Gloom and doom - and light

Looking back, it now seems somehow fitting that my copy of Nirvana's Nevermind - an impulse buy, on Amazon, meant to take me back to September 24, 1991, when the seminal album was first released - arrived in our mailbox this past Monday. On the first day, that is, of a week that was characterized by a litany of tragic details and morose happenings. In a sense, there couldn't have been a more fitting soundtrack than the plaintive, restless sounds of Nirvana: sounds now all the heavier, due to the band's frontman's eventual suicide.

Early in the week, L. and I awoke at about 2:3o in the morning to the screams of a woman, a few hundred feet from our house. I called 911, and the sounds soon receded, but I was up until at least 4:00 merely wondering what had happened to her. Several days later, Cleo and I returned home from a morning of play to find a neighbor's house boxed in by police cars, ambulances, and a fire truck - the institutional response, apparently, to a drug overdose. Shortly after that, while crossing a city street, I peered into the windshield of a car stopped at the light, and saw a woman weeping, while speaking into a phone and wiping her eyes. And today, as I walked to get Cleo at school, I passed by a father who pushed, in a stroller, a tiny boy with an oxygen tube running under his nose.

Everywhere, then, it seemed a fallen world. Which is why I was so happy to come upon Cleo, as she and the Bluebirds were walking back from their playground to their school, singing to herself while her classmates merely trundled along. From a distance, I couldn't quite make out what she was chanting, and then, suddenly, the sounds came into focus: next time won't you sing with me.

Yes, yes I will. In fact, given the overcast aspect of this past week, I'd be absolutely delighted to.

Psychosomatics

Here is how Kurt Vonnegut, jr. describes a combo singing 'That Old Gang of Mine' at a party on page 148 of Slaughterhouse Five: "the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords - chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again." And here, in turn, is how Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, experiences the music: "Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque..."

Fortunately, our reactions to music aren't always quite that powerful. But, nonetheless, you can probably relate, on some level - for, as we're coming to understand more and more fully, our reactions to art are often visceral, or embodied. In fact, so too are our responses to the world in general: think of the acidic taste of fear, or the hint of iron in the throat that can accompany raw lust, or the queasy weightless tingling spurred by acrophobia.

If that's familiar ground for us, though, I wonder if it's also familiar to my toddler-in-residence. Certainly, Cleo, like most 2-year-olds, is deeply attentive to her body, constantly noting boo-boos, frequently digging for nuggets in her nostrils, and practicing tiny leaps, and dance steps. And, too, she can react vigorously, and physically, when presented with certain options; earlier today, a proffered cucumber prompted a hyperbolic shake of the head. But what does such a shake mean, exactly? I'm not sure, but my sense is that Cleo's disgusted by the thought more than by the actual taste, or its recollection. After all, she actually downed a healthy bite of the cucumber just a few minutes later. In other words, the shake of the head isn't psychosomatic as much as it is emphatic, or, if you want, expressive. It's a choice, more than a reaction.

So, sure, Cleo can make her face every bit as grotesque as Billy Pilgrim - and does, sometimes. But the underlying mechanism, I think, is different. Billy ultimately realizes that his extreme feelings are generated by a repressed war memory. Cleo, of course, has no war memories - and, similarly, has little in the way of comparative experience. She simply likes or doesn't like, while those of us who have been around a bit longer like and dislike less directly: we do it, you might say, through the lenses of history, and through the lenses of our bodies, which we've come to know so well. A madeleine, to Proust, is a door to a world of memories; a cucumber, to a toddler, is a chance to practice autonomy, or a temporary alternative to plunging finger, again, into nose.

Recognition

In his 1881 book The Violin and its Music, George Hart tells an interesting story about Mozart. Apparently, the composer was in Berlin in 1788, and he decided to attend a performance of his own 'Die Entfuhrung aud dem Serail.' Seating himself near the orchestra, he listened, more and more despondently, as the second violins played D sharp, instead of the natural D specified in his score. Finally unable to remain silent, Mozart began to mutter to himself, and then burst out: "Confound it! do take D." The musicians, hearing the comment, glanced into the audience, and were startled to recognize the composer himself.

At the Green Space (a local playground) yesterday, I was witness to a similarly jarring - if less historically significant - moment of recognition. I was pushing Cleo in her favorite blue swing, and a mom next to me pushed her own 3-year-old in the adjacent black swing. The mom looked familiar to me, and I to her, and we fell to chatting, trying to figure out exactly why we knew each other. From work? No, that wasn't it. From previous play sessions at the playground? Well, that struck us as possible - until, suddenly, her daughter pointed to Cleo and said, clearly, "She's a bluebird."

Well, yes, indeed. Cleo's nursery divides the kids into flocks, by age, and she is indeed a bluebird, like all of the 2-year-olds. And the observant Charlotte, it turned out, is a yellowbird - a member of the next class up. So now we knew how we knew each other. But Charlotte wasn't done - for, she realized, Cleo wasn't holding a certain stuffed monkey, who accompanies her to school every day. "She has George," added Charlotte confidently. Yes, she does, I responded. She brings him to school every day. And Charlotte soon confessed, in turn, to having a favorite blanket.

A pointed comment about the performance; a coincidental moment on the swings: it's surprising what can spark a recognition. Even if a telltale monkey is missing.

Into voices

For the past ten days now, I've been carrying about, in my satchel, an increasingly worn copy of the September 11 New York Times Sunday Review section, folded to page 2. Was that perhaps, you ask, a particularly affecting piece on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks? Well, not exactly. Rather, I keep looking at a brief interview with the French shoe designer Christian Louboutin - and admiring the clear, bright simplicity with which he speaks of his tastes.

I was particularly struck by his description of what he's been listening to, of late. "I listen to my stomach," he begins, in jest. "It tells me when I am starving." Well, okay: at least he's not overly serious. But then, lest he seem merely trivial, Louboutin then quickly offers a crisp answer to the interviewer's query. "I like Adele, Mika, Natacha Atlas, and a beautiful old record, 'An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskori." An interesting list, I thought: I've long enjoyed Atlas' work, and it's been hard to avoid Adele's bluesy anthems in the Hopkins weight room over the last month. So I read on, and came to this: "I am very much into voices. I would say I'm a fan of voices, not of sound. I'm a fan of singers, not of bands."

For some reason, the confident directness with which he could articulate his tastes (and rule out entire fields of musical endeavor!) appealed to me. No hemming and hawing here: the man knows, or seems to think he knows, what he likes. And while I like bands, as well as singers, his list was intriguing enough to move me, today, to order the Belafonte album.

Why only today? Well, because it's been tough to find much free time of late - precisely because there's an emergent voice in our house, too. Cleo - or Jo, as she now prefers to be known - has been talking enthusiastically, and increasingly ambitiously, of late. The past tense? She's got it. The future's harder, but she occasionally nails it, too. She'll say "I need some oatmeal," and then, having eaten it, announce, "I must go." She asks to go to particular playgrounds, questions the appeal of others, and tells her pet monkey to smile, for the camera.

For the first time, then, we can have reasonable, extended conversations with our daughter, and plumbing the depths of her mind - her likes, and her pains - is fascinating. Fascinating enough, in fact, that I wind up carrying fragments of newspapers about, as yellowing reminders, and take more than a week to press purchase, and order an album full of allegedly promising voices.

The sounds of missing you

Cleo, we've occasionally been further apart, I guess, than we were this weekend; once I was in Milwaukee, while you were snowbound in Baltimore, and once you were jetsetting in Chicago while I remained at home. But this past weekend, as you smelled roses in Care-line-a, as you call it, I missed you more than I remember having done before. And so, in the absence of your tiny voice, and padding morning feet, and occasional shrieks, I tried to listen a little closer, every now and then, to the world around me. Here is what I heard: the thrum of dragonflies, in a cloud in West Virginia. The thin wheedle of a chain saw engine after it had been turned off, but still spun. The burble of shoppers strolling on the sidewalks of an outlet mall; the creak of sagged planks in our house. And then, on Saturday evening, your voice, when I called your mother, and in a near squeak of a voice (perhaps prompted by mommy, perhaps not), I love you, daddy.

I was reminded of Basho's haiku:

The old pond.

A frog leapt -

The sound of the water!

Staid stillness is shattered, and the sudden noise a revelation.

Just Motown

Every now and then, while driving Cleo about town, I manage to slip in a few minutes of ESPN Radio. Maybe I hear a slice of the kerfuffle surrounding Miami football, or a fraction of a heated analysis of Reggie Bush's prospects for the coming year. Usually, though, before I manage to get any rounded picture of the issue being debated, a small but insistent voice briskly cuts through the prattling announcers, saying, play music. And who, really, can object? Someday, I assume, Cleo may learn the appeal of a good debate about Yankees and the BoSox, but, sure, for the most part we have been trying to nudge her towards more cultured sounds.

In that vein, we've relied rather heavily on the sage advice of more experienced parents - such as Cleo's aunt, who steered us towards the nifty compilation CD Jazz for Kids. Featuring, as you may recall from an earlier post, a stirring version of Old MacDonald, that was a huge hit, but it's recently been eclipsed by a companion CD from the same warehouse. That'd be Motown for Kids, featuring seminal works by Stevie Wonder, the Jackson Five and others - and offering enough musical energy to meet your average toddler at least halfway. Every now and then, the sheer intensity of the music can feel slightly inappropriate: I prefer, for instance, to take my commute a touch slowly, without Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in the background. For the most part, though, the compilation's a winner, and can even open onto further discussion. When The Marvelettes plead with Mr. Postman, for instance, it's a chance to explain to Cleo exactly why mail used to be so important. And why exactly ain't, I imagine Cleo wondering, as Marvin Gaye sings, no mountain high enough? Explaining that, in words comprehensible to a toddler, is harder than you might think.

But anyway: I begin to digress. The point is, now you've got enough background to appreciate, I think, my favorite recent exchange with Cleo. While driving:

Me: Cleo, would you like some water?

Cleo: No, just Motown.