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.