Understanding generosity

If you turn to page 643 of the 1955 edition of Milton Cross' Complete Stories of the Great Operas, you'll find an interesting little essay entitled 'How to Enjoy an Opera.' And if you read the first sentence, you'll see this: "To enjoy anything, you must first understand it."

One simple sentence in, and we're already skating, it seems to me, on thin conceptual ice. Is enjoyment really predicated, so neatly, upon understanding? Can the child who enjoys the heat of a summer day really be said to understand it? Is my enjoyment of motoring, on an autumn afternoon, the thinner because I've never mastered the mechanical logic of an automobile? And, if we assume that Cross enjoyed, at some point in his rich life, an evening of complete romance, would he really have claimed to have understood all of the dances, feints, innuendos, and notional distances and genetic tugs that comprise passion?

No. One can enjoy, I think, without understanding. And here's a brief proof, in the form of a first-person account. Today is the anniversary of my grandmother's birthday. Of Scottish descent, and proud of that fact, she was stereotypically Scottish in several senses: she was firmly autonomous, a gifted storyteller, disciplined and hard-working, and always aware of the value of a dollar. Indeed, in the years that I knew her, some of these traits were on constant display, as she lived alone, in the wintry city of Albany, and on a fixed income. And yet, I understood almost nothing about the importance of these factors: after all, when I visited as a six- or ten-year-old boy, I'd never heard of Social Security, and Grandma always set out cocktail dishes full of cheese puffs and nuts, filled the diner table high with meatloaf, and often pushed a recent issue of Sport magazine into my hands when we shopped at Price Chopper. I rarely thought to call any of this generosity - I simply thought of such gestures as typical of Grandma - and I surely didn't understand what they cost her, in terms of her monthly income, or modest personal inclinations. But I know that I enjoyed them: indeed, I still miss them, and deeply.

In recent days, I've encountered a couple of corollary actions that have also centered around generosity, and   an enjoyment that is unfettered to understanding. Outside Starbucks on a recent morning, I sat near a man who begged money of every passerby. "Got coffee," he'd say, "trying to get breakfast." Almost sung, this refrain was repeated frequently, over about ten minutes, until he saw a young woman with a one-year-old, buckling her child into her car. He got up, and wandered over, and, in a tender voice, tried to push a quarter into the mother's hands. "Let me give him a quarter," he said. The mother, embarrassed, politely refused, but she also smiled. Who could have expected such generosity from a beggar? And who could understand such a sudden jettisoning of his immediate goal? But still, his action suggested that the city is not only always hard.

Two days later, I was pushing Cleo on a swing in our backyard, when an elderly neighbor - again, a woman of modest means - wandered over. We chatted about gardening, and weather, and summertime, and then she walked back to her house - only to return again, a minute later. She held a five-dollar bill in her hand, and extended it to me. "For her birthday," she said, nodding at Cleo. "Get her an ice cream." And when I told her that, no, she needn't, and that we simply appreciated her good thoughts, she dropped the bill at my feet and insisted that I take it, even as she apologized for the rudeness of the abrupt gesture.

So tell me, Milton Cross: do you really think that Cleo, who understood none of our exchange, won't enjoy that strawberry ice cream cone?

The Wainwrights and us

In Chicago two weekends ago, I spent a pleasant couple of hours with an old college friend, who is always brimming with ideas, with modish cultural recommendations, and with online links that are worth trying. He's also a dad, and an enthusiastic one, and so his suggestions are occasionally simply infallible - like this one. Wonderfully, too, they're also usually completely novel to me, and so when I'm on my game I actually bring a pad of paper to our conversations. Given that, I was thus surprised (and a mite relieved) when he extolled a song by Loudon Wainwright, an artist I'd actually heard of (I think of him as a pleasant cross between Bob Dylan and Steve Earle). But I didn't know Wainwright's 'Daughter,' which, as Andrew pointed out, has a winning quality to it - a wide-eyed enthusiasm and a wistful poignancy that seem true to fatherhood.

Back in Baltimore, though, I kept coming across references to Wainwright and his even better-known son, Rufus. Rufus, I happened to read, has an equally emotional song about, of all things, the deep love that a girl visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art comes to feel for the art teacher who accompanies her to see the paintings in the gallery.You in the mood for an improbable ode to love? Try these lyrics on for size: "He told me he liked Turner And never have I turned since then. No, never have I turned to any other man."

Where does such a tendency toward on-your-sleeve love and such deep respect for childhood come from? Well, in all probability from no place but the Wainwright family history. Last Friday, the NPR show Fresh Air aired a 25th-anniversary special, with a number of pieces featuring past appearances by musical guests. And among them was Loudon, singing a song that he'd written about his dissolving marriage, for his children - who included a 14-year-old Rufus. It, too, is worth listening to, if only for the opening couplet, which includes the always-intelligent admission that we are merely fragile, fallible, and, yes, stupid creatures, despite our wishes that we could be the strong, capable beings our kids seem to initially imagine us to be. Indeed, might that be why some of us write songs that revisit childhood love and enthusiasm? We may not be what they see - but that only makes us want to see what they see all the more.

Swirling nebula

David Khalili, an Isfahan-born Jew who is now one of the more established veteran collectors of Islamic art, once spoke of his thousands of visual objects in explicitly musical terms. "The collection," he said, "is like a symphony; every object has its note and the combination of them all makes the music."

I like the idea - and I've enjoyed thinking, in recent days, of Cleo's sprawling collection of valued objects in symphonic terms, as well. Her books might comprise an opening movement, characterized by bright coloratura, a vaguely moral optimism, and the occasional note of crass commercialism. Her toys - new Duplo blocks; a kitchen baking set; silly face magnets - could easily constitute the percussive undertones of a second movement. And the flashlight? The Mardi Gras sunglasses? Well, I suppose every conductor has her idiosyncratic moments.

But might there be some actual parallel - some extant symphony that might resemble, in sound or structure, her collection? There might - and Alex Ross' recent description of the opening of Charles Ives' 'Universe Symphony' might seem to offer a relatively strong example. 19 percussionists, writes Ross, and a piccolist, "each playing in a different meter and at a different tempo, generate a swirling nebula of rhythm." I gather that Ives' work doesn't require the symphony to play a stuffed monkey swaddled in a size 5 diaper, or a bed made of blue wooden blocks. But a swirling nebula of rhythm? The parallel seems tenable. You can explore it for yourself here: the music starts at about the 3' mark.

Q.E.D.

As if to underscore the theme of yesterday's blog entry - that is, Cleo's transformation into Lisa, the lead singer of Milkshake - the above greeted me when I got home yesterday. L. and Cleo had been playing with Scrabble tiles, rendering the words that seem most appealing or urgent at the moment. Who's Mikel? Mikel's the lead guitarist for Milkshake, and a longtime friend of Lisa. And Children? Well, Children is me. Aware that every singer needs an audience, and having noticed that Milkshake's audience is comprised almost entire of kids, Cleo recently cast me as the children in her ongoing role play. Daddy, she'll say - and then correct herself: I mean, children...

Hey, I'm just happy to be included.

The real McCoy

Above, because if you somehow sought out this website you'll likely want to know, that's Cleo with her new friend and occasional playmate Cora. Cora's a sweetie, and has shown an ability to weather the suffocating attention and constant caresses that her visits inspire in Cleo. And that ability, in turn, has endeared her to Cleo, whose attention thus redoubles. It's like a closed circuit of constantly increasing adoration: a 2-year-old greenhouse in which the gases of cuteness and instinctive mothering grow ever more intense.

But while Cleo really likes Cora, she's even more infatuated, in recent days, with the notion of actually being Lisa, the lead singer of Milkshake. You'll remember Milkshake: that's the child-friendly band which plays the occasional local concert and which is fronted by an warm, enthusiastic, talented, and tutu-wearing lead singer named Lisa. For a few days after the show, Cleo asked - always very bashfully - to be called Lisa, and if you were willing to comply you could produce a wave of shy giggles. Now that some time has passed, though, the initial novelty has worn off, and Cleo speaks confidently as if she were, in fact, Lisa, or at least a younger version of Lisa. Today, for instance, as we walked past a pair of parked motorcycles she matter-of-factly announced that "When I was a baby I couldn't ride a motorcycle but when I am a singer I will ride a big motorcycle."

She may; she may not. For the moment, though, her insistence on being addressed as Lisa has definitely increased the level of confusion in our home. For not only does the daughter want to emulate the singer, she has also appropriated her mother's name - leading to scenes like one, the other evening, where I casually asked L. if she wanted a beer - only to hear a small voice respond, "Which Lisa?" At the same time, too, Cleo has thus staked out a private level of association with classics such as Corduroy, in which the girl who takes home the curious teddy is named... Lisa. Suddenly, in other words, I'm surrounded by Lisas, and reading a simple children's book can become a deeply fluid exercise in identity exchange.

But so be it. The rewards of the (temporary? After all, for a time she also wanted to be called Joe, after her favorite Blue's Clues character...) name change are significant. Shortly after passing by the motorcycles, we walked into a grocery store. As we were paying for our lunch, Cleo snared the receipt, said, "This is my microphone," and began to sing softly. The checkout woman heard her, laughed, and offered a brief sung verse of her own: "I love you," she lilted, "and you love me."

It was a sweet effort - in fact, the woman could never have known that it bore a close resemblance to Cleo's very favorite Milkshake song ("I love you; I love you; I don't know much; But this much is true."). But only, in the end, a resemblance. When I pointed out, outside the store, the coincidence to my little daughter, she answered in the studied tones of a connoisseur. "Yeah," she averred, "but her song only went "I love you" one time."

Songs are only songs, and they can always be modified, abbreviated, reworded, or mashed up. But to their makers, real or pretend, they're also a serious business.