Monotony

The following being an attempt in which the caffeinated author tries, earnestly, to draw on several of his varied current interests: viz., the 1890s, art criticism and the care of a 3-year-old.

Because, really, that's what the last few days have been made of. Cape Town, of course, is a modern city, with more than its share of splashy cafes and slick design firms. But I've found myself gravitating towards its older traces: towards the city as it stood in the last days of Victoria's reign and in the years shortly before WWI. And so I swim laps in the century-old public pool complex (where signs forbid, among a longish list of trespasses, petting and the preparation of food), and then walk a long block to Hiddingh Hall, the university art library, which stands directly next to a wonderful Egyptian revival structure and which offers, on its open stacks, improbably old volumes by Ruskin, William Morris, and peers. And so I sit down and read them: excerpts from The Stones of Venice; News from Nowhere, and on, and on.

And then I walk up the hill, past the mozzarella bar and the gothic fashion store, and dive into a different sort of pool: the world of imaginative, fluid play. This world has its own logic and rules: yesterday, for instance, Cleo suggested that we skip around the sofa, before augmenting the exercise with small, percussive egg rattles. After a few minutes of skipping and shaking, she paused, and suggested that we build a nest out of blankets and pillows, and tend to those same violently shaken eggs. And then this, in her enthusiastic little voice: "How about Lisa gonna shake her hair and Lisa gonna be silly?" Sure, Cleo, I said: go ahead. You pretend to be Milkshake's singer, and you shake that hair, girl. It's simply nice to see you healthy and happy.

Do the two spheres have anything, though, in common? Not, on the surface, much. But there's this: I can see, in Cleo's play, the same involved absorption that Ruskin and Morris sought in work. She is, as she romps in the living room, as far from alienated as the fulfilled craftsmen in Morris' late utopian novel. But I'd go further than that, in fact, because I'm also fascinated by the rhythm of Cleo's play. I remember, from her first couple of years, regular periods of relative tedium, as I tired of reading the same book, or repeating the same action again and again. But her current pace is more involving, from my point of view: just as I begin to feel a certain monotony setting in, she too seems to yearn from something new, and to suggest a change of course. And the resulting effect is engaging, or even powerful - an aspect that Ruskin, in fact, once noticed in great art and thoughtful music. In "The Nature of Gothic" (a section of The Stones of Venice that was later republished by the deeply impressed Morris), Ruskin wrote the following:

"Monotony after a certain time, or beyond a certain degree, becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it in one of two ways: either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of repeated passages, an entirely new passage is introduced, which is more or less delightful according to the length of the previous monotony. Nature, of course, uses both of these kinds of variation perpetually. The seawaves, resembling each other in general mass, but none like its brother in minor divisions and curves, are a monotony of the first kind; the great plain, broken by an emergent rock or clump of trees, is a monotony of the second.”

May we collapse two separate fields, then? Each turn around the sofa, plastic eggs in hand, resembles the last in general mass, but never repeats it in minor divisions and curves. And soon enough, you're building a nest.

Set list

Even as L. oversees a flourishing study abroad program in public health, both she and I continue to receive an ad hoc tutorial in pediatrics, right at home. After 11 days of antibiotics, Cleo seemed to have triumphed over Lyme disease: she was upbeat and energetic for much of last week, and the tick bite had shrunk to small dot on her ankle. But then, on Friday night, the spots arrived.

Dime-sized blotches that soon bled into larger discolored circles, they covered much of Cleo’s abdomen and legs by mid-Saturday. And as she scratched at them, we went through a ritual that’s no doubt familiar to almost all parents of our generation: the online search for a medical explanation. Soon enough, using various picture galleries and drop-down menus of symptoms, we’d ruled out most of the more sinister candidates, and settled on hives. Usually relatively benign, hives are nonetheless rather enigmatic, and their cause is often impossible to ascertain. A reaction to the many doses of penicillin she’d ingested? Possible? Her body rejecting something in South Africa honey? Also possible. And on, and on: as her doctor told us yesterday, most cases are never entirely explained. Regardless, L. and I were simultaneously comforted to know that it wasn’t something worse, and daunted to realize that she’d have to go on a program of antihistamines.

From Cleo’s point of view, though, the news wasn’t all grim. After all, she doesn't resent medicine, if it tastes reasonable (and here a shout-out to the chemical engineers who developed a vanilla-flavored syrup is the meet and right thing), and she’s never unhappy to spend a day or two in the comfortable confines of home, playing with the parents. So that’s what we did: all Sunday and Monday, L. and I traded off and then joined in together, keeping an eye on her symptoms as we tried to devise new games that can be played with legos, kitchen spoons, and blankets. The spots swelled, the clock turned, and we did the simplest kind of parenting imaginable: playing with our daughter.

But how exactly, you might wonder, does one pass ten hours, and then another ten, with a sick girl? Sure, brief outings to the aquarium and the cable car can help to break up the day. But we really were inside for most of the time, and as game gave way to game I was reminded of the set lists that bands produce before a show. Here's one from a 2010 show in London: care to try to name the source?

Anyway, we moved, like a band, from number to number, and stage right to stage left. Pretending to change diapers on each other gave way to a game of hide and seek; while we were playing that, Cleo noticed her drawing board, and started to draw, alternately, the sun and the moon, expecting me to rise and slumber with each new motif. Then she suggested that we pretend to oversleep, and we spent several minutes trying to rouse each other from deep pretend rest, until her eye drifted to a board game that features marbles, which we spun and rolled, and used as props in a make-believe casino game of roulette. And so on: such a list, I suppose, soon grows tedious, but at the same time it points to the sheer fluidity and variety of play with a 3-year-old.

She's already feeling better - even if, as the rash is receding, she's now contracted a cold. But that doesn't mean - not yet, at least - an end to the show. At 7:50 this morning, we were busy building a puppet theater, whose contours were clear only to Cleo. And this afternoon, that theater will inevitably give way to another, newer idea. The show goes on, and yet it's always also evolving.

One thing

...leads to another. Two evenings ago, as Cleo was carefully pasting the last of a series of sticker puzzle pieces into a two-page spread in her Curious George activity book, I started to fiddle with the remainder of the sticker page - with the pliable, adhesive negative space from which the stickers had been pulled. Tear here, hold there, push against forehead: and suddenly we were masked bandits, or monsters, in search of an unsuspecting victim named L.

Or this. While driving to pick Cleo up from school on Wednesday, I heard the brief, catchy refrain of a pop song on the car radio. "God is a DJ, " the singer happily announced, "and life is a dance floor." Not knowing the source, I turned the analogy over in my head for a few minutes - life as performance; nature as music - and then forgot all about it. Yesterday, though, as Cleo and L. stacked Duplos in the aquarium play space, I picked up a weekend supplement of the paper, and read about a local musician who named as influences Massive Attack and Faithless. I know Massive Attack well, and sometimes play their beguiling 'Teardrop' before classes. Faithless, though? That name required some internet research, and when I had a half hour this morning, I soon found that Faithless - also known, like Massive Attack, for music that draws on trip-hop ad trance - is especially well known for a collaboration with a rapper that was titled... "God is a DJ."

The next step is not always manifest in this moment. But often enough life is rather like a dance, in that one step leads fluidly - instinctively; naturally - into the next.

Inversion

Sometimes the father is momentarily distant from daughter, or even from fatherhood. But never for very long, it seems. Yesterday, after dropping Cleo at her nursery, I spent a happy hour reading about John Ruskin, before ambling down to the Long Street baths, where I swam laps in the aging pool, beneath a crumbling wall painting. And then to the equally colorful (and colorfully named!) Labia movie complex, where I paid my 35 rand and bought a ticket to the 2008 Italian film Caos Calmo. Was that me sitting in the fourth row, alone in the compact theater, with a double brandy and Coke in hand at 11:45 in the morning? It was - and for a few moments, at least, I was more cineaste than daddy.

For a few moments, at least. Because in fact the reason I'd chosen that film was that it revolves around the intense interest a recently widowed father takes in his daughter's life. A successful businessman whose firm is embroiled in a complicated merger, Pietro is sharp in a tie - but soon realizes that he would rather spend his days in the small park outside his daughter's primary school, reading and nursing espressi until her school day is over. Eventually, work and family find him, even there: his sister in law visits him in the park and prods the depths of his grief for his wife; associates stop by to share a coffee and update him on developments in the office. But always he is there, in the park, visible to his daughter when she thinks to look outside her school window.

Even as I enjoyed the film, I couldn't help but feel a slight pinprick of conscience as I watched. Cleo, after all, was in school at that very moment - and yet, if she had looked out her windows, she would have seen only the mountain, or traffic. No daddy, right? Because her dad was sitting in the dark, a mile away, sipping brandy.

But wait, and watch. Near the end of the film, even as Pietro is becoming a minor celebrity for his seemingly unique devotion to his daughter, his daughter asks him for a very specific Christmas present. What is it, he asks? What would you like? She already has a cell phone, and a signed Britney Spears photo. What else could she need? She is specific: her friends at school have begun to laugh at her, precisely because of her doting father. Could you perhaps...? she begins to ask, and he understands perfectly.

And this father, in turn, felt a small crest of relief. We are not meant to stand constant vigil, simply devoted to our children. Instead, it's important - or, indeed, necessary - that we lead full lives, as well, precisely so that we can offer richer examples to our children, or engage with them out of a sense of choice, rather than sheer duty. The presence of a parent can be deeply reassuring, I guess, but constant presence can be suffocating.

Do a morning movie and a double brandy with Coke constitute a rich alternative to constant parenthood? Probably not on a daily basis - but they certainly felt appropriate on this Thursday - especially when I then walked out of the movie theater, and drove up the hill to pick up my little girl, and to take her up, up, up Table Mountain once again, on the cable car. Hand in hand, we looked out over the city, in which mornings spent separately had now converged.

Unalloyed

Sifting through old books in the cathedral thrift store early this afternoon, I came across a volume entitled A Mozart Pilgrimage. Not having heard of it, I flipped to the back, and learned that it's an edited version of the diaries kept by Vincent and Mary Novello. And who were they, you ask? Apparently, they were a music-loving couple who heard, in 1829, that Mozart had run into financial troubles, and who thus set out across Europe in the hopes of giving him some financial aid. And the book is the record of their journey.

Interesting, right? And the opening sentence of the journals certainly sets an inviting tone. "Dear children," we read, "I have now been out a week with the exception of last night have known no alloy to the pleasure of this journey." No Paul Theroux here, folks!


Thrift stores can have many pleasures (not least, in this case, the memory of my grandma working in a rather similarly cluttered and endlessly fascinating church bazaar); among those must be numbered the occasional power of the fortuitous find. For those opening words mirrored my current attitude almost exactly. Sure, we had some tough times last week, and Cleo was certainly out of sorts as her body recovered from the onset of Lyme disease. But she's been nothing but delightful for the past three days: fueled by her a new passion for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (her record, I believe, is five in a day), she's regained the two pounds that she lost last week. She's also grown out of (at least temporarily: but, still, we exhale in thanks) her need for a daily dose of Milkshake videos, and has realized with delight that she can revisit old favorites such as Max & Ruby and the Wonder Pets, alongside her morning cup of warm milk. And, finally, she's regained the general spirit of willingness and enthusiasm that has generally characterized her life so far. As a result, she and I rode the cable car to the top of Table Mountain on a brilliant African winter day yesterday, and split an ice cream cone while looking down over one of the ten cities recently named, by CNN, the Most Loved in the World.


Unalloyed pleasure is rare, especially on the road, and certainly last week was marred by irregularities of various sorts. For the past three days, though, this trip has been nothing other than wonderful.

Father's Day

The weekend began happily, with Cleo emerging from a half-day in school (her first, since she'd fallen sick several days earlier) reasonably full of beans, and with the card, above, in her hand. Father's Day! I can't say it was foremost in my mind, which was generally crowded with thoughts of dosages of antibiotics, passive verbs in Arabic, and the Czechs' upcoming test in Euro 2012, but it turns out that it's actually taken rather seriously here: Cleo's lovely teacher looked me in the eye, and then wished me, sincerely, a very happy day. And then added, Don't let them spoil you.

No, ma'am. For in fact I've found that - for all the beauty of decorated cards and the touching thoughtfulness of mailed wishes - some of the best gifts to this father, at least, are the offhanded ones. For instance, Cleo recently rediscovered her Curious George activity book, and this morning we spent a few minutes carefully composing complicated narrative landscapes using pages of stickers in the back of the book. Approaching a beach scene, Cleo opted for a sticker depicting tumbling surf, and soberly announced that "These are the great waves of Africa." I'm not sure where the phrase came from, but for some reason I loved it - and want to think of it, too, as the sort of gift that falls into a father's lap, as he simply sits and watches.

Or sits and participates. For, after we picked Cleo up from her school on Friday, we drove over the crest of the mountain on whose northern slope our home sits, and then down into Camps Bay, where the sun shone strong, and the sandy beach beckoned. L. had thought to bring several plastic cups, and so for a good half hour we sat on the strand, our casual conversation and impetuous earthmoving projects occasionally offset by the offers of vendors who wandered up and proffered sunglasses, and paintings, and sculptures. Cleo is still recovering, I think, from her bout with Lyme disease, and she was clearly tired, and a bit prickly. But she still dropped, without even meaning to, a number of lovely moments in my direction. Including this one, which L. managed to record, and is all this dad needs for a happy Father's Day, and then some:

On the mend

A good day yesterday, as Cleo rebounded nicely, and spent all of the sunlit hours (and then some) building Lego robots, washing the glass partition in the bath, listening to Richard Scarry stories, pretending to hang laundry, eschewing a nap, and generally Being Three. We'll see where things go, but she certainly seems to be on the road to a full and quick recovery: she's now downing her antibiotics with a cool panache, instead of clamping hands over mouth, and where on Wednesday she had given a curt no to porrected ice cream, suggesting in rapid shorthand the depths of her illness, yesterday she offered a quick and enthusiastic yes. Hopefully, we'll all be able to make the short drive to the warm beach this afternoon, and soon the recent fears and confusion may be little more than a memory.

So perhaps it won't be inappropriate to offer a rather lighthearted anecdote about the act of interpretation and its perils. In last week's New Yorker, Ursula LeGuin remembered understanding, as a child, the phrase child molester as  referring to a specific office, held only by children, that involved retrieving or obtaining moles. If only, we think - but it's easy to come up with parallels in our own experience. Some of mine, in fact, are musical: I remember, for instance, an embarrassing moment in the early 1980s when my brother questioned my interpretation of the lyrics of a then-popular song by Golden Earring called 'The Twilight Zone.' I must have been singing it aloud, and offered a rendition of what I thought was a part of the song: 'when the bullet hits the bone." The phone? asked my brother. I think it's 'the bone.' And, willful as always, I argued at length for my idiosyncratic reading, before realizing later, in solitude, that his had all the force of reason and tradition behind it. Bullets only hit phones, I guess, when shot by moles afraid of the children sent to apprehend them.

So how does this relate to Cleo? Well, as you know, L.'s currently leading a group of students working on public health. And that would seem to explain the large pile of wrappered condoms that sit by our door, like a twisted bowl of Halloween candy. But the crinkly packaging and the allure of the wrapped object have recently attracted Cleo's attention, and she's begun to wonder what, exactly, they are. Um, we say. They're, they're... like medicine. They help people stay healthy. And we thought the point was satisfactorily made until, a few moments later, Cleo approached me as I sat on the couch and announced that I needed to take my pretend medicine - and that I should open wide, for my condom.

All of which goes to show that child molester can have a third meaning, as well.

Struggle

Clouds of pain. Tiny hand to forehead, seemingly unconsciously. A moan, the head lifted a few inches - and then back down on the pillow, and back to sleep. For 20 hours, Cleo's little body simply rested: on a soft bench in a cafe; on our sofa as Portugal frustrated the Danes, on the television, with a late goal; on her bed, under the venerable blanket made by her nanny.

L. and I fret, we wonder, we review the symptoms of Lyme disease and compare them with other possible causes of this feverish lethargy. We're comforted by the tone of the doctor, who was utterly competent and warm as she gently felt Cleo's lymph nodes, and we're encouraged by Cleo's apparent willingness to swallow the antibiotics. But, still, one worries - and so I awoke in my bed at 1, climbed out, and joined Cleo for the rest of the night in a tender vigil, ministering her tiny gulps of water when she awoke for a minute or two.

One worries - but one also has a certain faith. After all, it seems that Beethoven, in 1796, may have suffered from meningitis, whose symptoms can be quite close to those of Lyme disease: like Cleo, he probably fell victim to sharp headaches, to an aversion to bright lights, and to a sustained weariness. True, there's debate about the exact contour of the infection that he contracted - but there's no debate about what he managed to accomplish in the years after. In 1805, after all, he composed the Eroica, prompting at least a few musical historians to wonder if he was picturing himself in the rugged, inspiring framework of the symphony: was the music a tribute to his own fight against sickness?

Cleo, as of 9:08 this morning, has not yet composed a symphony. But she did manage to sit up and to watch a slew of Milkshake videos, and to down a half dozen spoonfuls of yogurt this morning. We'll maintain our vigil, of course, but I hope that she's already on the mend, and we thank all of you who have written with kind words and encouraging wishes.

Twelve minutes of joy

The day before the photo, above, was taken, I read Sam Lipsyte's recent story 'The Republic of Empathy,' and laughed out loud at this assertion, made by a fictional father: "You can cobble together a solid twelve minutes of unconquerable joy a day caring for a toddler. It's just the other fourteen or fifteen hours that strip your nerves and immolate your spirit."

The day of the photo, I used up my allotment of twelve minutes but quick, on the small sandy beach beside the Simon's Town wharf, as Cleo and I used mussel shells to dig small wells: dark cavities in which we hid pebbles, like pirates burying their treasure.

And several days after the photo was taken, I came across W.S.B. Mathews's account of walking into an orchestral rehearsal, and hearing a piece of music that was, in his words, attractively simple in a way that recalled Mozart, but also earnest, in a manner suggestive of Beethoven. Just then, though, "the counterpoint took a turn which was plainly not Beethoven, but surely the work of some late master, and the question was, Who could have done a thing of this kind so delightfully, with such a reserve?" And then the answer came to mind: it was the symphony in E minor by Brahms - a composition that, Mathews concluded, is "genius in its moments of pure enjoyment."

Twelve minutes of joy; moments of enjoyment. Sure, life is taxing, vexing, and only rarely relaxing. Cleo, it seems, contracted Lyme disease from a tick as we few over an ocean, and we're doing what we can to ease her pain and to find a means of treating a condition that doesn't exist on this continent. But such frictions only augment, I suppose, the quality of joy in our better moments. We are often conquered, but those instants of happiness that cannot be overwhelmed are perhaps the more outstanding for our pedestrian defeats.

Lock it up

With Cleo still steadfastly interested in the videos of Milkshake - I reminded her, this morning, of her old friends the Wonder Pets and Curious George, only to hear her respond that George sometimes plays mean tricks - let's take the theme of rock bands on tour a step further. There are, no doubt, literally dozens of cliches and overused images connected to the lifestyles of bands on the road (furniture cast into swimming pools; slow-eyed, starstruck female fans in rumpled beds, under sheets; medium shots of the band, on the tarmac, about to board the plane...), but one of the most enduring seems to involve the raided minibar, or liquor cabinet. This morning, on the third consecutive day of rain in Cape Town, I checked my e-mail, cast an eye at the ballscores, read the paper, and then Googled "lock up liquor rock band" - and was greeted with 478,000 hits.

Joplin, Moon, Bonham, Cobain: you know their names, and you most likely know their vices: gravitational pulls that could not have been thwarted, in all probability, by a simple lock. But hotels tried, especially after the revelry that Moon initiated in a Flint, Michigan Holiday Inn, where his five-tiered birthday cake was soon the very epicenter of a food fight that was eventually drenched in the output of various fire extinguishers. And what hotelier, really, wouldn't fear the sight of an enthusiastically boyish Robert Plant, about to set the Sunset Strip on fire:

Lock the liquor cabinets, boys: let them do their worst, but let's not add fuel to the fire.

In South Africa, though, one finds a different kind of lock. On the refrigerator and the freezer in our lovely rented home, you'll find two small locks, each with an accompanying key. A further sign of the omnipresent fear of home invasions - a parallel to the three panic buttons, and the crisp alarm system, and the high gate? No: or not quite. Rather, as Patrick Flanery explains, in his recent novel Absolution, they're there to thwart any domestic servants - cleaners, or gardeners, say - who might be tempted to help themselves to... what? A piece of cheese? A glass of milk? You can imagine the details; the whole, regardless, is clear: another trace of the endemic inequality that still shoots through this society.

Only here, however, for two months - on tour, you might say - we can partly ignore the deeper complexities of life in South Africa. So we leave the locks unlocked, decorate the front of the fridge with dainty ballerina magnets, grab a yogurt, and sit down in front of another showing of Milkshakes' videos.

On tour

In rain-dazzled, sun-speckled Cape Town, Cleo and I - L.'s temporarily in Jo'Burg, to meet her students - live something like a band on tour. The mornings have nothing to do with our communal performance; just as the Stones or the members of G'n'R would have used mornings to sleep off the previous night's excesses, we split up and take care of our needs. I edit chapters, smooth out permission payments, read about germinate verbs in Arabic, and stare disbelievingly at evidence of another Pirate win; Cleo, I gather, clutches her two small plastic toys as talismans in making her way through another morning of heavy accents and Boer games at daycare. But then, at 2:30, my work and her nap both end, and we reunite, transformed: she into Lisa, of Milkshake, and I into children, her adoring entourage. And, cast thusly, we take the city by storm: cutting out a paper dinosaur at the local library, and seeking out apple cake at the German bakery; splashing in puddles, and learning the ropes of the nearby playground and its treacherous, but alluring, carousel. Only to crash into bed, spent, at the end of the performance - and then to rise the next afternoon, and do it again.