By self

Hey, the ol' Blogger template now allows for paragraph breaks again! So let's celebrate, with a pale ale, and a blog entry that thinks

in big, isolated blocks

about what a certain one-year-old is up to.

And that'd be pretty much anything, folks, by self. Which summarizes Cleo's recent more-or-less constant goal. Cleo climb by self; Cleo shoes by self. And if you don't let Cleo pants by self, well, you're asking for a temporary world of hurt.

But it's all good, because at 1202 Sabina we're totally into letting people putting their own shoes on. And if you want to try to feed yourself, instead of having peas delivered to your mouth by our hand, well, that's cool. So Cleo and L. and I get along, all of us putting our pants on by self.

Still, though, the phrase is a funny one. For one thing, it's sometimes uttered even as Cleo struggles with a task that in fact she can't do by herself - resulting in an amusing inverse of Wallace Shawn, in The Princess Bride, muttering Inconceivable! even as the inconceivable takes place before his eyes. By self, yelps Cleo, as she tries to magically ascend an unclimbable wall. Furthermore, for some reason, it reminds me, rhythmically, of a small fragment of a Metallica lyric - down by law - from a song called The Shortest Straw. Shirt by self; down by law: the power chords drone in my mind as I try to encourage Cleo to get dressed.

Maybe the main reason to enjoy Cleo's bluntly willful phrasing, though, is that in time, it too will surely give way to something else, leaving us, again, with nothing but a memory. Did you know, for instance, that for a while Sinatra closed his shows with My Way? And then, after months of that, he reportedly said (according to the 2003 book Sessions with Sinatra), "I'm sick and tired of singing the song. I've been trying to find something to replace it for years, and we've finally gotten it."

Gotten what? New York, New York. Or, perhaps, less amazed by the novelty of putting on one's own shoes.

The missing soundtrack

Do erratic bloggers need to offer excuses for their less punctual entries? The general consensus seems to be no, but this blogger, at least, feels compelled to give some explanation - especially when he sees that his Russian audience (137 hits, folks, from Russia in the last month) has been checking in regularly of late. So, my apologies, Moscow, and sorry, Tinkerbell Road: and I'll blame the lack of copy of late on 1950s Egyptian movie posters, on a happy jaunt to Brooklyn, on a lecture on Turkish art, and on my recent discovery of Myths Retold.

But of course, despite all of the pleasant distractions, I'm still dadding it up, as well, and you're presumably here to hear about that, rather than the mundane steps of proposing conference talks. So: on a fine recent afternoon Cleo and I headed to the now-familiar Maryland Zoo, where we spent some good time with the polar bears, the vultures, and the eerily lively crocodiles, who looked us in the eye, and pawed slowly with their prehistoric claws. But along the way the glint of the zoo's handsome merry-go-round caught Cleo's eye, and so we wound up with a handful of bright tokens and a spot on the otherwise empty platform. Your choice, Cleo: gorilla, giraffe, or horse? Horse, says the little girl, and so I hoist her up, and put the safety belt on, and then we're off: rao-u, rao-u, in Cleo's terms. And, really, it's complete fun, as the world arcs around us, with but one small caveat: oddly, there's no music. We ride, and our animals rise and fall, and the sun strikes us, and then recedes - but all we hear, along the way, is the squeaking of the machine and the chirps of a little bird who lives in the framework, and whose rest we've disturbed. So, Cleo, let's finish our ride with the help of the Internet. Here you can hear what we were missing - if, in fact, missing's the word for a ride that was nothing but enjoyable.

Giving

So one way of thinking about it – about all of it, I mean; the whole ball of wax – is that men and women work, and always have worked, with profit in the front of their minds. The efficiency of a Roman aqueduct in rural Latium; the first movement of a symphony by Beethoven; the heartful poems of Milosz: all of it done, on some level, in order to put bread on the table.

But of course there are other ways of thinking, as well. And one that appeals to me is the idea that such accomplishments can be framed, at some point, as gifts. As gifts to their users, or their readers, in the present tense – but also as gifts to future generations, or to what we often call posterity. Dante struggles, in the Ravennate court, to find a rhyme; you and I benefit from his work. And we may never know the name of the carver of the Stele of Hammurabi, but we may nonetheless thank him, in a nebulous way, for his generosity.

And then I wonder: where, in this simple scheme of alternatives, does parenting stand? Yes, sure, on the one hand we do it out of a sense of obligation, and expectation: there is a real pressure, I’d hold, that one feels on a playground peopled with other parents. And the social Darwinists would presumably claim that parents are motivated, similarly, by a set of motives honed by the cold force of natural selection.

Ultimately, though, the idea of a gift once again appeals, more fully than the alternatives. The tiny sock carried, and then gently put on the screaming baby; the soft, repeated explanations (“that’s a helicopter”) and pieces of advice. We received them all once, from our parents; now, as parents, we finally have a chance to give, in turn.

Duet

The first duet I remember hearing? Well, that'd be Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, crooning together on Islands in the Stream: a 1983 hit that was actually written - you learn something all the time on this blog, folks, all the time - by the Bee Gees.

More recently, though, it's been Jason Aldean and Kelly Clarkson in the background, as their current duet wafts rather inappropriately through the Hopkins weightroom: we struggle to look tough in our tank tops while Clarkson sighs that she wants to make love last.

In any event, though, I thought I'd try to form a modest duet of my own last night. And Cleo rose to the occasion! Sure, we're a little (or a lot) pitchy, as they always say on American Idol, and, sure, Cleo's phrasing is not quite as smooth as Sinatra's. But we had fun nonetheless:

It takes courage

Well, after having spoken with, I think, my entire readership in the past three days, I'm not sure that I promise a great deal of new material. But here's one thought, at least, that didn't come up in the weekend's many conversations: I've been struck, of late, by how much courage people exhibit on a virtually daily basis. I mean this broadly - as in, say, the courage to undergo a day of written exams that will determine one's future (congrats, Melissa!), or the courage to attend one's 50th college reunion, and to strike up conversations with people one hasn't seen in decades (and many thanks for the stuffed animal, Helen Ann!). But I also mean it in relation to my own experiences. Just this morning, L. and I were chatting with a family friend, and articulated our concerns about our upcoming 30-hour trip, with Cleo in tow, from Baltimore to Cape Town. Oh, said the friend, I can relate - and promptly told us about flying alone, with a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, to the Sudan in 1972. The courage of others, in short, puts our own ultimately modest accomplishments into perspective. As usual, though, Cleo's my most familiar lens. And she, too, has demonstrated some courage in the past week. Last Monday, on a balmy day, I took her to a playground with a tall, spiral slide. Cleo had been there before, and we'd gone down the slide together several times - but on that Monday, she made it clear that she wanted to try it on her own. And so there she stood, above my eye level, on a small perforated platform at the head of the slide. And stood, and stood - and then squatted, turned, and lay down on her belly, feet pointed towards the bottom of the slide. A few seconds later, she was at the bottom, hair frazzled with static electricity, and resolved to try it again. I forget so much, and so quickly. But if this blog is in any way a mechanism against forgetting, then let me remember, years hence, Cleo's resolve as she stood, a tiny girl, at the top of the slide high above the rest of the playground.

All I Want is Potato Chips

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life. And give a man with a kid a copy of the above CD, and you condemn him, sweetly but surely, to many months of requests for Ella Fitzgerald's hyperkinetic Old MacDonald.

At least, that's the lesson I've drawn from a seemingly well-intended New Year's gift. The CD came to us from parent friends in D.C., one of whom was unable to take, any longer, the rapid rhythm of Fitzgerald's opening track. Otherwise, though, they assured us that the CD's full of good tunes, and wondered if Cleo might like it.

Can roughly 100 requests, issued from the back of the car over the course of three months, for yai-yo be taken as conclusive evidence that, yes, she likes it? But those parents were right, too, that there are some neat tunes once you get beyond MacDonald's farm. Hearing Slim Gaillard's bizarre ode to potato chips usually makes me smile, and Lionel Hampton's 'Rag Mop' is a weirdly creative anticipation, in swing, of postmodern poetry. And I'll happily debate the Google's view that "the only song that seems out of place is Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," as it injects a serious air that is missing elsewhere." In my experience, that track forms the lovely soft ending at the end of the CD, and offers a perfect backdrop for a evening arrival at home, or for a gentle point of departure into a car nap.

Still, though, anyone who has heard of Ringu knows that sinister things can come in innocent packages. And while Ella Fitzgerald coming out of our speakers is preferable, by a long shot, to what happens in the the climax of that film, we're still reeling from the everyday consequences of the gift. It's amazing, in its own right, that a few moments of passion can lead to a lifetime of parenthood. It's only slightly less amazing that a simple gift, weighing a few ounces, can lead to a what seems like a lifetime of cute, but insistent, lobbed requests that float from the backseat to the front.

In fishing, one throws back the occasional smallfry. Is it acceptable, by the same token, to toss certain CDs from the pier every now and then?

Big shoes

Cleo's current fashion obsession involves a pair of shoes passed down to her by her stalwart playmate, Quentin - who outgrew, and then shared (with the gentle aid of his mom), the gaudy silver sneakers you see above. And while we don't think that Cleo had actively envied the shoes when they were on Quentin's feet, there's no doubt that she's in love with them now. Cleo big shoes, she earnestly intones, as she works on taking them on and off. Big shoes, she repeats, admiringly, as she clomps around the house like an astronaut on an unfamiliar, distant sphere. Her handsome brown shoes, so reliable for so many months, lie abandoned in a basket; her soft leather slippers are ignored. It's the big shoes that she wants, and no others will do.

Who knows why we choose what we do, and when? I remember with some specificity, and mild embarrassment, my first forays into classical music. At some point in high school, I bought a copy of Dvorak's New World Symphony; shortly after, I paid a few bucks for an LP version of several of Beethoven's symphonies, at a used record store in uptown Chapel Hill. I remember, too, owning a cassette of Holst's The Planets. Predicable, right? It was poppy, accessible music, for the most part, informed by coarse taste and an impressed regard for perceived reputation. But there I was, with Holst in my knockoff Walkman, and Dvorak pouring out of the speakers of our Reliant K. Big music, I might have said; certainly, it felt exciting, in its own way.

And yet we rarely realize, as amateurs, that more educated observers and more refined arbiters of taste are all around us, should be desire their advice. My dad, had I asked him, could have let me know that the titles in my small classical collection were as inevitable as the rows of Rand, Kerouac, and Kundera that line the shelves of college seniors' dorm rooms. And we'd be happy to remind Cleo that her squeaky Carolina shoes can light up a room of surprised diners much more effectively than the blocky, Buck Rodgers-ish footwear she now favors. But what does it matter? Taste and experience, at such moments, are never the issue. In discovering a new vein of material, we don't yet want to be told of its reputation. We'll learn, soon enough, that Holst is not Chopin, and that small shoes have their appeal, as well. That will come, in time. For a few moments, though, everyone simply needs a few uncritical days in their big shoes.