the man in their lot, a tip of 2-5 rand (30-75 cents) is common.

But not inevitable. Since Cleo and I spend a good deal of time at popular parks, we've seen our share of parking lot attendants. And since Cleo still likes, occasionally, to stand in the front seat and to pretend to drive, I've had a chance to study, informally, Capetonians' responses. I'd say that about half of all drivers give something, but generally only when approached: few actually offer money, unsolicited, to the men. Many refuse altogether, in a sternly passive manner: eyes straight ahead, and windows rolled up, they simply ignore the claims of the attendants. And a rare few even chide, or chastise, the attendants: in Worcester, I watched a man yell heatedly at the attendant, who slowly retreated, with the patience of one who's seen it before.

Occasionally, the scene can be rather heart-wrenching: a few days ago, near Rockland Park, I watched one of the attendants, clearly famished, miss a departing driver as he poked through trash of an adjacent pizzeria. Coins or food? How to choose? But even had he approached that driver, he might well have gotten nothing: four consecutive drivers, in fact, pulled away without responding to his gestures and pleas.

That's their choice, of course, as things stand. But the choice is given a certain sharpness, due to the fact that most of those drivers had just spent, in the adjacent cafe, at least 20 rand on coffee and snacks. Indeed, Cleo and I had just downed, after playing, an 18-rand fig smoothie. How can one be so generous, one moment, to one's healthy child, and so coldly frugal, the next moment, to a stranger clearly in need?

Perhaps the most concrete answer I know to such a query is the sociobiological one - the sort forwarded by Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene. When we're altruistic, we tend to give to kin, or to those genetically similar to ourselves. By sharing smoothies with our kids, we extend our own genes' life; when we give to strangers, we do a good deed in the abstract, but do nothing to further our own immortality.

Or do we? Coincidentally, in the next 24 hours I came across two very different discussions of love, and both suggested, in their own way, that Dawkins' view is hardly the only one. So meet Creina Alcock, a white woman who moved with her husband to rural, black Msinga in the 1970s, and gave the remainder of her life to the local community, and land - only to lose her husband to cancer, to watch their cooperative gradually erode, against a backdrop of local warfare, and to fall victim to a number of personal robberies - some by an orphan she had informally adopted. "If you're really going to live in Africa," she told Rian Malan in the 1980s, " you have to be able to look at it and say, This is the way of love, down this road: Look at it hard. This is where it is going to lead you. I think you will know," she concluded, "what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat." Smoothies, in short, are easy stuff; giving until one can give no more, in the knowledge that the problem will always overwhelm one's own resources: well, that's something else entirely.

And, second, in Njabulo Ndebele's 2003 novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, a female Sowetan, abandoned by her politicized husband, quotes, rather bitterly, this maxim: "Selflessness is the essential condition of love." She mocks the idea, gently, noting that it could work as a lyric in a pop song, but she's also attracted to it. What else can she do, in the long absence of her untrue husband? Her notion of self has dissolved - and yet she still loves.

All right, then. I'm not sure how to add all of this up, but it might go something like this: when we buy snacks for our children, after an hour on the playground, we do so lovingly, but not entirely unselfishly. When we give to parking lot attendants whom we may never see again, however, we move into some other realm of generosity - and one that may qualify, too, as love. So, then: sociobiology and pop song - two models of kindness that can be enacted on a single city block.