Hint

Yesterday, as we were chatting with friends from South Africa in our hotel room and our two daughters played in the bathroom (and the hall, and the strips of space between beds...), we suddenly heard the faint click of the mirrored closet door. And Cleo, suddenly was gone.

"Why," asked her playmate, "are you in the closet?" And Cleo, in turn: "I'm hiding while I change into my clothes because that's what ballet dancers do."

That's what they do: sure enough, dancers often work as hard offstage as they do on, and the magic of any performance of The Nutcracker (which Cleo recently saw, twice) depends as much on the costumes and the changing room as on the arabesques and swelling music in the performance hall. That which is shown is the result of that which is concealed.

Thus the Christmas hint, above, for one of this blog's most faithful readers. Let her who has eyes see. And to the rest of you, a happy Christmas, full of lovely manifestations of that which has been concealed, to all!

Tell me a story

So far, so good, I'd say: our holiday weekend thus far has been both active (Exhibit A: a 6 a.m. turn in a hotel whirlpool this morning) and silly (Exhibit B: Mr. Potato Head ridiculousness contest). Sure, there was some sclerotic holiday traffic, and, sure, travel can make a gal a bit homesick (Exhibit C: Cleo, this morning, declared that " I miss my adorable little desk and chair," where she eats her granola each day). But if the hardest thing about a trip is that is makes you appreciate home a little more, then all's more or less well.

That said, L. and I have been facing one other challenge that's arisen consistently over the past few weeks, regardless of where we are. Ultimately, it too is almost risibly modest, and perhaps even lovable: it consists of nothing more than Cleo saying, 10 or 12 times a day, that she wants us to tell her a story. And what, you ask, is so wrong with that? Nothing - aside from the impoverished state of our imaginations. Because Cleo's not asking us to read a story, or, generally, even to recite a familiar tale. She wants a new story, cut from clean cloth. Sometimes she'll offer a couple of prompts; this morning, for instance, she asked for a story that involved a wolf and a monster. Just as often, though, you're given nothing in the way of guidance. Just tell a story.

It's true, of course, that 3-year-olds are pretty undemanding, as far as audiences go. But, still, you want your story to hang together. After all, you're competing with the polished, published tales on which she's been raised; your listener expects the tight narrative of a Mother Goose story, and the pleasant cohesiveness of one of Curious George's experiences. And, too, you need to shape your vocabulary thoughtfully on the fly: your wordings should accommodate your little listener. Then there's the fact, as well, that Cleo's not your only audience; often, your spouse is a few feet away, casually wondering how, exactly, you'll resolve the tension between wolf and monster.

So we try our best. And yet, even as we do, we feel acutely aware of our own shortcomings as storytellers. I  fall back too often, for example, on coy inversions of expectation (the monster turns out to be nice) and on silly props (a piece of pie featured prominently in this morning's third tale). Obviously, we're thrilled with the idea that our little girl loves stories - but frustrated by the fact that we can't accommodate that love more artfully, or more easily. In that sense, I sometimes feel like the generic court musicians who are ordered, in medieval epics, to play for the king. What, they must have wondered, should I play? And must I really play all night, while the intemperate Darab wine-bibs or until Beowulf's men down the last of the mead? Does the king even like this raga? Doesn't he realize that my hands ache, and that Ahmed, on the tabla, needs a rest?

Well, increasingly, Cleo must realize that even the most enthusiastic storytellers can grow tired, for we've told her as much, and asked her to step in and play a role, as well. And so, over the past few days, a new game has evolved, in which we take turns contributing to an unfolding narrative. Each speaker offers a sentence or two, and then pauses, and lets the next player embroider. Due to the simple fact of collaboration, and to Cleo's apparent taste for sudden and spectacular new variables, it's less clear than ever where the narrative might be headed. But that's part of the appeal, of course, along with the fact that such an approach lessens the pressure on the storyteller; now we're all accountable, in a sense, for the story's arc.

And, finally, there's the simple fact that it's wonderful to listen as a young girl's imagination takes an audible form. Cleo is no king, but she can be, like any 3-year-old, a demanding and willful presence. How beautiful is it, then, when a king steps down from his dais, picks up a lute, joins the quartet, and simply joins in, now nothing more than one of the cohort of music-makers?

Symphonies

A couple of days ago, laying the groundwork for an upcoming trip with Cleo, I stopped by MICA's video library and asked for some recommendations for DVDs that might appeal to a certain 3-and-a-half-year-old. I already had my sights set on Snow White, since Cleo's given the thumbs-up to princesses,in general, and to Disney, via Dumbo. But I was happily surprised to hear the girl working the desk recommend Disney's Silly Symphonies, a compilation of shorts, primarily, from the 1930s, that marry musical passages to animation. "I loved them when I was a kid," she told me. And do you remember anything of them, today? Sure, she said - and told me about one episode in which the instruments in a symphony orchestra are given personalities, and in which a member of the brass can then falls in love, problematically, with a stringed instrument. Romeo and Juliet for trombones and cellos! I took that one home, too.

We haven't watched Silly Symphonies yet, but Cleo did ask for a more or less immediate screening of Snow White. Given that it's over an hour long, and that parts of it - evil queen; plotted murder; poisoned apple - are pretty intense, we spent some time chatting about it on the way home from school, and then watched it in parts. On the whole, I'd say it went well: after reaching the end of the movie, Cleo spent a block of time yesterday asking us to retell the story, before expressing a desire this morning to watch the beginning once more. She's digesting it; making it hers. And I can see why such a process appeals, for there are some stretches that are truly unsettling. Indeed, Roy Disney recalls, in the DVD's liner notes, watching the film as a boy and being terrified by the claw-like branches that cling to Snow White's skirts as she flees into the forest. Sure enough, that seems to have been the scene that affected Cleo the most. This morning, when I sat down next to her after making her warm milk, Snow White was just about to repeat her flight through the woods - and Cleo's body was turned at an awkward 60-degree angle away from the screen. "If you were not here," she told me, "I would close my eyes."

But of course once you've seen a scary stretch of film once, it often ceases to be as scary, the second time. Cleo now knew that the apparently monstrous eyes in the forest belonged to benign deer and rabbits; she had gathered, too, that the snarling crocodiles were merely the figments of a frightened Snow White's imagination. And I, too, initially struck by the vibrant quality of the animation in Disney's first feature length film (it came out in 1937), could now pay attention to other elements, as well - such as the music (which comprised the first commercially issued film soundtrack). Thus, as Snow White turned and shrieked and fell, I listened to the crescendo of strings and to the rapid rhythm that intensified the disorienting aspect of the scene.

And you know what? Once you start to listen, you can hear symphonic aspects in a number of surprising places. Yesterday afternoon, Cleo and I went to Port Discovery, a children's activity center (excuse me - children's 'museum') that we've visited repeatedly over the last three years. She's always found something to keep her busy there, but yesterday was an absolute delight, as she threw herself into each option at hand - gathering groceries in a mock store; washing windows; drawing sea monsters - with simple enthusiasm. I followed along, playing by her rules on the mock soccer field and squirting water pistols alongside her - and as I did, it occurred to me that our 3 hours there were something like a symphony. Multiple parts, conducted towards a common end of fun and exploration.

In the end, then, the only little cottage we found was a miniaturized Trojan Horse, in which kids could hide. But we did learn, all over again, the appeal of separate lines that work together towards the creation of something substantial, and varied. Tuba and violin, father and daughter, girl and princess: arbitrary divisions that fade and dissolve in the light of art.

Dies irae

Suddenly, it seems, I am surrounded by intimations of death. While Cleo learns Greek myths, L. produces mounds of Christmas cards, and the calendar moves inexorably towards a celebrated birth, I keep coming up against accounts of our basic mortality. There was the shooting in Newtown, of course - but then, two days later, a 91-year-old neighbor died, and a day after that a good friend wrote to say that his father had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. I sit down to watch a episode of Breaking Bad, and mourn as Jesse's vibrant girlfriend dies of an overdose; I pick up the latest issue of Source, only to find that it's a collection of short essays in memory of the recently deceased Leo Steinberg, once my favorite living art historian. Consequently, it only felt appropriate when, as I read the Shahnama (a famous medieval Persian epic) at One World today, I came across this account of the gory aftermath of a battle: "No surgeon came to the pillow of the wounded. All was occasion for sorrow and blood-stained tears."

What to do in such circumstances? How to respond, exactly? Perhaps, perhaps we could think of a work such as Brahms's "A German Requiem," which was apparently initially conceived in response to the death of Brahms's close friend Robert Schumann, and then actually written after the 1865 death of the composer's mother. Unlike many requiems, its lyrics seem largely concerned with the living, rather than the dead: in fact, the first sung line can be translated as "Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted." As a result, the conductor Manfred Honeck, who recently led the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the piece, noted that "There are hopeful elements in it; always a positive feeling."

So you can play your Brahms. Or you can simply devote yourself with renewed enthusiasm to that 5-to-8 slot, when Cleo's home from daycare and simply wants to romp, and innovate, and read, and shriek. Over the past few days, with classes ended and grades in, I've had both time and energy, and we've had a blast. Last night, we built an elaborate 4-foot ramp of sloped books, along which Cleo could run a wooden car towards barricades of various materials; tonight, she wanted to hide under a tent-like blanket with L. while I sniffed and snuffled and circled, an inept monster confused by the trembling fabric. The activity, wonderfully, varies by the minute, but we are, at least for now, all fully invested in the play, and the result is sheer fun.

Which makes me think, in turn, of a different passage from the Shahnama. The author, Ferdowsi, is often intrigued by the workings of history, and the possibility of destiny, and at one point he seems to realize that sadness and happiness are simply bound to alternate. "That is the habit," he writes, "of the skies and fate; sometimes they are laden with pain and grief and sometimes they are full of gladness."

For now, we recognize the need for grief and try to make the most of gladness.

Practice makes pictures

She is such a person now. She has the quirky habits of a longtime roommate - she likes to eat, for instance, yogurt and honey on the coffee table, facing north - and she prefers Motown to metal. If you happen to give her your phone while you're driving, she can turn it on, open a fishing simulation game and catch a virtual catfish - or may take a photo, like the one above. When she wakes up (at about 5:30, of late), she turns on her bedroom light, and plays quietly with her doctor's kit and her dolls or experiments with her wardrobe. At 6 (and she knows it's 6 now; she can read digital clocks with some accuracy), she pads down the hall and wakes you up. Or, should you happen to get up before then, you might open the door to her room to find her smiling. In fact, the first words she said to me on Friday morning, after she'd gone to bed with a mild cold, were "Feeling better!"

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses a study done by K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues at the Berlin Academy of Music. Working with the school's violinists, whom they grouped in three broad categories according to skill level (world-class; good; proficient), the researchers asked the musicians how many hours, roughly, they had practiced since first picking up the instrument. Most of the violinists, they found, had begun playing at around 5 years of age. But by the age of 20, the world-class violinists had typically practiced an average of around 10,000 hours, in total, while the merely proficient had logged an average of 4,000 hours.

Even 4,000 sounds like a lot, right? Until you realize that Cleo, as an ordinary 3-and-a-half year-old, has already logged more than 36,000 hours of, well, of practice at simply being human. Speaking, running, taking pictures: it adds up, even for those of us who aren't outliers. And the results of such constant, steady practice are lovely.

England's greatness

Sometimes a thing is most notable for what it does not feature, or include. Sherlock Holmes once solved a case by noticing that a dog had not barked at a particular moment; John Shearman once offered a novel and pleasing reading of an installation by Verrocchio by suggesting that the absence of most of the apostles implied that the Florentines who coursed through the city streets beneath the niche could think of themselves as those apostles.

Some of my spare moments of late have been occupied by a pleasant game available on IPhones, called SongPop Free. It's essentially a variant of Guess that Tune, in which players compete by trying to identify the singers or titles of five songs at a time, as quickly as possible. I can hold my own in Classic Rock or Nineties Alternative, but when it comes to Today's Hits, or Modern Rap -I haven't been allowed to unlock the more historical, or classical, categories yet - my limitations quickly surface. And so I find myself relying heavily on the processes of deduction and elimination. There are only four options for each tune. And so if a song is by a teen diva, well, I can rule out the options involving male singers. And if the snippet that I hear doesn't have any relation to the offered titles, that can prove helpful, as well. Let's go with Rihanna, or Ring the Alarm - and so on.

Cleo, apparently, plays the same game, or uses the same strategy, in perceiving the world around her. While driving home the other day, I decided to give her a little game-show format quiz, of sorts. Cleo Dahlia, I began, in my best and most syrupy Hollywood voice, welcome to the quiz game. And so we dove in: How do you get to the top of the mountain, in Cape Town? On the cable car, responded the little voice in the back. And what can you get at the top? Popsicle! Okay, then: can you name one thing that you remember about England? A pause, and then: No school!

Hmm. Well, she's right: when we were in Winchester this summer, she didn't have to go to school. Granted, L. and I were too busy enjoying the medieval cathedral, the walks along streams, and the inviting pubs to think too much about that. But, yes, come to think of it, there was no school in England.

Just one more reason to remember, fondly, what we'd already celebrated for other, more obvious reasons.

Laugh it up

You probably remember, if you've seen Milos Forman's Amadeus, Mozart's ridiculous cackle. It was a profane giggle that threw the inexplicable nature of his divine gift into higher relief, and that taunted a tortured Salieri, who saw it as something more than Mozart laughing - it was, Salieri claimed, God himself laughing at the mediocrity of his own effort. Of course, Forman was using the laugh as a narrative device (for a bright explication of how, exactly, check out Kristin Thompson's Storytelling in the New Hollywood), but it's a motif that does seem to have some historical truth to it. Even in his own day, Mozart was known for a bawdy sense of humor - and for registering his glee aloud.

But did his father laugh in a comparable way? Franz Hoffmann, in his 1873 book Mozart's Early Days, would have us think so. (And perhaps we should give his report some credence; after all, 1873 was closer to Mozart's time than to our own...). On page 6, he tries to reconstruct Leopold's happiness at learning that he was to become a father, and to have a son whom he could introduce into the world of music. "He rubbed," claims Hoffman, "his hands joyfully, he murmured unintelligible words to himself, he threw radiant glances towards the blue sky, which had become almost cloudless. Yes, he forgot himself so far that he gave way at times to a joyous laugh, a loud laugh on the open highway, such as no one had ever heard from the vice orchestra leader."

Well. We may wonder at the accuracy of such at account: the repetition of joy suggests a certain formulaic aspect to the account, and surely Hoffmann could not have known the state of the sky on a random day in 1755. And yet: boisterous laughs sometimes do pour forth, in expected ways. Matter of fact, Cleo's been developing a room-silencing laugh of her own, over the past ten days or so. And we've got proof: just have a look at the video, above.

We're not quite sure when, or why, this new laugh developed. And, to be honest, I'm also not sure how sincere, or unselfconscious, it typically is. (The example above, as you've likely gathered, is staged, but more or less acoustically typical). Sometimes, Cleo lets loose while watching Max and Ruby. But she also spent some of Monday at school asking her teachers to "talk about [my] new laugh." Having heard them remark on it, she apparently became interested in how it prompted certain reactions."

Which, presumably, may have been part of Mozart's project, as well. At least, Forman would have see it so: that is, laughter can be both naked celebration and open taunt; bald joy, and implicit provocation. We laugh with the world; we laugh at the world. And the world, in turn, stands at attention, reckoning the new sound.

Home

What is home?

The word, clearly, can be read in many ways. It can refer, rather bluntly, to a structure, an address, or a plot of land. It can mean, as well, an evocative notion: Molly Bloom's arias wafting through the air, or the palace and massive bed shared with Penelope. It can refer to absence, as well as presence - think of the muddied infantryman staring at the photograph of the young woman in the knee-length dress, and it can seem trite... until, suddenly, it seems vital.

When I ask Cleo if she wants to go home, the answer is usually (but not quite always) yes. But one of the activities I associate most strongly with returning home is, oddly, checking the mail; looking for evidence, that is, of contacts with the outside world, from which I just returned.

And strange, too, is the fact that one of the most moving celebrations of my home city of 10 years - of Baltimore, that is - is a song by a punk band whose members are not even, technically, from Baltimore. (They're from Towson, a suburb to the north). But, still: home's appeal can sneak up on you: especially, I gather, when you're thousands of miles abroad, playing at music festivals in Northern Europe. So, to that end, I offer All Time Low's 'For Baltimore,' an appealing conflation of love, longing, and appreciation of home. Just click here to watch one version of the 3-minute music video (you can skip the ad a few seconds in).

Two Thanksgiving performances

Tomorrow's one of our favorite holidays, and we plan to spend it, in part, eating Turkey alongside MICA's international students, watching RGIII post 7-yard dashes against the Cowboys, and splashing about in an indoor pool. For now, though, we're looking forward to the day-before-Thanksgiving Bolton Hill Nursery pageant. The bread pudding is coming together, and there's a rumor that the Bluebirds will be dressed as carrots, and our own Yellowbird as a leaf. Even a trip to Whole Foods, bursting at the seams with turkeys and cranberries, conspires to put one in a holiday frame of mind.

Here at halfstep, though, we like to give as well as to receive - and so we spent a few minutes casting about for some Thanksgiving-themed music. It turns out, though, that it's rather slim pickings: Handel may have Christmas covered, and Bach took care of Easter - but Commissioner Sir Dean Goffin's 'Symphony of Thanksgiving,' which might seem to be relevant here, is actually an abstract meditation on God's grace by a New Zealand-based member of the Salvation Army. Not entirely beside the point, I guess, but its bright opening fanfare hardly recalls, to this listener, late New England autumns, or fallen maple leaves.

And so we've crafted our own brief message, working in house with our own team of crack screenwriters and actors to produce and pass on a 5-second holiday greeting. Enjoy - and enjoy the coming day, as well.

The bridge, whereabouts of

"Has anyone seen the bridge?" In 1973, near the end of a track called 'The Crunge,' Led Zeppelin's front man Robert Plant wailed the question, seemingly feeling his way towards a musical resolution in a manner that evoked the dramatic habits of another great band leader, James Brown. Brown had often pretended, while onstage during performances, to be looking for a new rhythm, or idea, or musical possibility; on 'The Crunge,' Plant suggested that even composed, recorded music could involve a similar process of seeking.

The phrase soon acquired a life of its own, becoming a sort of touchstone in the work of later rock bands. A 1986 Camper van Beethoven track called 'Joe Stalin's Cadillac,' for instance, features a drawled intonation of the same phrase, and in 1996 The Dave Matthews Band was struck by the general similarity between a transitional piece they'd composed for live performances and Zeppelin's earlier effort. Soon enough, the band was calling their piece 'Anyone Seen the Bridge?' in a manner that invoked both its function as a connector and their place in the larger history of rock music. Brown, Plant, Matthews: the three singers offer, in their shared quest for a transition, a common bridge across the last half century of American popular music.

But if pop tunes can seem to need bridges, so too can blogs. Over the past few weeks, I've left a number of narratives unfinished. Balls in the air, threads hanging: the result, you can choose your metaphor, but to me it feels as though I've mapped portions of a territory without necessary linking the charted zones. So: on this quiet Tuesday afternoon, with L. and Cleo back in B'more after a long weekend trip to see the grandparents in N.C., let's get up to speed:

1. Cleo was a fox, a red fox, for Halloween. She wore her outfit during her school's Halloween parade, which went swimmingly, and she then wore it as darkness descended on the city, trick-or-treating among the stately stone houses of Bolton Hill and gently illuminated windows of our own neighborhood.

2. Cleo's anger at me - but is that even the right word? I mean her frustration with my refusal to let her watch Dumbo while we hosted a guest - soon dissipated. Said guest, in fact, brought a lovely set of African-themed dominoes that captivated Cleo, and we then spent much of the next day at Storyville and Barnes and Noble, where she played like an absolute angel.

3. And Hurricane Sandy was relatively gentle to our old pink house. Water seeped in through the seams of our roof, and the drywall ceiling in one room will need to be replaced. All things considered, though, we were lucky: after I explained to Cleo why I was setting buckets out to catch the invasive water, she went back to playing, and then, when L. returned home from out west, dutifully told her that 'we have an old house and so water came in.'

4. The image above? Cleo, flying a kite in Meadowwood Park, on a windy fall day: her suggestion, my joy.

Four bridges, built in a matter of minutes. Hope they help to connect the islands of a blog that too often and too easily, perhaps, forgets to provide narrative closure. But that will, in the next day or two, attract its 10,000th visitor - for which I thank all of you.

Alienation and community

You probably know the story already - or, as it turns out, the stories. Let's start with the earlier: in July of 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan performed three songs using an electric guitar - and, in the process, angered a number of folk purists who saw the instrument as anathema. Pete Seeger allegedly tried to cut the power off, and the folk singer Oscar Brand observed, subsequently, that to many lovers of folk music "the electric guitar represented capitalism." Dylan had crossed a line, and the situation grew rowdy, with some in the crowd booing loudly.

Yesterday, as Cleo and I drove from her nursery to pick up L. after work, the conversation suddenly grew similarly heavy, and ominous. Cleo suggested that she could watch Dumbo when we got home, but I, since we were expecting a dinner guest, told her that she would have to wait until a polite time. Cleo dissented, and whined a little bit; I suggested that she try not to whine. And then she released this electric zinger: "I don't like you," she said, calmly. And then repeated it.

Honestly, I didn't know what to say. I felt momentarily paralyzed, completely deflated. Had she really said that? Could she really feel that way? She's at the age where she enjoys trying out phrasings, to see if they might bring a response, and I wondered if this was thus mere provocation. Perhaps. But in the moment it also felt as though she were entirely, coldly sincere.

But of course no story ends as simply as its telling might suggest. As Benjamin Filene notes, in Romancing the Folk:Public Memory & American Roots Music, part of the reason that Dylan's electric guitar angered Seeger so viscerally was that it violated Seeger's basic philosophy of performance: that a concert, that is, can offer an opportunity to build community. Seeger wanted his crowds to sing along with him - a possibility that was more or less precluded by Dylan's grinding, shrieking guitar. "Dylan's song set at Newport," Filene says, "was a performance done perhaps to his audience, but he had little interest in allowing it to be done by them."

Or, at least, he didn't for a few moments. There are, in fact, alternative accounts of what, exactly, happened in Newport in 1965. Ryder Windham, for example, points out that "some insiders maintain that the booing was not prompted by... Dylan's guitar, but in response to the festival's inferior sound system and the fact that Dylan, like every other performer, to three songs." That would make some sense, too, given that members of the audience then demanded an encore: a demand honored by Dylan, who later returned to the stage and played two songs, by himself - on an acoustic guitar.

So where is the truth? There were boos; Cleo was unhappy with me. But any rupture in community was, in both cases, soon restored; distances were bridged; amends made. This morning, Cleo woke up shortly after 6, and within a few minutes she was enthusiastically showing me how she can dive, and insisting that next summer I play in the pool with her.

Sure thing, Cleo. And I'll be sure to turn the electricity off before we dive in.

Dress rehearsal

Today's photo day at Bolton Hill Nursery, and  so I spent a few enjoyable minutes last evening pretending to be the photographer as Cleo hammed it up. Last year, the guy who shot the Bluebirds was a real pro; aware that some of the 2-year-olds might find the process daunting, he kept up a friendly patter of comments, and regularly placed a stuffed animal on his head, allowing it to slip off in an apparently unplanned way that drew a number of giggles.

Why practice for such a thing? Why, indeed - especially when rehearsals can be more upsetting than the actual thing? In Stanislavski on Opera, for instance, you can read the harrowing story of a 1926 rehearsal for The Tsar's Bride, during which "a large chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling over the orchestra, followed by a cloud of dust." The members of the orchestra scrambled, he says, under the stage, and the cast ran offstage. Stanislavski covered his head with his hands, and slowly retreated, as sawdust fell on the footlights. "To top it all," remembered one individual, "we now saw a pair of legs encased in boots dangling from the gaping black hole overhead." Soon enough, though, things stabilized. Cool heads took over, and within a few minutes a ladder was erected - and a fireman, who had been inspecting the upper zones of the building, rescued from his precarious place above the stage.

Happily, our rehearsal went rather more smoothly. No sawdust, no unexpected crashes. And, as you can see above, some truly warm smiles. But of course the rehearsal is rarely exactly like the performance itself. And so we'll see, at 10 a.m. today, if the slipping stuffed animal can retain its lively appeal for a second year.

My father's book

Perhaps the most touching- is that the right word? Not quite: moving, or affecting might work better - piece I've heard on the radio lately was Robert Siegel's interview with a young woman who had always joked with her father about the Warren Zevon vampish romp 'Werewolves of London.' The father, who was a trucker, knew his girl didn't think much of the song, but he made a point of calling her whenever he heard it played on the radio: it thus became a means of bridging the hundreds of miles between them, and of sparking chats. It was kindling, in a sense, for conversation, a small fire around which they could huddle from time to time, to tell stories, and catch up. And then, when the daughter grew up and was about to get married, she - well, you can figure out the rest, if you click here.

Well, with a hurricane approaching, there's little distance between Cleo and me: in fact, we're cooped up at home, with both of our schools closed for the foreseeable future, and L. in San Francisco, for a public health conference (and, hopefully, for an impromptu street celebration or two after the Giants completed their very improbable sweep last night). Anyway, Cleo and I have spent the morning rather as we often did when she was 1: we make a snack; we try our hand at a puzzle we look outside at the weather; we listen to the news; we stack blocks; we make a snack. But of course she's not 1 anymore, and so the sheer range of things we can do is comparatively wide: she helps to stir the macaroni and cheese, she sketches the design for our jack-o'-lantern, she passes ten minutes with a computer mouse, pretending that it's an iron. Passing time with her is still intense - she doesn't like to be too far from me - but it's certainly interestingly varied, and often truly collaborative.

But, still, a day's a long while, and so a couple of hours ago I suggested that we try something new. Let's get under a blanket, I suggested, and read My Father's Dragon - which just happened to be one of my own father's favorite books as a child. Okay, said an amenable Cleo, who quickly set about arranging pillows for our reading nest. And then we were off to the island of Tangerina (see map, above) - and into a story that still carries for me, as well, a sense of magic and sheer immensity: it was, I think, the longest book I'd ever encountered at the time, and it's certainly longer than anything I've tried with Cleo.

She stuck with it, for the full 80-some pages. Sure, she wriggled, like any 3-year-old listener, throughout, and spent much of Chapter Seven bouncing on the side of the bed. But when I paused, at the end of one complex sentence, and asked her if she understood, she responded immediately and correctly, and when I wondered aloud, at the end of each chapter, if she wanted to keep reading, the answer was always yes. And soon little Elmer Elevator was standing face to face with the dragon.

Right now, Cleo is playing with a hot dog-shaped car that I once designed for a scouts' Pinewood Derby. A piece of my childhood is literally in her hands. Likewise, the volume of My Father's Dragon that we read is still inscribed with my own father's boyhood address. Inheritances, passed from father to child. But the child always makes the inheritance his own, or her own. Cleo just wandered over and announced that the hot dog was a weight, a barbell, and hoisted it over her head, and then asked how the car was meant to work.

And so another twenty minutes will be passed:

May this storm leave all those over whom it passes safe, sound - and, perhaps, surrounded by the sound of stories shared and tiny rolling race car tires, as well as howling winds.

Killing me (softly)

Remember when Pearl Jam - in 1995, when they had recently been assigned the heavy and fleeting title of World's Biggest Band - decided to challenge Ticketmaster? Having taken shape in a Seattle that was deeply shaped by the indie movement of the late 1980s, and recently empowered in a way that allowed them to dictate, to an extent, their own terms, the band sought to work around the giant ticketing agency's virtual monopoly, and to structure concert deals that were nominally fairer to fans and musicians alike. A noble idea, perhaps - but the ensuing self-organized and self-promoted tour soon became a fiasco, as Pearl Jam wound up playing in venues that couldn't handle their crowds and cancelling a number of dates. Soon enough, the band abandoned its crusade, and fans were left to complain, for years hence, about the harsh fees imposed by the even stronger Ticketmaster. "Ticketmaster is killing me," wrote a disgruntled music fan in 2007, and he was hardly alone in voicing a frustration that had only been redoubled or intensified by the failure of Pearl Jam's attempted rebellion.

You're killing me. It's a phrase that's apparently been circulating in the Yellowbird classroom recently, as well - complete with a whining, high-pitched melodramatic voicing. I first heard it yesterday, when Cleo and I were talking about the birthday party of a classmate. 'Well,' I said, 'her birthday was actually on Friday, but her party is on Sunday, so that more people can come.' But Cleo felt differently, insisting that the party would be on some unspecified day in the future. We'd reached an impasse - until, suddenly, she upped the ante with a practiced Dad, you're killing me.

Well. My first reaction was simple, unalloyed surprise - how did my little daughter come to be able to recall, so skillfully, the pained, self-sacrificing tone of a Jewish comedian working the Borscht belt? And I laughed out loud. Which meant, in turn, that Cleo decided to repeat the phrase, whenever appropriate - and, too, at a number of times that weren't appropriate. Our walk home, in short, became a series of repeated variations on the theme. You're killing me, Dad. And, by the fifth or sixth variation, I found myself tiring of it. Partly, that is, because I wanted some fresh material, and partly because Cleo didn't really seem to have a sense of why the phrase might be funny - or of why it might not be funny, in certain contexts. Interestingly, she's been fascinated by death of late: she shocked her teachers this week by announcing that when her favorite singer, Lisa, dies, she will become, in turn, Lisa singer, and she was deeply interested in the mock tombstones that we saw decorating suburban yards on a Halloweenish walk around Rodgers Forge yesterday. Dead people can be placed underground? She puzzled over that for a while, before telling me, yesterday evening, that Lisa singer might have a house underground at some point, when she's dead.

And so I stopped walking, and asked Cleo if I could talk to her for a minute. I tried, in a stereotypically Serious Dad manner, to explain that kill is a heavy word, and that literally killing someone is a terrible act, with real consequences. Sure, Cleo, you've stumbled upon a funny phrase. But do realize, please, that it is not always appropriate. And, anyway: you're a big girl. There's no need to whine, even if you do do it in an entertainingly hyperbolic way. She took that in. She tested out her phrase a few more times, to see how it felt now. And then, when I asked her if she'd say it once more, so I could make a short video, she altered it, as you see above.

In the heat of their battle with Ticketmaster, Pearl Jam recorded a plaintive, grinding song called 'This is Not For You.' Sometimes read as a jeremiad involving their recently developed celebrity - an articulation of their resentment, in other words, at the demands placed on their time by their hue new body of fans - it has also been read as a summary of Generation X's willful, slothful unwillingness to work for The Man, or to give into the system. It seems most appropriate, though, to read it as a document born of their wars with Ticketmaster - a battle cry, that is, in a battle that they soon lost.

Challenging the powers that be is often, of course, laudable. Seizing creative control of one's appearances, as a musician, or resorting to comedic exaggeration, as a 3-year-old, can be deeply inspiring. But those acts of rebellion sometimes encounter considerable resistance; indeed, they may never unfold as simply, perhaps, or as beautifully and cleanly as the rebel might wish.

Playing ball

This gives way to that; one moment melts into another; plans evolve; patterns and melodies emerge.

Yesterday, for rather mundane and complicated reasons, I spent the five o'clock hour as an impromptu babysitter, watching both Cleo and a Yellowbird classmate named Jasper in a playground, until Jasper's mom was able to leave work and join us. It was hardly a chore, though; rather, I fully enjoyed watching the kids develop idea after idea, nudging them only occasionally to show a little care on the balance beam, or the playground tower. And so a session on the swings gave way to an imaginary rocket ship liftoff, which in turn melted into a game of tag, and then - due to the chance find of a ball at the bottom of a grassy slope - into the fort-da variant you see above. At one point, a third child joined in for a bit, and the two boys alternated catching and returning; soon after, Cleo and Jasper were taking their shoes off, claiming that they were about to enter an apartment.

I felt, all at the same time, like a proud and happy father, like an anthropologist who has stumbled on a remarkable culture, and like a privileged witness to a fluid and improvisatory musical performance. I felt, in other words, a bit like Michael Bakan, who once wrote, in his book Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamela Belenganjur, of an organic session of music that seemed to evolve out of and blur into everyday life: "As the ensemble grew larger, some of the musicians began picking up instrument and playing, while others continued socializing casually. There were some who managed to converse, smoke, and warm up on their instruments all at the same time, which I found impressive. What playing there was seemed random and haphazard."

There was no smoking on our playground - even this babysitter has some rules! - but I think it's fair to say that there was a random, haphazard aspect to the late afternoon play: an aspect which I found, like Bakan, in a different context, impressive.

Get out of the van

I spent most of my free moments last week glued to the pages of Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, a wonderful history of indie bands in the 1980s: published in 2001 and recommended to me at a dinner party, the book focuses on 11 influential bands, from Black Flag to Fugazi, who attracted a following even as they worked outside the network of established studios and labels. Disgusting stories about entire tours conducted out of a single van?  Tales of utter, rampant violence that spills from stage to club floor and then back again? Yes, and yes. But it's also a book that offers a number of thoughts about the sheer potential of music as a form of expression and a tool of dissent, and as I've toted it around with me I've been surprised at how many people recognize the cover and smile fondly as they mention that they, too, enjoyed it.

My favorite anecdote in the book, I think, involves the Replacements, a Minnesota band that had become rather widely known in alternative communities by 1984 and was thus able to embark on an ambitious tour that took them all the way out to the west coast. But this was pre-Internet, and the band did much of its own organizing, and so choosing venues was often characterized by sheer guesswork and open reliance on word of mouth. Moreover, the punk community in many cities was so small that there was no established club, or center. "When we played Seattle," Bill Sullivan (a member of the band's crew) later remembered, "there was the Central Tavern, a blues bar. There were VFW's, Mexican restaurants, - we played a Mexican restaurant in Indianapolis - we played clothing stores." And then there was Davis, California, where the band had been booked to play a place called 617 Anderson - which turned out to be a private residence, on Anderson St. No matter: the band set up in the living room, which was covered from floor to ceiling in plastic; a keg in the kitchen functioned as the bar. And, recalls Sullivan, "it was a pretty fun gig, actually."

That spirit - of DIY, of devil-may-care open-mindedness - appeals; it points, I think, to a humble embrace of possibility. And it reminds me of one of the wonderful things about spending time with a three-year-old. Sure, we occasionally take Cleo to some rarefied sites - the Cape Town cable car; Winchester Cathedral; the Detroit Institute of Arts - and we try, generally, to keep our act together. But, inevitably, there are less impressive moments, or breakdowns in the day's play: a few weeks ago, Port Discovery was closed for renovation; this past Saturday, Cleo and I were boxed in by the Baltimore Marathon. But, still: when plans go awry, Cleo typically looks around, and immediately begins to use what's at hand. As the runners streamed by, she found a grated fence, and began to perform improvisational gymnastics in the morning sun. And when Port Discovery's doors were locked, her eyes locked, in turn, on a nearby fountain, whose contours she traced with her tiny hand. It was, in the end, a pretty fun gig.

As are all things, I suppose, if one approaches them as if one's climbing out of a van, and into a world full of fresh possibility.

That conversation

Perhaps we all imitate our teachers - in manners both obvious and oblique. As an art history professor, I still hand out outlines of the day's lecture, complete with the basic details of every image to be shown, just as my professors at Williams College distributed monuments lists in darkened classrooms in the late 1980s. In doing so, though, I'm only repeating the tendencies of Bela Bartok's students, who were often profoundly influenced by their teacher's approach; as David Yeoman has noted, in fact, some of them later confessed to inadvertently imitating the playing style that he employed in lessons in their own later performances. Heck, even Kobe Bryant sometimes summons his inner Zen master, as he draws on the lessons he learned from Phil Jackson. 'When the student is ready,' holds the proverb, 'the teacher will appear.' But the teacher often appears, as well, in the subsequent behaviors, gestures, and words of the student.

And that's happening among the Yellowbirds right now. It's not uncommon to find one of Cleo's classmates reassuringly parting his arms, hands down, and telling his parents, 'Don't freak out' - which is one of the many endearing habits of one of their classroom teachers. Given the amount of time she spends with our children, it's hardly surprising to discern her influence in them. But I still had to laugh out loud today when, after Cleo and I spent a few seconds bickering over the correct term for pinwheel (Cleo calls them spinwheels, which is cool with me, but she unfairly chides me each time I use the supposedly incorrect form pinwheel), Cleo suddenly announced, "I am not having this conversation."

I wasn't even sure, to be honest, where that phrase came from. L. doesn't say it, I don't think, and I've never heard any of Cleo's teachers employ it. So, after I stopped laughing, I asked my little girl. 'Um, Cleo, who says that? Where did you learn that sentence?' Oh, she said, and quickly named two of her classmates. They say it all the time, she added.

We learn from our teachers. But our teachers, it seems, are many, and everywhere.

Back-seat criticism

Awesome moment in the car today, on the way to work - but it'll take a little setting up. So: flash back to the summer of 2011, when we were in Cape Town, and Cleo's daily DVD of choice was a collection of video shorts of Maurice Sendak stories. One of Cleo's favorites was 'In the Night Kitchen,' in which a boy named Mickey tumbled mysteriously from his bed into a rollicking world of mustached cooks, who seemed intent on baking him. As they did their thing, mixing, and stirring, and dancing, what seemed to be a lively klezmer band - Sendak was the son of Polish Jews - played a bouncy tune in the background, and I can still recall the off-kilter melody of the horns and the rhythm of the guitar strings behind the slow gestures of the ample, animated chefs.

Okay, then. Today, as we headed out the door,I decided to play something new for Cleo. So, girl: would you like to hear some Ornette Coleman, or some Django Reinhardt? Django, she decided, after a prolonged negotiation in which I promised to follow two of his songs with three by Milkshake. And, bless her heart, she listened, as the first track, Nuages, played in our little car. And then, at the first intersection, as the Eastern European-inflected swing floated about us, she excitedly announced, 'It's like Mickey in the Night Kitchen!'

Well, now that you mention it, yes. Yes, indeed. But don't simply take my word for it; listen, instead, to National Geographic's musical historians, who point out in a readable entry on Roma music that "it became commonplace [in early modernism] to see Gypsy and Jewish klezmer musicians playing together" - and that "in artists like Peret or even the late genius Django Reinhardt you can hear the long road the Gypsies have travelled across the years."

Reinhardt, Mickey, and the Romas, all bound by a common musical DNA, in a way that's even audible to a 3-year-old. Or, at least, to a 3-year-old who happily follows up her observation regarding similarity with the immodest claim that "I've got good ears!"

Protein shake

Remember when Bruce Springsteen, who had been known primarily for his incandescent concerts and for songs that positioned him as a poet on the margins of a disappointing post-industrial America, reinvented himself as a beefcake, during the Reagan years? Wearing tight tee-shirts ad sporting guns, he carried his guitar like a small tool, and posed against massive flags: a musical Rambo, of sorts. Or, as Fred Pfeil has written, "a swaggering, solidly muscled working-class rocker." And the image, of course, both suited, and influenced our opinion of, his music. 'Born in the U.S.A.' was often discussed in physical terms, and the critic and music historian Rob Kirkpatrick once argued that 'Brothers Under the Bridge' is "a strong-muscled anthem." In the mid-1980s, as Detroit was being overrun by terrifyingly efficient Japanese micro-cars and we still worried, in television dramas, about the possibility of Soviet nuclear attacks, it was good to feel strong, and Springsteen rode that wave.

But I'm here to tell you that it's still good to be strong. At least, according to Cleo, who dropped milk, eggs, and tofu into her age-appropriate shopping cart at Whole Foods, and then, amazed that she could still push the groaning vehicle, paused to flex (above), and ask, rhetorically, "Isn't I strong?"

Yes, you are, girl. And always getting stronger.

Coming of age

"My music," Stravinsky supposedly said, "is best understood by children and animals." As one ages, then, does one somehow understand it less - less fully, or less instinctively? Perhaps: but here at Half Step, we've been fascinated in recent days to see Cleo moving into a fuller and more instinctive pace when it comes to language. Spend a day with her, and you're bound to hear at least a few chestnuts that don't quite feel, well, childlike. Such as:

Yesterday, as she and I drove to Harford Road for a big breakfast at Clementine's, she asked, from the back seat, "What day is today?" Reasonable question, I thought, and answered in turn: "Today is Sunday." And then she, from the back: "The week just goes on and on."

Well, yes, it does - but that phrasing felt more like the output of a weary teen, or an overwhelmed office worker, than the thoughts of an energetic 3-year-old. I was even more surprised, though, when we got in the car and began to drive home after spending some time on a playground just south of Clementine's. We drove slowly over a large speed bump, rocking the car, and Cleo suddenly said, "I was like, 'What was going on?'"

You were like? You're paraphrasing your own reaction? Aren't you, um, 3?

Yes, Daddy. But I'm also one of the few people (along with, say, dogs) who can best understand the music of Stravinsky. Unlike you.

Buster

For better or for worse, one of the most deeply established elements of Cleo's daily routine is her morning video. It's not always the first thing we do - sometimes the day kicks off with a book, or a dressing session - but usually by 7 a.m. she's settled in her big black Thinking Chair, with a cup of warm milk in her hands, and an age-appropriate video all cued up.

But of course as Cleo grows older, the material that suits her changes. The mild chaos of Max and the cool-headed practicality of Ruby once appealed, but then gave way to the slightly more complicated narrative arcs of Curious George cartoons. For a time, this summer, the raw energy and seasonally-apt inventiveness of Phineas and Ferb (two boys who are determined to make the most of their summer vacation) was what she wanted. And now, intriguingly, it's Buster Keaton.

You've probably heard of Keaton, even if you don't remember the name. An exact contemporary of Charlie Chaplin, he was the more physical and acrobatic counterpart to Chaplin's elegant grace: in the relatively small world of silent film comedy, Keaton was Gene Kelly to Chaplin's Fred Astaire. You turn to Chaplin's films for the expressive possibilities of a flower held in clenched teeth, or for hints of substantial social criticism; if you're in the mood for wild chases and antics on the roof of a moving train, though, Keaton's your man.

And now he's Cleo's man, too. When I first showed her a Keaton sketch - a year ago, after picking up a DVD at a thrift store while on a road trip with her - she was downright frightened by a scene in which a bumbling family man, played by Keaton, somehow manages to drive his model T into a harbor. It's meant to be a silly scene, with Keaton as an unharmed buffoon, but Cleo had never seen anything like it, and she asked me to turn it off. Every now and then, in the subsequent months, she would occasionally refer in a slightly awed manner to the car in the water, and would sometimes even insinuate - echoing my apologies - that I should not have shown it to her.

But, recently, she announced that she wanted to see it again. I emphasized that it's just a movie, and put it on and read the title cards to her, as they appeared, in a slightly simplified manner. And, as you can see in the video above, she's grown into something of a fan: she understands the weird eccentricities of Keaton's wildly engineered electric house, and the charm of his inept attempts at boatbuilding. So the plots appeal. But might other elements, too? Keaton's films, of course, feature no dialogue, but they do embody a strong sense of rhythm - rhythm that's sometimes manifested in the accompanying music, and that is also implicit in Keaton's comically rapid motions and the relatively quick cuts from scene to scene. In watching the films with her, I've come to see them as antecedents of later Warner Bros. cartoons: they evoke both the quickness of the Road Runner and the narrative velocity of, say, a short involving Sylvester the Cat. They're jazzy, in short, rather than symphonic, and percussive, rather than lush. And while Cleo may, in time, grow interested in videos that can evoke the complexity of a Brahms composition, we're more than satisfied for now with films that speak a musical language - concise, energetic, rhythmic - that seems to be that of many 3-year-olds.

Umbrellas

There are many reasons, I think, to feel a belated affection for the composer Erik Satie - but perhaps the most endearing of them revolves around his passion for umbrellas.  He regularly left dozens of them, all open, scattered around his apartment; he spoke of them as flowers, and when he died nearly a hundred of them were found: a veritable garden. Once, when he realized that he had left an umbrella at a cafe, he supposedly hurried to that establishment, muttering, Oh, how worried my umbrella must be to have lost me! Sure, Satie's music can be ravishing - but has anyone, really, ever enjoyed umbrellas as him?

Well, maybe: above, one of the may set pieces involving umbrellas produced in recent weeks by Cleo. Already a master of repetitive music, a genre championed by Satie (and still occasionally perpetuated in our car, through successive playings of Milkshake), she can also act, like Satie, in a minimalist or Dadaist vein. (Her abbreviated, three-line, nonsensical knock-knock jokes might qualify as both). And yet she is closest to Satie, in spirit, in her love of the common umbrella as a basic element of interior decoration. Today, she saw them as protection against monsters, rather than as flowers, but the end result seems to be about the same: a living room awash with color, if not rain.

Keep on, girl. The past is a fog, into which we occasionally see with partial clarity, and through which we can perceive tiny shards of color. You make the present feel equally mysterious - and even more colorful.

That note

About a year ago, Salon ran an interview with the Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, on his attitudes toward improvisation - a subject that turns out to be centrally important to his musical practice. In it, he mentions a wide range of precedents and examples, and even contends that he feels freer while playing the guitar than he does in ordinary conversation. But perhaps the moment I enjoyed most was his allusion to a single note, in a tune by Hendrix:

I started listening to improvisational music when I was in high school. Before that, I was more interested in composition. I listened to “West Side Story” and Sly & the Family Stone — really listening to their arrangements and how they laid all the melodies. But, in that way, good improvisation has a structure. It has a form. I remember, like many guitarists, being obsessed with Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. It was the record.

I listened to that solo on “Machine Gun” a million times.

With that one amazing note.

Yeah, the note! 

What's that note? Ah, folks: the Internet gives, and it gives some more. But while you're waiting for that solo - "the greatest note ever played!" - you might also mull over the assertion of Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher who keeps a blog on education. "Everyone," she writes, "should have the opportunity to reflect on how the beauty of improvisation can play a part in our daily lives, both personal and professional. Imagine if we could all learn to improvise alone and in collaboration with others."

We're trying, Elizabeth. The last two afternoons, lovely lambent exercises in autumn skies, Cleo and I have simply wandered sidewalks after school, finding impromptu balance beams, studying puddles, and making pretend mint leaves from maple trees. Our notes may not be amazing, to the outside ear, but I'm already looking forward to whatever unpredictable form this afternoon might bring. 

As you were

This morning I came across a wonderfully odd document online: a 1935 master's thesis by a Martha Byrne, who set out to chart the relative popularity of a dozen waltzes among groups of children and musical experts. There are all kinds of methodological problems with the study, including the relatively small sample sizes, but her earnest tone and the sheer idealism of the project (which cites, among other authors, Aquinas: Byrne was at Loyola, in Chicago) make up for most of what it lacks in scientific rigor. And then, on page 159, we arrive at the heart of the matter. "[I]t is true," she says, "too that these young children have marvelous imaginations; they are at an age when it is natural for them to follow a lead, so it is easy for them to allow their imaginations to follow the ideas which the composer puts forth and to let their young minds travel where the music leads them."

Well, amen to that. I've been struck repeatedly, over the past months, with Cleo's sheer aesthetic flexibility. Sure, the girl likes her Milkshake, but she's generally open to other types of music (with one real exception noted thus far), and she admires pretty much any visual art that I show her. And, wonderfully, her tendency to accommodate extends to clothes and to personal appearances, as well: she never seemed rattled by my unkempt summer style, and when we darted into a store, recently, to try to find some new pants, she was a pleasant one-man chorus of ayes and yeses. ("And, Cleo, what do you think of these?" "Good.")

But of course it's not just Cleo: children tend to be accepting in ways that can surprise us. Last night, while reading Rick Bass's Why I Cam West, I smiled when I came to his self-deprecating list of the times that he's mistakenly sprayed himself with the searing hot pepper spray he sometimes carries to ward off grizzlies. the worst time, arguably, was when he mistakenly set the canister off by crouching, while on a walk with his two daughters; the spray covered his groin, forcing him to run for a river, and to seek relief on the long walk home by covering the stained areas of his pants with pounds of moss and lichen.

"Curls of black lichen," he remembered, "protruded from the neck of my shirt ad from beneath the sleeves of my T-shirt. Wisps of black tuft gathered around the tops of my boots, and as I lurched humpbacked through the forest, pausing from time to time to readjust the shifting lichen, I'm sure I looked like nothing less than a werewolf, and it was both alarming and touching at how matter-of-factly my daughters accepted this strangeness."

Waltzes, slacks, lichen-covered daddies: there's a willingness to overlook and to accept, in little girls, that's both disarming and somehow close to holy.

Among other things

To be honest, I don't have a great number of musical memories from my childhood. I remember beating on a drum, happily, during an improvisational session in the Ephesus Road elementary school music room, and I remember a class trip - all of us bearing recorders - to a performance by the N.C. Symphony Orchestra. I think that I remember seeing Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger sing 'This Land is My Land,' and, if you're willing to count my 12th year as a part of my childhood, I recall seeing the Beatles' 'Help' on a big screen.

It's against a relatively thin tapestry, then, that I recall, in rather vivid terms, the Schoolhouse Rock musical that focused on the means by which a bill becomes a law. The bebop jazzman Jack Sheldon singing about the legislative process? It's hard to forget, once you've heard it.

And, indeed, the tune crossed my mind the other day, as Cleo and I walked across the National Mall after a good spell at the Air and Space Museum (that's Cleo, above, in the cockpit of a Cessna) and the National Botanical Garden. It was a beautiful day; the capitol building shone brilliantly above the sweet cut grass, and a few tourists walked lazily around the reflecting pool whose surface was pierced only by a few ducks. Inspired, I gestured to the building, and told Cleo something like this: "That's an important building, sweetie. You know how we live in a country called America? In that building, people make decisions about America. They decide things like - and here I paused, suddenly daunted by the task of explaining Medicare to a three-year-old - things like where to build roads, and when to build buildings."

Cleo took it in. She thought for a second. And then she asked, reasonably, "And is that where they decide where to make syrup?"

Traces of travel

In 1829, Felix Mendelssohn traveled to Scotland - and began to develop the ideas for a symphony that he eventually completed in 1842. Mendelssohn sometimes referred, later in his life, to the piece - opus 56, in A minor - as his Scotch symphony, and musical historians often agree that both the opening theme of the first movement and the finale reflect (or echo, or betray, depending on your their exact position) the influences of Scottish culture on the young composer.

For, after all, who can travel and not be affected by what they see, and hear? Travel alters our mental set, giving us new schema and points of reference - which we then employ in making sense of future experiences.  Durer's works, after his 1495 trip to Italy, imply the influence of Pollaiuolo; Ibn Tulun's time in Samarra may well have resulted, decades later, in the spiralling stair of his Cairene minaret. In moving from zone to zone, we are not empty beakers; rather, we carry what we have learned with us. And, for a family who recently spent two months in South Africa, the phenomenon is sometimes crystal clear.

Yesterday, I took Cleo down to D.C. for a short overnight with old friends, who have a two-year-old named Harper. At one point, I was at home alone with the two girls, for about 15 minutes; in that time, Harper began to wonder where her mother was, and peered out the window. "Don't worry," said Cleo, trying to be helpful. "Your mommy will be here now-now."

Now-now? It's a wonderful South Africanism that L. had first taught me, several years ago. In the relaxed tempo of Africa, now typically implies, as a future marker, slow eventuality. If someone promises to send you that letter now, you might get it in a week or more. Just now, meanwhile, implies a heightened urgency: it's on my mind, friend. And now-now is truly emphatic: it implies real imminence. It's what nursery school teachers, for instance, will say to calm crying children who wonder when their mommies might pick them up.

Which is how, more or less, Cleo explained her use of the term, after I asked her about it. "They said that in Sugar and Spice," she told me. Yes. And those passages in Mendelssohn? They played those, or their close cousins, in Scotland.

For the first time

Came across an especially engaging post on Reddit a couple of days ago: a reader who was congenitally deaf and whose hearing aids had given him only the roughest sense of sound was given new, state-of-the-art aids. He was immediately startled, as he walked across the floor of the doctor's office, by the noise of his shoes on the carpet - a sound that he had always assumed was inaudible to all. When a friend came to meet him, the poster was surprised to find that his friend's voice was slightly raspy - a detail that he'd never been able to perceive. And so, that same evening, his friends set about giving him a new musical education, playing Mozart, the Stones, and Sigur Ros in an effort to show him how beautiful, how moving music can be. So, the poster asked the Reddit community: what else should I listen to? What music would you recommend?

It was a twist on a familiar question: if you were consigned to a desert island, which songs would you want to have along with you? Here, though, the idea of a limit was inverted: really, it was as though someone raised on a desert island had returned to the mainland, discovering a wealth of culture to which he now had access. (Or, as one reader observed, it was vaguely comparable to an alien, just arrived on earth, asking for our recommendations). And Reddit responded: with over 14,000 comments, the original post sparked one of the more popular and involved threads I've ever seen online. You can follow them here.

But of course the basic premise of the post - what to teach a neophyte? - isn't really that remarkable at all, from the point of view of a parent. I've already written a couple of times, in Cleo's three years, about the raw opportunity that a child offers, in terms of musical education. Sure, a toddler's responses aren't usually as rapt or as articulate as those of a grown man hearing a symphony clearly for the first time. But, still, there's something both disarming and affirming in hearing Cleo ask, from the back seat, for some Motown.

And yet, it would be folly to pretend that one could be truly exhaustive. Holst in the background, while we play? Okay, sure, perhaps, from time to time. But I have little interest in trying to offer Cleo a strict musical program.  And, anyway, there will soon come a moment when she discovers compositions about which I myself know nothing - and perhaps plays them for me. In other words, the moment in which one first hears, clearly, beautiful music is clearly remarkable. But so too is the moment in which one shares it with someone else.

In practice

Cleo knows, as your Jewish great-uncle might say, from dancing. She can curtsy with the best of them; she knows how to pirouette and spin; she'll sometimes suggest a game that revolves around suddenly stopping, en pointe. In Cape Town, she liked to visit a frozen yogurt store (banana and honey smoothie, please) that played mellow house music, under lights that warbled through a range of pastel colors: typically, she'd start swaying at some point, and her two little arms would become aqueous, expressive tools in the service of dance. Heck, the girl likes to wear tutus in her down time: she loves, like so many kids her age, not merely dance but also the trappings of dance.

Does the video above, taken at Port Discovery last week, show Cleo dancing? Not in the formal sense: there's no routine, no given series of steps. And there's no accompanying music; Cleo's simply moving across a pad onto which are projected images of a lily pad, of fallen leaves. But I'd argue that formal distinctions don't, in fact, make much sense here. The generic background noise of parents, toddlers, and air conditioning units is a sort of music, and Cleo's elliptical orbit, if not precise, is certainly expressive. At 3, in short, Cleo is still at the age where dance and life and music are still seamlessly integrated in both principle and practice. The definitions of the aestheticians will have their day, in time: for now, words, activities and spheres overlap.

Before six

Much excitement, little energy, less time. That's been, more or less, the state of things over the past week, during which we took two intercontinental flights, enjoyed a stay in Olympic-saturated Winchester, arrived home in Baltimore only to watch some of our closest friends move to Wisconsin and Vancouver... and, yes, rose with Cleo for three straight days before 3:30 a.m., in a punishing vigil organized by the priests of jetlag.

But now things are beginning, beginning to feel normal again. Cleo slept until 5:45 yesterday, which felt more than civilized, and while L. tackled the mountain of tasks that had piled up on her work desk, my daughter and I enjoyed a relatively easy summer day in Baltimore. We fed sparrows flecks of bread on the docks, we played Yahtzee over frozen yogurt, we waded in the Hampden swimming pool, and Cleo rediscovered her watercolors, and produced a touching composition for her mommy. Heck, by the end of the day the lawn was even mowed. So, no, we're not Olympic athletes, but after 19 hours of flying we're still standing, and ready to embrace a steamy August.

But we're also slightly different, in a range of ways. L. is aware that she likely won't lead the Cape Town trip next year, and so she's beginning to reframe her view of her job - beginning with an upcoming fall talk on the subject in the Bay Area. Similarly, with my book coming out in less than two months, I'm feeling about for promising new directions - and wait, relatedly, to hear back from Nka about my first piece of criticism on sub-Saharan African contemporary art. And Cleo? Well, she seems to have suddenly grown into a pleasant and relatively well-mannered little lady - who acquired, somewhere in the past two weeks, a new voice that is definitely less squeak than speaking style.

Here's what I mean. Did you see, in a June New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones' characterization of Norah Jones' voice? "Jones," he wrote, "has one of the most textured and tactile voices in pop - it has real heft, even when played at low volume on laptop speakers. Her vocals are a cottony mix of breath and surprisingly low pitches; the voice reassures even before her lyrics sink in." That's about as effective a description of a voice as I've seen, and of course it celebrates one of the most popular voices in contemporary song. I won't try to echo it, then, in describing Cleo's - but suffice it to say that my little girl has recently been speaking in a slightly raspy, reedy, husky voice that seems both to imply an arrival into a new maturity and the residue of life in a continent that left all three of us, at points, a bit feeble. Cleo seems to be in good health - no worries there, we think - but I take the recent change in her vocal tone as governed by something akin to recovery. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote that "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Yes, I think: and it's that persistent strength in Cleo's voice that I heard today, at 5:11, when she strode into our room and said, confidently, "Um, Mommy? Today I slept until six." Such a voice, too, can reassure even before the content sinks in.

Beyond the known

Increasingly, Cleo, you're raising questions that I can't answer. Not the iconic question, yet, about the sky being blue, but a wonderful curiosity - sometimes explicit, sometimes unspoken - nevertheless in other directions. What is that wrinkled fruit that drops from the tree next door onto our steps? Might it be useful to think of bacteria as purple seeds? How does one remedy a slight burn occasioned during the making of the morning's pancakes? And, over the weekend, what are the full lyrics to 'Here Comes the Bride'?

Cleo and I were attending an imaginary wedding in our bubble-wrap dresses when I decided to teach her the traditional entry theme. But, as often happens, the seemingly simple soon turns out to be complicated, and the limits of our adult knowledge are quickly shown to be embarrassingly narrow: we know just enough, it seems, and rarely more. Were you aware, for instance, that the traditional wedding march was composed by Wagner, and is thus rarely played at Jewish weddings, where the composer's rabid anti-Semitism is hardly desired? (Indeed, given that it originally accompanied the motion of a newly married couple into the nuptial chamber, it's sometimes seen as inappropriate for use in any holy setting). Or do you happen to know the line that comes after all dressed in white?

I did not. And neither, it turns out, do many others: it's been parodied many times, but the original is hardly a standard, in full. But, Cleo, should you be reading this years from now, know that your daddy sometimes had the time, the good sense, and the modesty to try to learn from what you taught him. So:

Here comes the bride,
all dressed in white
Sweetly, serenely, in the soft glowing light
Lovely to see, marching to thee
Sweet love united for eternity.

Rules to live by

With the rains now returned, and most of our age-appropriate books thoroughly perused, L. and I are doing our best to come up with new activities that keep the days feeling fresh. A morning croissant at Melissa's, before school? Sure: and it turns out that Cleo likes to place her own orders, with a lively emphasis on the strawberry jelly. That meter of bubble wrap I bought, on a whim, just in case? Made into a pretend wedding dress last night.

Happily, though, we don't have to do all of the thinking, as one of Cleo's grandmas sent us to Cape Town with an arsenal of small gifts that included a sort of time-release capsule, Santa-style: nine tiny presents, each individually wrapped, in a small bag. We've been doling them out one per week, on Fridays, and yesterday, at about 6:30 in the morning, Cleo unveiled a pack of fish-themed playing cards. By 6:33, we were on the floor, trying to figure out the intended rules - see accompanying card - to Fish and Pig. Suddenly, though, Cleo announced her own rule. "If you see a dragon," she intoned, in an almost complete non sequitur, "you can't give a card to a dragon."

All right, then. I'm all for gnomic advice and koan-like aphorisms, and this one struck me as a relative pearl. My favorite, easily, is a sentence uttered by my senior religion professor in an introductory course, in 1989. Although a gentle man, he had a stern appearance, and his fluent command of the difficult anthropological texts that we read intimidated us; so, too, did the rumor that his wife, with whom he lived about an hour from campus, was battling cancer of some sort. And so when, one day in the moments before class, he suddenly said, "On the drive here, I saw horses. They could have been anything, but they were horses," some of us took notice. Was this deep, accrued wisdom, in a form opaque to us? I still suspect that it was.

Are there musical sages who speak in the same vein. Frank Zappa might offer a fair analog. Consider, for instance, this doozy from the man who is arguably the most popular musical figure across Eastern Europe: "Remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best." I like the way in which Zappa moves from a sort of Marshall McLuhan-like stance to a bald rejection of Keats, and then into, gradually, an apparently self-consciously playful tone colored by braggadocio.

Love is not music; they could have been anything; you can't give a card to a dragon. More than enough, young grasshopper, for one blog entry.