Fan mail

On Saturday, L. took Cleo and a friend to see Milkshake, the Grammy-nominated, Baltimore-based children's band that's fronted by a woman whose child is an alumna of Cleo's nursery - and, more importantly, whose wardrobe tends towards flamboyant tutus. A good show, I gather: Cleo heard several of her favorite tunes, including the gentle 'I Love You,' and got to sit (and dance) in the front row. At one point, in fact, the lead singer asked Cleo what she'd had for breakfast - prompting, apparently a convulsion of shy gestures from the starstruck two-year-old. "Boogerberry muffins?" wondered the singer, helpfully. No, Cleo replied, cereal and strawberry muffins: a fabrication, but still a relatively coherent answer in the bright glare of fame.

And then, that evening, L. set Cleo up with the finger paints, so that she could create a thank-you note to the band. What wonderful things must land in these musicians' mailbox! Instead of the stock hurled lingerie, or a screamed proposal, they'll receive, tomorrow, a field of rainbow hues and a mom's appreciative note.

Making music might seem to be simple. But, as we learn again and again, the responses that it can provoke are far-ranging, and deeper than you might expect.

Signatures

Happy birthday, Robert Fripp! The experimental rocker is 67 today, and while you may know some of the details of his life - mainstay of the progressive band King Crimson; creator of many of the sounds on the Windows Vista operating system - I'd argue that perhaps you could surmise others from the buoyant signature on the album above. The raw gallows that forms the initial F; the dynamic, centrifugal energy of the first p: the autograph implies an artist who is comfortable rethinking received forms.

But Fripp's not the only one doling out signatures. Cleo - who isn't quite a birthday girl, but who happily tells strangers about her upcoming June 4 birthday party - spent a solid part of today spinning out variations on her name. Here's one of my favorites:

Favorite? But, you point out, the girl seems to be struggling here: the C is backwards, the O is a maelstrom - and of course the whole word runs right to left. Shouldn't this fragment be recycled, rather than celebrated?

And I respond, in turn, by pointing to one of the great masterpieces of Greek vase painting: to the Francois vase, which feature dozens of mythological heroes, including an image of a struggle between Achilles and Ajax. Have a look, if you will, at the labels:

Right to left, left to right: the coursing of text is merely a convention, and conventions are never - insist the progressive rocker, the ambitious vase painter, and the blithe two-year-old - hard laws. Rather, letters are signs: signs of sounds, certainly, but also signs of the deep creativity and imagination of the hand that renders them.

A real mechanical sense

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jack White - labeled by The New York Times as "the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time" - on LPs: "I was talking to Robert Altman before he died, and I asked him about an interview where he said that he would never switch to videotape, that he would always stay in film. He said: 'I know what that is. It has a negative. It has a positive. With videotape or digital, I have no idea what's going on.' That's how I feel about vinyl. The left wall is the left channel, the right wall is the right channel, and you're just dragging that rock through the groove. Watching it spin, you get a real mechanical sense of music being reproduced."

And so from the founder of the White Stripes to the recipient of an Easter basket. Today Cleo excitedly pawed through the contents of a wonderful basket from her grandparents - and, in the process, spent about a minute trying to figure out how to open a small pie tin and tart mold, both of which were wrapped in a plastic sleeve. No easy task, as it turned out, and in the end we had to turn to scissors. But what I like about the following video is the clarity and patience of thought on display: she looks; her hands move almost unthinkingly; she considers another angle. The right half of the brain is connected to the left, and you just drag new ideas through the entire organ. And in the process, give a real mechanical sense of how thought and learning unfold:

Pet sounds

In the checkout line at Whole Foods the other day, I noticed a glossy new issue of Rolling Stone for sale. Collector's Edition! boasted the cover, and it promised, moreover, an overview of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Who could resist, while waiting to pay for a pineapple and pita chips, at least a look? And so I thumbed to the beginning of the survey, and to the purported top ten, where I found a familiar roster of legendary efforts - the White Album; Highway 61 Revisited; What's Going On? - and one odd outlier. Perched (rather precariously, it seemed to me) at number 2 was the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

The Beach Boys? It's an astounding apotheosis. When I was in high school, and an enthusiastic student of the history of rock, the Beach Boys were far from canonical: sure, we all knew Good Vibrations, and California Girls, but the band was generally seen as too glossy, too easy, to be considered a truly historically significant act. The Beach Boys were like Renoir, or wine coolers: sure, they were nice enough, and you didn't mind spending time with them, but they had no grit, no depth, no greatness.

But the story's been rewritten, over the past decade. Brian Wilson's solo efforts have repeatedly veered into openly experimental terrain, and that prompted a number of critics to rethink the Beach Boys, as well - and their music, which sometimes involved ambient sounds, is now often seen as important to the evolution of the Beatles, and others.

So welcome to the club, Beach Boys. And, in your honor, I'll offer a brief top five list of my own. Here follow my favorite recent sounds from an ever-expanding soundtrack of fatherhood:

1. The vigorous, accelerating sound of footfalls at 6:15 in the morning, as Cleo trots toward our bedroom door, to wake us up.

2. Cleo singing along, in the backseat of the car, to Milkshake's "I Love You." You have to listen closely for this - it's like trying to record the utterances of field mice - but the reward is deeply touching, as she hesitantly completes the chorus by intoning "that much is true."

3. Cleo's pish, a sound that she makes to suggest imaginary actions and transactions. If, for instance, you give her a pretend ticket to a pretend train, she may take it and act as though stamping it while uttering a dramatic pish.

4. A variant on no. 1 that manages to be both excruciating and amusing at the same time: Cleo shouting Daddy! in a curt, commanding voice from her little bed, in the dark of the morning, as she attempts to set the day into motion.

5. Cleo's standby song: The Day of the Week. For more than a month now, at offhanded moments, she's broken into a little chant that usually begins with Sunday, Monday, and may or may not reach the end of the week. Sung in a soft but confident and steady voice, it feels more like a talisman than a catalog of days.

All that is solid melts into air

You could swear the girl weighed twenty-some pounds; you remember the pressure of her in your arms; you recall her tight, compact frame, even weeks after holding her. And yet, the photo seems to suggest otherwise: part of her is nothing but a wisp, a blur, a wraith. A few ounces of energy, and nothing more.

That's dad, or Grandpa, holding Cleo about a month ago, at a meeting of Music Together, where Cleo and a gaggle of other toddlers and caretakers regularly assembled to watch the intrepid and vaguely tragic Miriam play her guitar, to shake the rattles and stomp during free play, and to try to inject a dose of ordered, measured music theory into lives often composed of random noise.

But that's also a career classicist who knows well, from reading Virgil, that poor Aeneas, try as he might, will never be able fully embrace his ghostly father when they meet, in the underworld. The old king Anchises' flesh turned to something immaterial - just as the toddler dissolves into watery lines and streaks of light.

At a Barnes and Noble today, while Cleo meticulously put each of the miniature locomotives on a train table into their shelters in a roundhouse, I read the first fifth of The Hunger Games, the teen novel that recently crossed over from cult hit to blockbuster. As you'd guess, it's a quick, easy read - until, at least, page 34, when Katniss, the protagonist and narrator, learns that her lovely, naive younger sister has been chosen, by lottery, to participate in a grim gladiatorial fight to the death. And suddenly, despite being completely alert to the unsubtle tug of melodrama, I felt shot through with cold. What if, I thought, she were taken from me?

Happily, it's a merely rhetorical question in my case: a thought experiment, a grounds for some Aristotelian catharsis. But for Katniss, of course, the question is real, and her response is both immediate and unequivocal: she promptly volunteers to take her sister's place. I will die for you, she decides - and thus follows the lead of - yes, of a hundred cliched love songs, but of millions of parents, as well. We will not, sings the chorus, let you fade away. It's you who is solid; we fathers are content to retreat into something less real, or more grey: into an underworld, if that is what is required.

Thankfully, though - unbelievably, I want to say - it is not required: at least, not yet. And so on this Sunday evening, while L. dined in Washington with old friends, I watched with full heart as Cleo spread an imaginary picnic before me, assigned me my place, gave George the monkey his bib, and then placed him in my lap. We were simply and fully present, in a simple, full meal. At some point in years to come, yes, one of us will be nothing but light, but air, but memory. But on this evening, at least, I was amazed that I could be exactly what Aeneas yearned for, as he closed his arms around nothing.