Underneath her clothes

One of the more modest highlights of last summer involved a late afternoon - lambent, the poets would call it - at Patterson Park, where we fulfilled a Baltimore goal of mine by seeing the locally famous All Mighty Senators live, on the slope. And, months later, what still sticks with me from that show is the tight, focused energy and controlled humor of one song, whose joyful refrain ran: "Everybody knows I've got no clothes on / Underneath my clothes."

Roughly nine months later, one of Cleo's favorite words is nuku, which implies nakedness, is usually pronounced with a cavalier delight, and which may derive (say the local etymologists) from 'no clothes.' Did the roots of Cleo's neologism first take shape, before she could talk, while she watched the All Mighty Senators?

I can't answer that. But, for the moment, I can assure you that there's rarely any ambiguity about what Cleo's wearing, underneath her clothes. Delighted that she can put on her own pants, but still unable to pull them up all the way, she proudly shows the world that she's sporting a onesie, underneath those clothes.

Ritual

At some point in the late summer of 2009 (we think, straining our viscous memories), Lisa put the above disc into a C.D. player in Cleo's bedroom, while nursing, and slowly rocked our daughter back to sleep, to a gentle, eclectic soundtrack.

Since then, Cleo's gone to sleep with these sounds in the background at least 500 times. She's heard it in Santa Monica; she's heard it in Chapel Hill. It's played in dark rooms, curtains drawn, in both Virginia and West Virginia. And, this summer, it'll likely make the trip to South Africa.

There's nothing necessarily exceptional about the songs; the artists aren't particularly well known (although Carlos Santana does make an appropriately restrained appearance), and the songs are largely in languages other than European tongues, rendering the lyrics meaningless to us and to Cleo. But mommy (and the designers behind the disc) chose well: throughout, there's a restfulness, a fullness, and a soft presence that are perfect for bedtime. And so, over time, Cleo's not the only one who's come to associate the songs with an easy slope into sleep. When I happen to be putting her to bed, and I hear the sounds lilting in the background, my eyes grow heavy, as well.

If the disc has real soporific powers, though, it's also done neat work as a ground, against which Cleo can grow. A year and a half ago, she was a little bean that we planted in the field of her crib. Now, she sometimes wakes up, stands in her crib, leans over the rail, opens the C.D. player, grabs the disc, puts it in, lowers the cover, and presses play. The first time this happened, it caught me by surprise: I entered the room at the end of a nap, and found Cleo listening to a very, very familiar soundtrack. Who'd been, I wondered, in the room? And what intruder knew about our C.D., or would care enough to play it?

But miracles, repeated often enough, become merely unusual, and then become rote. The very fact that we can press a button and hear Carlos Santana bending notes is, in a way, miraculous. So, too, is Cleo's ability to summon him. As time has passed, though, both have become merely pleasant aspects associated with a disc that forms the center of one of our oldest family rituals.

In praise of bells

Bells, I'm coming to think, deserve a slightly more vaunted place in the jumbled pantheon of musical instruments.

They seem to be assigned to, tacitly, or quietly, or thoughtlessly, a second tier: they occupy, I'd argue, a place on the same mental shelf as the mandolin, or the harmonica, or the sitar. Yes, we know they have their place, and their moments - but, really, bells? How many glockenspielers can you name?

But they deserve better, as a certain toddler is teaching me. Since we spent, a couple of weeks ago, a full half hour in a tiny, toddler-scaled wooden locomotive, ringing the stout brass bell at least 50 times, I've noticed that bells are much more common, in the fabric of our lives, than I'd imagined. And not only are are they consistently present: they almost always acquit themselves in style. The clock on the spire of Corpus Christi, across from my office at MICA? Its daily chime at 12:10 is a timeless reminder of larger concerns. Two small bells, brought back from Japan by thoughtful grandparents, sit on a counter in our West Virginia barn, awaiting the arrival of Cleo's small hands, in whose grasp they tinkle gracefully. A cow, in one of Cleo's board books, wears a bell, and the thought of its sound in the colorful meadow beyond brings no small pleasure. And then there's the light rail train, with its satisfying bell delicately heralding its bulking presence, as we take a sharp turn.

Violins, pianos, and saxophones all have their partisans, their odes. Toddlers, not yet drenched in the canon, openly admit the fascination of other sounds, as well.

Through the generations

A few months ago The Times ran a rather simple, but surprisingly touching, feature about a man named Dave Levitt - a 40-year-old music specialist who now works at a largely Jewish daytime care program for retirees, but whose experience as a klezmer player is rooted in generations of familial experience. His great-grandfather, Max Levinsky, was a shtetl violinist who emigrated from Ukraine in the 1880s; his grandfather played the trombone with a group known as the Boibriker Kapelle, and his father headed the Marty Levitt Orchestra. As a result, when Levitt plays his klezmer before a few dozen aged men and women - some Jewish, and some not - he can draw on decades of accured familial experience. Or, to put it in rather sappier terms, his playing is both informed by, and gives voice to, his ancestors.

Over the past nine eight days, we've been lucky enough to enjoy weekend visits by all four of Cleo's grandparents. And while Cleo can't claim, like Levitt, a premature talent on an instrument - today she struggled with a whistle, emitting nothing more than a tiny whisper, before giving up - it's certainly clear that she's inherited an array of other sorts of gifts from them. Some are only nascent; some have not yet manifested themselves. But in years to come, she'll be, I don't doubt, her grandparents' child, in many ways.

Of course, in at least one sense, she already is. “I was brought up," Levitt told The Times, "with an elderly audience." And that's more or less what Cleo enjoyed, as well, these past Saturdays and Sundays. Whether she was riding the light rail, or taking a bath, or merely eating her yogurt, she had a warm and appreciative audience. But don't be too cocky, Cleo. Although they love to watch you, you need to remember that you are what you are because of, and only because of, all four of them. They're not merely audience, in other words; they're your past, and in many ways, your future. You'll get better, I'm sure, at blowing that whistle. But you'll never be the first, I can tell you now, to do it well.