Unforeseen lists

Among the many various things that you acquire, incidentally, as a new parent - car seats; changing stations; advice on how to wear a Baby Bjorn; experience in washing poop from rugs - is a set of familiar anthems. It almost happens without your realizing it: for a few months, you take your baby to reading groups, and then you buy a few DVDs for your toddler, and all of a sudden you've heard The Grand Old Duke of York fifty times, and the theme song to Max and Ruby at least twice that often. In the process, some of those tunes can acquire a sort of warm associative glow. Sure, they can get a little repetitive, but along the way you come to associate - rather like your child, I assume - them with regularity, with comfort, and with reliability. Good old Max and Ruby, you say to yourself when you hear the melody, and you smile at Max's blithe good luck and at Ruby's gentle exasperation with her little brother.

One of the tunes that's acquired, in my mind, such a patina over the past two years is a real chestnut: it's Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World, which is the final track on an album of jazz standards that two close friends gave us about a year ago. Cleo was a big fan of that C.D. during her Old MacDonald phase, but I always looked forward, instead, to Armstrong's soulful, sincere, and somehow melancholy invocation of the beauties of the world. It's a lovely song, and it had the added power, I convinced myself, of putting Cleo to sleep: more than once, she nodded off in the backseat as I sang silently along with the tune.

If you look at it closely, though, it's also a rather odd song - odd, that is, in its collection of images. Sure, the rhyme scheme dictates some of the choices, and so did the decision to emphasize color; as a result, we get - no real surprise here - green trees, red roses, and blue skies. But keep going: "I see skies of blue / clouds of white / Bright blessed days / dark sacred nights." It's a somewhat sudden leap into seriousness, isn't it? And then we move on to a rainbow, to faces, and finally to the cries of babies... The song is clearly meant to evoke what you might call the pageant of life, and to create an affirmative tone, but its means of achieving that tone feels almost random. The wonderful world is a collection of colors and people and trees and bright blessed days. And even larger car seats, as your baby grows up.

That's not to say, though, that the list of seemingly disparate elements necessarily weakens the song. In fact, I feel like arguing the opposite, after a brief conversation Cleo and I had yesterday. In the soft winter sun, on a park bench, I felt especially warmly towards my daughter, and told her that I loved her. And then, perhaps a little self-servingly, I asked her whom she loved. Might she name me?

Amy, she replied, with no hesitation - referring to a good friend of ours who was, interestingly, our first friend to see little Cleo in the hospital recovery room, and who more recently taught Cleo to blow soap bubbles through a washcloth. Good stuff, sure, but Amy hadn't spent, as I had, the vast majority of the past month with Cleo. So I pressed my luck. What else do you love? I asked. And she responded, in turn: school. School? I thought. But you resist it every single day of the week. You offer sudden alternatives - a walk; a puzzle - to driving to school. You cry when we leave you at school. But, well, okay. And what else do you love? And here she thought for a while, and then issued a third love: cheese.

Amy, school, and cheese. Skies, and days, and trees. The lists are not quite what I might have predicted. But for that they have a beauty all their own.