The reasons why

Ah, Cleo: never imagine, please, that the sustained moments of online silence correspond to moments of distance between us. Instead, as I think I've mentioned before, the opposite is often true: it's those days that are full of shared play and exploration that offer the least in terms of time for blogging. One can only tweet about the revolution when one isn't storming the king's barricades, right?

And, happily, the past week has been richly full of family activities. You have a wonderful mom, and a generous set of scattered supporters, and their love for you was manifest, for instance, in your school's Halloween parade on Friday, where you marched into public with your fellow Bluebirds in your handsome black spider outfit. Sure, you broke into tears when you saw me, in a storm of confusion - Is school over now? Why would Daddy be here in the late morning? - but your willingness to keep walking, nonetheless, had us full of pride.

So, too, did the generous, inclusive, and energetic spirit that you brought to our late Saturday afternoon play date with Juni. While we chatted - at length! - with her parents, and made bowls of chili on a snowy night, you shared your paints with your friend, and hugged her, and let her sit with you for a semi-private screening of Blue's Clues. So, no, I wasn't blogging - but the very reason for that is that I was catching up with friends, as you hosted a friend of your own.

Perhaps my favorite memory of the past week, though, is from this morning: you choosing a CD of Billboard hits from 1982, extending it to Mommy - and, then, when the slick melodies wound about our dining room, breaking into your personal dance style. Arms up, like chicken wings, and little torso bending forward and back, you were a vision of happy kinetic energy. I'd have to be a fool to ignore such a scene, and to spend the time blogging, instead.

And in fact, now that you're in school, and my students' essays are almost graded, and I have a little time for blogging, I wish that you were right here next to me, dancing in that crazy mode.

And once more

Baa-baa, black sheep,

Cleo has a new favorite song.

Have you any wool?

She first heard it at the library, when she was tiny, during story time.

Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.

Recently, though it's resurfaced, as it's sung at her nursery school. And on car rides through town, Cleo likes to unleash a version of it, unaccompanied.

One for my master, one for my game.

Does she get the words exactly right? Well, no. But does that really matter?

Baa-baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

Hard to think so. At least, it certainly doesn't diminish her enthusiasm. Another round, perhaps?

Endless melodies

Frequently, in composing a blog devoted to music and fatherhood, I've been forced to seek out rough comparisons between the two subjects: to spin thin parallels, or faintly gesture toward common ground. Certain moments, however, bring full overlaps between the two, and in fact yesterday was characterized by a number of those moments. For some reason, Cleo was simply shot through with music on October 19.

As she often does, she spent some of the drive to school singing her ABCs; over the past month, her version of the song has gone from a plaintive recitation characterized by a droning rhythm that called to mind chants uttered in the slave galleys of Roman warships to a relatively bright and rapid celebration of the letters. Part of the reason, of course, is due to her growing sense of familiarity with the letters; indeed, we spent a few minutes after school noting familiar forms in the text of a historical marker at the Mount Royal train station. But surely the change is also due in part to her evolving realization that there are, in fact, different types of music. On the way home from school, she curtly announced, "I want to hear Motown and then jazz" - in other words, her two favorite CDs.

Happy to oblige, Cleo: and happy to see that Motown can still put you in a good mood. In fact, the good mood lasted the entire evening; after an episode of Blues Clues, we all decamped to the play room, where Cleo, after issuing pretend shots as a pretend doctor and after forming a human wicket through which we could roll balls, decided to issue musical instruments. L. got a washtub and a drumstick; I got the colorful xylophone; Cleo took the little tom tom for herself. And damn if we didn't put on a family concert for the next 10 minutes. Overlapping rhythms, simple melodies, and some big smiles: granted, we weren't as tight as the Jackson Five, but we did have some fun.

And then it was time for bed, which meant a new diaper, a round of pajamas for Cleo and her growing stable of stuffed monkeys, a reading of a Curious George story... and the nighttime CD that's played at bedtime for more than a year now. With the soft, swirling notes of a lullaby in the air, then, I said night, night, and closed her door - just a little bit, as per her instructions, at 8:31.

Degrees of recall

In 1779, Mozart traveled, as a young 20-something, with to Rome. During Holy Week, his father Leopold took him to the Sistine Chapel, to hear Gregorio Allegri's well-known Miserere. A relatively complex choral work for nine voices, the Miserere was considered to be the sacred property of the Vatican, and copying it was strictly forbidden; conventional transcriptions were supposedly punishable with excommunication.

Mozart heard it performed once, and then returned to his room, where he wrote down, from memory, the entire piece.

Instead of provoking the fury of the Church, though, Mozart's feat fanned broad interest in his abilities. In fact, he was allowed to return to the Chapel several days later; after this visit, he corrected a few minor mistakes in his original transcription, and the score of the Miserere was a secret no longer.

We don't spend much time - in fact, I can't remember spending any time - wondering if Cleo is a little Mozart. It seems pretty clear, though, that recalling, in the sense of retelling, any rather complicated event still lies beyond her powers. Often, when I pick her up from nursery school, I ask her what the day had brought. Generally, there's a brief report on any scrapes she may have accrued in the playground - "I got an ow-ee on my knee" - and sometimes there are big, broad summaries: "I played." And yet, when we talk to the teachers, or receive the week-end e-mails from the school, it's clear that she and the other kids are leading relatively rich and varied lives during the day. Just two days ago, in fact, there was apparently a rather emotional farewell to Yertle the Turtle, who had lived in an aquarium in the Bluebirds' room for months, before giving up the ghost over the weekend.

But if Cleo is unable to tell us about such episodes, I'm not convinced that she doesn't - and that all of the kids in her room - don't, in fact, remember them. The memory of a toddler is clearly dynamic, and weirdly selective. But it's clearly potent, as well: a fact that's made clear as she and I move through Baltimore on a daily basis. Yesterday, she pointed to the apartment in which her friend Quentin used to live - until June, when he moved to Texas - and announced that it was his. And as we waited for L., on the steps of her building, Cleo suggested that we play a game that we'd last tried, on the same steps, a few weeks ago.

So: so far, no transcribed Miserere. But, still: signs that the past is always with us, in forms that are almost as beautiful as divine music.

Vicarious travel

On Saturday I spent much of the day in the Hopkins library, while L. took Cleo, a friend, and the friend's toddler to a sprawling orchard, where they went on a couple of hay rides, raced toy boats, and picked out Halloween pumpkins. When we met up at 4, they were clearly buoyed by a day in the fall sun, and L. spoke happily of live music and a petting zoo. Having spent my own time simply reading, I struggled slightly to imagine the scene - until L. revealed a camera full of autumnal pictures, and until I saw the back seat, littered with the small stickers with which the girls had played. The back seat was the tonal opposite of a stock crime scene: instead of a grim consequence of violence, it was the aftermath of an enjoyable ride in the car, and I felt almost as though I could live vicariously through the residues of little girls' decisions.

For some reason - or perhaps for an obvious reason: I haven't been very far afield of late - all sorts of vicarious travel have appealed to me over the past week. Last night, I finished Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, and enjoyed picturing the small Cairene cafe around which the novel swirls. On Saturday evening, I made a big batch of foul, a common Middle Eastern bean soup, in an attempt to evoke the aura of an Aleppo restaurant where I first tried it. Yesterday, while a colleague described his upcoming trip to Buenos Aires and Rio, I imagined the drama of flying into seaside Brazil. And the Sunday Times travel section, with pictures of a Patagonian ice bar? Sure: let's go.

But perhaps the simplest example, in this vein, involves our morning commute. These days, the routine is rather simple: drive the lovely, tree-lined avenues of Roland Park, glide along the park-like University Drive, and drop L. at Hopkins; then merge with the sclerotic rush-hour traffic, and drive southwest, through gritty Remington, to Cleo's nursery school; walk to my own campus. It's an interesting, varied drive, and we certainly can't complain about its length: at around 20 minutes total, it's a fraction of many local commutes. Still, though, it can use the occasional augmentation. And so, when I recently bought a batch of classic recordings of the Muslim call to prayer and pushed them into the car's CD drive at 8:05 on a recent morning, the result was surprisingly stirring. Suddenly we were not merely waiting for a green light; it was as though we were also in Fez, or Medina, or Mosul. The muezzin's voice wrapped around us, suggesting a pace very different from the staccato motion of the traffic, and even as we drove to our familiar workplaces and schools, we seemed to already have arrived somewhere else quite different.

Special offer!

As you may have guessed, from the trickle of recent posts, the sledding's been - well, not exactly difficult, but certainly busy, in recent weeks. A small mountain of papers to be graded, a happy weekend with my brother's family, a birthday party for one of Cleo's fellow Bluebirds, a bit of yard maintenance, research for a talk at February's CAA conference... rather rare, it seems, are the unplanned 30-minute blocks that can result in blog entries.

But now the grading's all done, and the meditative quiet of Fall Break has arrived, I've got 65 pages of notes toward the talk, and my fantasy football team has elbowed its way into a tie for first - and so it's time to get back, if only briefly, to the blog. So here, dear readers, is my offer to you: as a means of trying to reward or win back your steady readership, I'll post at least an image of Cleo each morning of this workweek. Obscure musical references and openly strained analogies may, in some cases, accompany the images. But you can simply ignore those, if you'd rather simply know what the girl looks like.

Above, that's Cleo with her friend Susanna at the B&O Railroad Museum.

Stepping out, and finding

I recently bought a copy of a series of songs - some of them solos, and some duets - by Harry Belafonte and the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri. Apparently, Belafonte had just finished a show in Athens, and decided to hit the town, late at night: as chance had it, he and his small entourage wandered into a club where Mouskori was singing. Struck (as were many, at the time) by her honeyed voice, he later pursued the possibility of a joint project, and the result was this ten-song compilation, which features a few lively traditional Greek standards, and a haunting, lilting song called The Baby Snake.

How many of life's more potent moments come from such chance meetings, and such impromptu decisions! And how much beauty lies, it seems, at hand, just down an alleyway. Such ideas have been on my mind of late, as Cleo and I have been enjoying the lovely fall afternoons after school by simply wandering the streets of Bolton Hill, and seeing what we can discover. Occasionally, we fall into brief conversations with students of mine, or with other local residents. Once, we spent a half hour using sticks as improvised rakes, to brush fallen leaves into a pile that reached Cleo's little knees. And then, too, there are the acorns: fallen jewels scattered along our path, which beg to be rolled into storm drains, or scraped on a sidewalk, or thrown up in the air and cracked.

We have yet, I'll admit, to produce anything in our meanderings that rivals The Baby Snake in its pure grace. But the irregular courses of broken acorn shells on Mosher and Brevard Streets are, rather like the recordings of Belafonte and Mouskori, residues of happy moments, of chance encounters, of a city explored.

Halloween soundtrack

On Tuesday, bellies full of soup on a rainy late afternoon, L. and I led Cleo into the local Party City, to show given her an idea of what Halloween is all about. She's read about it, of course - in one of Cleo's books, Maisy throws a costume party; in another Curious George causes a ruckus when he mistakenly dresses like a ghost. And, in fact, Cleo's already been in full costume, twice, due to the generosity and handicraft of a certain Florida-based well-wisher. But, still: she's two now, and two-year-olds tend to want direct, concrete things before them, rather than memories or sketches.

So, Cleo, meet aisles 7 and 8. We spent more than half an hour trying on silly masks and plastic props. L., for a few minutes, was a Venetian carnival-goer; moments later, she was Papa Smurf. And soon Cleo was in the spirit, as well; in fact, she doubled down on the spirit, taking a large foam beer stein hat off of the shelf, and donning it at a rakish angle, to our delight. Even I, in an oh-so-serious water buffalo headdress, had to smile.

In that sense, then, Party City easily delivered. But it also surprised me, with a certain level of intensity for which I wasn't prepared, as a parent. Next to the entrance was a fully life-sized, animated Freddy Krueger in a cage; equipped with a motion sensor, he turned to face anyone who entered, and delivered gruesome bon mots (which justified, to an extent, his $250 price tag). Cleo was rapt. A moving man, in a cage? She wondered what was going on, even as I wondered how, exactly, to explain. I mean, it's a big leap from the polite bunny world of Ruby and Max to the blood-spattered realm of Nightmare on Elm Street, and I wasn't quite ready to make that jump.

But then we heard the music. As in the film upon which the installation was based, children began to chant a twisted version of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Perhaps, if you were a teen in the 1980s, you'll remember:

One, two, Freddy's coming for you.

Three, four, better lock your door.

And so on. I could just see Cleo, who rolls through the alphabet song a few times a day, and who's got her numbers down pat, perking her ears. And so we whisked her away, to an aisle stocked with bright knick-knacks, before she heard the final verse (Nine, ten, never sleep again). A few minutes, later, though, I began to wonder: why are children's songs so darned scary? A week earlier, I'd shown my freshmen the first shot of Halloween, which is preceded by a ditty chanted by a choir of children: Black cats and goblins and broomsticks and ghosts... And, too, a few days before that, I'd been remembering Omar's whistled refrain in The Wire: while on the hunt on the streets of Baltimore, he'd often issue a bedeviling version of The Farmer in the Dell.

So, readers, I'll ask you: why the conjunction between children's songs and terror? Is it a simple inversion of our associations of the tunes with innocence? Do the songs recall, on some level, the intense nighttime fears that we felt at that age?

You have until October 31 to answer.