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.