Review; rear view

Tuesday, late morning - and Cleo's still living the holiday dream, as we're parked at a Frederick mall, where L., Cleo, and a hundred other little folks dressed in rainbows and sparkles are taking in an early matinee showing of Frozen, Disney's latest. And why not, after all? There has always been a pleasant loosening of structures, a relaxation of obligations, around this time of year. The peasants looked for the bean in their cake, and ironically called their farmer neighbor king; we savor the closure of our schools' doors, and think about what it would mean to be a princess with an icy gift.

Not that we haven't enjoyed gifts ourselves. We have - and many, and rich ones. The past week offered a stream of happy moments with grandparents, in settings that were often warm or affirming. Cleo laid a rose on her great-grandparents' grave in Arlington National; she savored a plate of fries and fell asleep in the boisterous Christmas evening roar of a French bistro; she enjoyed a sleepover with one set of grandparents and an enactment of the adventures of the three billy goats gruff with the other. And, of course, she was plied with wrapped packages that revealed presents that were generous, creative, and full of promise.

L. and I enjoyed a similar fortune, and so it was in a car slightly weighed down with baked goods, new books, handsome clothes and resonant memories that we set out on an intentionally indirect route home. We visited friends in Winston for dinner, and watched with mild awe as a truly accomplished game of hide and seek took shape without a drop of input from parents. We stayed a night in Roanoke, where an indoor pool and hot tub offered a perfect destination for a blustery early morning. And we bowled a game in Winchester's vast facility, learning in the process that while princesses may have many talents they cannot compete with Viking superheroes in tenpin.

Along the way, in idle half hours and during nap times, I read one of my gifts. Caleb Crain's appealing Necessary Errors is a first novel, and it juxtaposes, in patient detail, the evolution of Prague in the early 1990s and the flowering of a young gay American's sexuality. And while I never spent any time in the equivalent of the T-cafe, I naturally found - as an American who lived in Czechoslovakia in 1992-3, and certainly discovered much about himself in that time - much of relevance in Crain's book. Above all, though, it was perhaps his evocation of a mood characterized by a simultaneous waiver of rules and a basic imminence that felt powerfully familiar. Yes, both Jacob and I sensed that our time there would be short, rather than measured in decades, and both of us wound up returning to graduate school. While abroad, though, both of us understood, on some level, that we were experiencing a freedom and a sort of international generosity that would be difficult to find again, and impossible to repay.

Such a sense took various forms, but one of its most natural manifestations is, I think musical. There are several moments in Crain's novel in which the narrator encounters, unexpectedly, music - music that is both unexpected and ephemeral. The horn players set up in the club; the gypsies play in the shadow of the train station. The music is diverse, and appealing, and moving - and always, also, temporary.

So you can see, perhaps, why the novel made a certain sense to me over the past week. It has been a decade since I was in Prague. But it's only been a few days since I experienced a comparable music, in the form of the irrational and wonderful love of grandparents and friends. Our time is short, and the dull dictates of holiday schedules make that point clearly. Yet another year is about to come to an end. And yet, how simply remarkable it is that we had a year together - years together, in fact - in which to share, to give, to see the castle and to sail under the bridge.

Indeed, it seems that against all odds we may soon have another. Thanks for reading. And a very happy 2014 to you.

Distance

So it's about 3 in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, and a faint shaft of December sun is falling towards the window, and, Cleo, you're in Washington, D.C. with Mom, Aunt Tasha and her family, and Omi and Papa. Meanwhile, I'm in Baltimore, where I spent most of the morning working and playing Santa. I'll see you in about an hour, when you come home on the train - but, still, it's strange to think of you there, and me here. Strange, at least, until I realize that this whole blog is predicated, in one sense, on that basic fact of distance: of us here and friends and grandparents there, and the sheer, stupid gulf between late 2013 and whenever it is when you, too, might read this.

Occasionally, though, distances collapse, and we live entirely in the noble, seamless present. Yesterday was such a moment, for after sending my grades in I had no immediate work to do, and an almost raw desire to spend the day with you. So that was us, sharing a cinnamon roll and printing photographs for Mom's present in the morning; that was us, too, looking up Caldecott winners from previous years at the Towson Library, and wondering, with Mirette, at what it must be like to learn to walk the high wire. That was us laughing in the rain as you tried to hold two umbrellas while I tried to hold you, and that was us at the Science Center, meeting friends from school and engaging in massive pulley-driven tugs of war.

I recently came across an interesting, if uneven, book called Strong Experiences with Music, by an Alf Gabrielsson. It consists in large part of oral accounts of allegedly moving moments, in the anonymous voices of the largely Scandinavian interviewees who experienced them. And while a number of them are worth reading, I'll just point to one, as an illustration; it's a young man talking about his experience at a Mike Oldfield concert in Sweden:

"The first notes almost made me faint… I felt that I disappeared for a moment and then woke up as if in a dream, but all the time aware of the music. In some way I was floating above the audience… It was like a dream, I was floating and the group was playing only for me."

Surrounded by a crowd, and the noise of the concert, he thus somehow rose, and felt both closer to the band, and further from his friends.

It's 3:30 now, and I see that flakes of snow have begun to fall.  You're a half hour closer to home, now, too, but at the same time you're even further from the time that we spent together yesterday. One tries to live in the present, but the present is constantly receding. One wants to be there, but is stuck in the here.

Tchaikovsky

So, yeah, it was 65 degrees - but, still, it was also December 22, and a Sunday, and so Baltimore was peppered with productions of The Nutcracker. L. had already arranged, with the parents of four other children from Cleo's nursery school, to meet at the matinee, and so it was with some excitement that Cleo climbed up into a big, plush seat at the Lyric, traded a few words with Oliver and Mary Anne, and got ready for the show.

But she wasn't the only one excited. After all, Cleo had already seen the ballet performed last year, and she's listened to it at least a dozen times on drives to and from school. Of course, I was in the car for a lot of those playings, too, but had sometimes been swapping news or stories with L., or gathering wool in the driver's seat. More to the point, though, I don't believe that I had ever, in my 43 years, seen a live performance of Tchaikovsky's holiday favorite. And so I, too, approached the show with real curiosity.

Put me down as pleased. Sure, the production was staged by the School for the Arts, and so there were some of the problems that you might anticipate in a high school performance: a few apparent difficulties with synchronization, and perhaps a lack of affect on the part of a few dancers. But some of the dancers  - the Nutcracker himself, for instance - were outstanding, and the music (performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) was utterly rich and professional.

But perhaps the most memorable aspects of the afternoon, from our perspective, involved the reactions of our kids. At one innocuous moment, as ballerinas gathered gracefully in the Land of the Sugar Plums, 5-year-old Forrest announced, in a voice that could be heard for several rows, 'I've got a bad feeling about this.' Cleo, on the other hand, watched in relatively rapt attention until one moment well into the second half of the show, when the Russian dance began and she suddenly turned to us and loudly exclaimed, 'Tchaikovsky!'

That's right, honey. It was Tchaikovsky. And now I have a sense of why parents take their children to see and hear it, year after year.

Evensong

With snow still lying on the ground, and dark descending before 5, each evening poses an implicit question: what to do? Indeed, Cleo's taken to voicing that query in a rather aggressively whiny manner: What, she asks, can we do? Sometimes we point to her toys; sometimes we cite a mantra developed by her grandma ('Read a book. Draw a picture. Eat a banana.'). But note her clever use of the first person plural: at 5:15 p.m., excited to be home from school, the girl doesn't want to play by herself. She wants to be involved.

So sometimes we all cook together. The other night we built a nest out of blankets, and stocked it with plastic foods and an army of stuffed animals. And last night? Last night, Cleo, currently infatuated with The Little Mermaid, wanted to pretend to be the rebellious Ariel, whose open curiosity in the world of humans deeply worries her father, King Triton. So I was Triton, shocked at her missing tail, and she was the princess mermaid who ran giggling and exuberant from our imagined palace and towards the beckoning surface of the water.

Happily, though, this imaginary Ariel also likes music, and wanted some 'loud fancy' music on in the background. And that's a wish that King Triton is happy to honor: indeed, it turns out that Triton enjoys looking through his old CDs. On Sunday, we'd gone to the Walters and had made a small semblance of an oud out of a bowl, cardboard, and rubber bands; as Cleo plucked it, I looked for Hamza al-Din, who plays a similar stringed instrument.

No dice: Ariel quickly complained that it wasn't dancy enough. And she was right: one can't quite squirm or gyrate to Hamza al-Din. So it was on to more upbeat material: to Albert King, to Common, and then to Natacha Atlas. And as we spun around a virtual musical globe, we also spun around the dining room, sometimes chasing, sometimes plucking, sometimes evincing grave disappointment at the princess's all-too-human legs, and sometimes merely improvising.

And soon enough, it was 8 p.m.: that magical hour when princesses start to get ready for bed, mothers choose books for a quiet reading, and King Triton settles down to work on his next day's class.

Stolen time

The snow started to fall in earnest at about 7, but by that point we already knew that it would be a special day. Hopkins had announced that it would be closed, and MICA soon followed suit. Cleo's school would open at 10 - but, come on. This day had snow day written all over it.

Last night, as the snowstorm coasted over the low Appalachian mountains to our west, I read Russell Schriefer's recent essay on a day spent with his aging father. Business happened to take Schriefer to Florida, and he realized that he was only a few hours' drive from his dad, who was in poor health. So he drove to his dad's, and they spent a day together: a relatively ordinary day, in Schriefer's telling (a brief conversation about children and plans for a burial lot; some e-mailing; a dinner out), until suddenly his father's health took a serious turn for the worse. And soon enough, paramedics had crowded into his father's home, trying to restore his health - and then declaring him, all of sudden, dead. On one plane, then, the story is one of loss, of being robbed. But Schriefer cast it in a second sense: realizing that he hadn't even originally planned to spend the day with his father, he felt in retrospect that he had cheated Time, and stolen a day with his father.

That's how I feel tonight. I don't mean to be ominous - indeed, right now Cleo and L. are watching the first minutes of Pocahantas - but in a very basic sense it feels as though I stole a day with my daughter. At a time when I thought I would be teaching an essay by Alois Riegl, I was wrestling and cooking with her. At noon, when I likely would have been eating alone, I built a snowman with her, and took her sledding. And at 4, when I might have been about to pick her up from her nursery school, I was teaching her a song by Twisted Sister and then suspending her from the bed, as we pretended that she was a deep-sea diver searching for pearls.

Time passes. The snow outside is already largely melted. On Thursday, she'll be back in school, as usual (tomorrow is her day off, and we plan to spend it in part looking at the mummies currently at the Science Center). But for now, I feel as though I stole the better part of a day with my daughter.

Thanksgiving

As the snow falls outside and wrapping paper carpets our play room, Thanksgiving can already feel remote, long gone. But wait a minute: it was less than two weeks ago, and a few of the guest place cards that Cleo prepared still stand, ready for duty, on our dining room table. And, to be simple about it, we're still just as thankful today for the things that we appreciated then: family, and home and hearth; a beautiful world that is large enough to evince a consistent wonder. So let's pause, on this December 10, and return at least briefly to the song that Cleo and her Redbird friends sang at their Thanksgiving pageant (and which she performed again, and again, to cornered relatives over the long weekend):

The earth is good to me. And I must thank the earth, for giving me the things I need: the sun and the rain and the apple seed. The earth is good to me.

Earth, you're partly covered today, in a soft, bleached blanket. Our car, this morning, bears a deep scar from another that slid into it, on the snow that conceals you; its door will no longer open and its backseat, in turn, is now covered in a rich tapestry of shattered glass. An appraiser is due to visit. But we are all okay. And for that we thank you, earth.

Music and the city

Ah, faithful reader: you came back, and we love you for it. Willing, apparently, to forgive three weeks of silence, you steered your browser here, and for that, we're grateful. (Or perhaps your Google search for more information on the soundtrack of Pinocchio brought you here - in which case, we're also grateful, and apologetic). We have a vague sense, in fact, that your generosity deserves an ode, a paean, a hymn of thanks. But our research department tells us that in fact you probably don't want odes. You want - well, you want cute pictures of Cleo. And maybe a related anecdote or two. So we'll try to respect your wishes, and instead of offering airy enconia or excuses for the recent lack of original material here (elephant ivory; art and destruction), we'll get down to business.

To Cleo, that is, and to fatherhood, and music. Did I tell you that we attended, two and a half weeks ago, the world premiere of a piece of music written about Baltimore. Indeed: it was part of a program assembled by the Walters Art Museum, which had commissioned Judah Adashi, a 30-something American pianist and composer, to write a work that was somehow inspired by the Book of Fayyum, which is now on display at the museum. So Adashi got to thinking, and the result was the four-movement Inner City, an original piece that consisted largely of pensive, jazz-inflected piano and an overlaid pre-recorded landscape of industrial and urban sounds.

Cleo and I took our seats early in the balcony of the half-filled auditorium, and spent some time testing the bounciness of the folding seats. We thought about how shiny the drum kit on the stage was, and wondered if Adashi would use it (he wouldn't; it was for a later piece). And then we watched and listened, as Adashi began to play: deliberately but emotionally, and imparting a sense that he was trying to channel some energy of the city into the sounds that drifted towards us.

Did he succeed? Well, we were both engaged - for the first two movements, at least, at which point Cleo began to squirm a bit, and we discretely headed for a door. 'What did you think?' I asked her- and learned that Cleo felt that the music 'wasn't as interesting as some music.' All right. But I will say that as we left the museum to join L. for lunch, the city that surrounded us now felt colored, in turn, by the music of the piano that seemed almost to accompany it.

My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?

So now it's a bit colder out, and the playgrounds are more sparsely populated and the  free boat rides about the Harbor suddenly less appealing. In other words, it's time to seek out other pursuits. Exhibit 1, above: the generous sculptures of Franz West, at the BMA. A guard tells me that they are generally instructed to ask viewers not to walk atop their upper ridges. But a 4-year-old who simply wants to sit on them, and giggle? no problem.

But sometimes it takes a little more in the way of creativity. On Monday, I spent much of the day reading Oscar Wilde's 'The Critic as Artist.' In that lengthy dialogue, Gilbert, a witty, iconoclastic dandy of the sort in which Wilde specialized, hopes that he can return to his keyboard, after a lengthy discourse on aesthetics with his friend Ernest. 'And now,' entreats Gilbert, 'let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorak? He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things.'

Curiously colored things? Later, Gilbert also tries to describe how certain pieces of music make him feel. And - well, why not? When we got home, I pulled three CDs, and asked Cleo if she would characterize brief segments of music in terms of colors, and describe how the made her feel. Yes, said my willing subject. So now I offer the results of our first attempt at emulating Gilbert.

1. The opening of Count Basie's One O'Clock Boogie? Orange, fire. And: 'It makes me feel... I don't know what it makes me feel like.' All right, then. So let's try...

2. Renato Carosone's Tu Vuo' Fa l'Americano. Purple. And happy.

3. Ornette Coleman's Broad Way Blues. Brown. Like I'm shouting.

And then, soon enough, she was virtually shouting, playing loudly in the next room after having decided that three excerpts was enough. Meanwhile, I sat in the empty dining room for a few moments, writing down her reactions, wondering about the gulfs between Cleo and Gilbert, and thinking, for the first time, about the way in which Carosone's ballad contains a note or two of purple.

Mental sets

I think I've mentioned it before in this blog, but it's a subject worth returning to: I'm thinking of Sir Ernst Gombrich's terrific Art and Illusion, in which he advances the notion of mental sets. Essentially, he argues that naturalism in art has traditionally always involved a degree of abstraction: the artist, that is, employs codes that are then understood by the reader, or viewer. Marble is not flesh, but we understand that it can represent flesh; the glazed blacks on a Greek vase denote forms and figures simply because they are not unglazed terra cotta. Thus, from such a perspective, an understanding of art depends upon a familiarity with the conventions in play - or, as Gombrich puts it, with the mental set of the culture in which they were developed. And, by extension, the more we see, the more we will be able to understand. A map of the London underground may not make any sense to us at first, but once we realize that circles can stand for stations, and that lines represent rails, we can plot our course from King's Crossing with relative ease.

I don't have a motto, but Gombrich's thesis serves me about as well as any other principle. The more you see, the more you understand. It's one of the reasons I love to travel, and it explains the basic excitement that can still grip me when I have an hour or two free in a bookstore, or library. And, happily, I can see traces of this basic openness to new forms in Cleo, too. L. (who is at least as open to new codes as I am) recently ordered another entry in the terrific Classical Kids series; this one deals with Tchaikovsky's 1891 trip to the New World, where he was to conduct in the glamorous new Music Hall. The story is rooted in fact: indeed, the composer apparently kept a small notebook, in which he jotted down questions and observations about the United States (a sample: 'Things to ask: Is it safe to drink the water in America? What kind of cigarettes do men smoke in New York City? What kind of hats do they wear?'). But it's also partly fictional, and lively; after all, it's aimed at kids.

Or, I might add, at adults who don't know his music all that well. Indeed, I've been delighted with some of the selections, from pieces that I don't think I've ever heard before. The other day, as Cleo and I drove home, I mentioned that I didn't know much of the music on the CD. 'All of us didn't,' came the reply, from the back seat. And then, a moment later: 'If you don't hear it, you don't know it.'

That's right, Cleo. But wonderfully, by the same principle, once you do, you do.

If you could see it

With L. scheduled to present a poster at the annual APHA meeting, we all set out for Boston on a sunny Saturday morning. On the flight up, I sat next to Cleo and told her that she might hear some novel accents. 'In Boston,' I explained, 'they sometimes don't say their r's very clearly.' And, falling back on an especially trite example, I added, 'They might say cah, or pahk.'

Two hours later, we were enjoying some drinks and conversation with our very gracious hosts, Perry and Susie, when Cleo walked directly up to Perry, and asked, 'Do you say the r in car?' Well, yes, it turned out - for he was raised in New Mexico, and never fostered a heavy New England accent. Or that's what he said, at least. An hour after that, as he took us on a driving tour of Cambridge, he happened to mention that the Charles had recently hosted its annual regatta. And Cleo, who had apparently been listening closely, turned to me in the back seat and smiled. 'Regatta,' she giggled, despite not even knowing the word's meaning. 'He doesn't say regatter.'

Well, that's right. But, regardless of accent, we had a happy little trip. In the heated hotel pool, Cleo learned how to use a kickboard, and tossed off about 30 laps, churning her little legs. In Cambridge, we had terrific hot chocolate, and in Somerville, caught up with old friends as Cleo got to try on a Belle-inspired dress. And this morning, with L. at the conference most of the day, Cleo and I tried out the strong Children's Museum, blowing large, drooping bubbles and trying our hand at a mock airplane control kit.

And then three hours later, as the two of us were boarding our plane home (L.'s in Boston for one more day), Cleo began to work the aisle. As travelers settled into their seats, to left and right, she turned to me, and smiled, and said, Cah. Pahk. Soft smiles began to form, on either side of her. Gahden.

By 5:15, we were in our car and on the road home, and as the city gave way to dark, I looked for a CD to play, to close out our short trip. My hand came up with an album by Coldplay, a best-seller that I've never played for Cleo. I told her a little bit about the band, and then skipped ahead to track 7, 'Speed of Sound.' The simple descending chords surrounded us, the stadium drums kicked in, and Chris Martin sang: 'If you could see it, you would understand.'

I think you would. The strangers in seats 7 c and d did, at least. The little girl can kindle warmth, and I'm so deeply happy that I get to spend time with her.

And I did not know

One of the many books that currently form the teetering pile on Cleo's dresser is Rembrandt Takes a Walk, a slightly off-color story of a boy who discovers that the paintings in his disheveled uncle's house can come to life. Ultimately, the boy gets some aid from Rembrandt, who emerges from a self-portrait to help in replacing the fruit in a ransacked Cezanne - but not before donning the uncle's gaudy colored tie.

Today, it was Cleo and I who took a walk, as we strolled southwest from Union Station, checked out the new black box video at the Hirshhorn, and then had a look at Leonardo's Ginevra, the Kahn and Mellon Madonnas (about which Cleo's Papa has written quite thoughtfully), works by Manet and Cassatt - and those two remarkable rooms full of Rembrandts. And while Cleo seemed open-minded about each one, responding thoughtfully to my questions, the self-portrait of Rembrandt clearly surprised her. "And I did not know," she giddily proclaimed, "that in a real museum there was a real picture of Rembrandt."

It's true: seeing something that one has only heard about, or read about, in the flesh can be overwhelming. Her reaction, in fact, reminded me of the disbelief that some early American Beatles fans felt, when they first saw the lads from Liverpool in person. A memory posted on a site devoted to Clevelanders' memories of the band might be taken as typical:

"I was 15 and won a ticket from the WKYC radio station with Jerry G. and the crazy deejays. My mom took me to Cleveland for the concert... I was in the 6th row of the balcony on the right side... practically overhanging the stage!.. It was insane! I was so overwhelmed by the whole evening. I couldn't and still can't believe I saw The Beatles..."

Didn't know; can't believe. And yet the ticket, and the photo above, offer indisputable proof. But there in the background is another sort of trace, or proof, as well. When I pointed to Rembrandt's shadowy darks in the lower left of the canvas, and suggested that we're not quite sure what is even represented there, she wasn't as uncertain as me. "I think," she volunteered, "that that's his tie." That is, the one that he had taken from an unsuspecting uncle, in a book on her dresser back home.

Autres dessins beaux

Folks, you can try Googling "drawings by Mozart," or "drawings by Verdi," but you won't get a single hit. Beethoven created some wildly beautiful scores, but he doesn't seem to have left a single sketch, of a more conventional sort, behind. Composers who draw, or drew, are flatly rare - which perhaps makes the John Cage piece pictured above ('River Rocks and Smoke,' 1991) all the more satisfying.

And which suggests, perhaps, that little Cleo may never grow up to be a composer. Because, you see, she is currently leaving a mad wake of drawings behind her, wherever she goes. Is the living room eerily quiet? It's probably because she's holed up again with her big bad of markers and crayons, and is hard at work on yet another dense composition featuring a family of bunnies, or sprouting flowers, or Rapunzel's tower, or rough approximations of labels.

But why tell, when I can show? Take this, Beethoven: here's a gallery of drawings by Cleo - a phrase that should now yield, when Googled, at least one hit.

Bons mots (et dessins)

Cleo's generally a pretty focused kid these days; she can really bury herself in a princess book, leafing slowly through the pictures and quietly mouthing an accompanying narrative, and it's not unusual to find her spending ten minutes or even longer on one of her sprawling, colorful drawings. Heck, the girl even got engrossed by a nature video (African Cats, a beautiful film about African lions and cheetahs), in sections, over the past few days.

Such concentration can be fun to watch, even if it's also a touch isolating: she is, momentarily, in her own world. Occasionally, though, a stray comment or sung line will give a bystander a rough sense of what she's thinking about. Just yesterday, for instance, she and I were sitting in the car, waiting as L. dropped off her computer, for repairs. Cleo was quiet for a few moments, and then started to clap with the music on the radio. And, suddenly, after clapping rhythmically for a bit, she brightly exclaimed, in an apparent reference to herself, "Keep the beat up, sparkle girl!" And then, from a slightly different perspective, and in a reassuring voice: "Very good, class."

Very good, indeed - for if Cleo is happy doing her thing, she's also pretty neatly convinced that she does it well. This morning, for instance, she sat down purposefully with her markers and crayons, and produced a dynamic drawing of Rapunzel, in her tower, flanked by the witch and by a prince concealed by a tree. When she finished, she showed it to me, and proudly proclaimed that she is the best drawer in the world. "Well," replied her rather dully literal dad, "there are a lot of good drawers in the world." And she, unfazed: "But I get letters. I creep downstairs, and open the mailbox, and get lots of letters from people saying how good I am."

Well, then. Turns out she's not alone at all, even when she appears to be. Very good, class.

Why, indeed

Fourth Tuesday of the month, folks, and you know what that means: Brews and Board Games, at The Wind-Up Space. Cleo and I showed up with our copy of Enchanted Forest, and as soon as we began to set it up a pleasant 40-something man, a father of two, asked in: he was wondering if it might be a game that he could play with his kids, as well. Well, sure. As long as you're willing to put up with our slightly modified rules, and missing trees.

Before we joined the gamers, though, we stopped by Joe Squared for a terrific olive pizza. Cleo was in a great mood, and we checked out upcoming bands' posters, watched a minute of The Simpsons, and started to take in the background music. 'Why,' I decided to ask her, 'do you think they play music at restaurants?' And she, in turn: 'So that you can enjoy the restaurant and have a good time and not have to play with your forks or knives.'

Yeah, that's probably fair. But playing with fairy tale-themed cards and plastic trees? That's cool, too.

Memory and improvisation

In his celebrated study The Mind of a Mnemonist, the Russian psychologist A. R. Luria tries to explain the means by which a Jewish journalist managed to astound European audiences in the 1930s by memorizing vast swatches of text, or series of numbers. Onstage, he would ask the audience to generate a series of words, which he would then recite, methodically, back to them. Hoping to stump him, audience members would sometimes bring sadistically nonsensical or difficult fragments - or, in one case, the first quatrain of Dante's Divine Comedy - in its original Italian. And yet S., the mnemonist, correctly repeated the medieval Italian - even though he knew no Italian at all.

How did he do it? According to Luria, he asked that the words be read clearly, with pauses between them; as they were read, he quickly developed a mental picture that incorporated details that were predicated on the evolving passage. These could vary widely, but in the case of the Divine Comedy, they happened to be, initially, musical. Let's listen in, as the mnemonist explains:

[First lie]
(Nel) - I was paying my membership dues when there, in the corridor, I caught site of the ballerina Nel'skaya.
(mezzo) - I myself am a violinist; what I do is to set up an image of a man, together with Nel'skaya, who is playing the violin.

And so on. But the kicker? He was still able to remember this image, and to recite the text correctly in full, fifteen years after initially memorizing it.

Over the past few years, I too have been forced to do some rather involved memorizing - albeit of a much more modest nature. Several of Cleo's puzzles depict gathered Disney princesses: Belle, Jasmine, Snow White, and so on. Cleo, of course, knows each on intimately by now. But her dad - not so much. Sure, I can identify Snow White, and I know Belle through her fiery hair? But Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty? I tended to get their generic beauty confused, until I finally set my mind to it: Cinderella wears blue, and Sleeping Beauty pink. Behold: the mnemonist at work.

I'm kidding, of course; learning two minor details is hardly a feat. But I am struck, in thinking about it, at how Cleo's sense of memory can work much more unconsciously than mine. I set my mind to it, and learn the colors of the dresses. Cleo, meanwhile, seems to relate more abstractly to her memories. Often, when we return to a site that we haven't visited for a few weeks or months, she'll ask to do exactly what we did when we were last there. At the Towson Barnes & Noble, we sit on the floor, against the south wall, and read. Golden West is the restaurant at which each meal ends with a York peppermint patty. And so on: it's not quite a conscious process, but rather a re-enactment of deeply embedded memories.

That said, though, it's not as though each of her steps is pre-ordained. Far from it. And as a demonstration of that assertion, I offer the video above. Cleo has sat at pianos dozens of times, and generally tries to bang out a series of notes as loudly and as quickly as possible. In a lounge at Johns Hopkins last week, though, she tried something new, something unremembered, something improvised. And I like, I have to say, the result.

Vibe people

So maybe you already saw John Seabrook's piece, in a recent New Yorker, on Lukasz Gottwald. And so maybe you know that he goes by the moniker Dr. Luke, and that the guy is on a real run when it comes to composing pop hits. Maybe you even knew some of them: Katy Perry's 'Roar,' perhaps? And maybe you were interested enough to read through the third paragraph, where you would have seen Dr. Luke defining his role as a vibe person. Vibe people, he tells Seabrook, don't write lyrics, or even music, in a traditional sense. Instead, they "know how to make a song happen, understand energy, and where music is going, even if they can't play a chord or sing a note." Vibe people, in essence, nudge ideas for songs in a direction that makes them more listenable, more memorable, more infectious. They give them life.

I like the idea. And the more I think about it, the more I think that we vibe people probably exist in all walks of life. Kerouac's Dean Moriarty, full of charisma and a productive disdain for convention? A vibe person. That old guy in the cap at the Berkeley Springs McDonald's on Saturday mornings, who keeps the chatter of the senior citizens going with his brief utterances and clever quips? A vibe person. Jean-Michel Basquiat was, I suppose, a vibe person; so, too, was Khalid El-Amin, the now-forgotten point guard for the 1999 UConn men's basketball team that won the national championship. They knew how to make it happen; they understood energy.

Is Cleo a vibe person? I suppose that all four-year-olds, to a certain extent, are. They seem to know where music is going, even though they can't play a chord. And even when they've had no training in mark-making, in composition or contrapposto, they seem to have a native instinct for the balanced and the dynamic. Or, at least, that's what this happy father thought when he saw the page of sketches above, which Cleo drew up as her dad read, one chair over, in a lounge in a Johns Hopkins science building, where young men and women training to be physicists and robotics experts ambled to and from class. Rules and systems, as the students knew, have their value. But that value lies at least partly in the fact that it can produce the architecture, or the environment, in which vibe people work.

No matter

A very good stretch, these last two weeks. Cleo is slowly learning to read, and can string together several short, simple words at a time. She's got some good friends, and they generally play well together, dashing off to devise narratives that are usually long on princesses and costumes (if a touch short on traditional cohesiveness). And she remains curious about the world around her. Yesterday, as watched a cartoon version of the Babar story, she asked if the accompanying music was by Mozart. Well, no - but I love the question.

Put some of those tendencies together, and occasionally you get a delightfully surprising new burst of creativity. The other day, feeling heady after a good day, Cleo started to sing a song that she's made up precisely to convey her sense of unflappable confidence. You can see the result, re-enacted yesterday, above; hope you enjoy.

Collaboration

In David Byrne's wholly enjoyable How Music Works, he refers smilingly to an article in Pitchfork that held that he would collaborate with pretty much any musician, for a bag of Doritos. Not quite, says Byrne - he does, he insists, have some standards. But in the end he winds up acknowledging that working with others has always been important to him.

Cleo, meanwhile, doesn't even know what Doritos are yet. She does like cucumber wedges, and pita chips - but doesn't require either, when it comes to collaboration. In fact, she's pretty much willing to play with any peer who comes along - just as long as they're not heads taller than her, or too many years faster. Yesterday, when I arrived at her nursery to pick her up, she shot me a firm look, and announced that she wanted to stay, and to play. And what was so involving? She and three other little girls were dressing up, assembling mock bouquets, and preparing for a wedding. It turned out that there was only one spouse - Cleo, in this case - but the others busied themselves nevertheless with their own roles: one was a flower girl, and one was a mother to the flower girl, and so on.

And above, an image from Sunday, when she and Jasper turned sticks in a park into swords, and navigated their way through a complex impromptu narrative involving a knight and a princess. The two chopped, and shouted, and consulted one another, and gamboled. Finally, they sat down, weary, and asked if we had any snacks. We did: Jasper's dad, it turned out, had a pumpkin cupcake on hand. And so, all of a sudden, the two collaborators were happily chewing - not on Doritos, perhaps, but in a manner that only confirmed the value of working together.

There must be more

Yesterday morning, with a handsome fall day stretched before her like a sail, Cleo opted to kick things off with a return to the classics. She chose, that is, to watch 25 minutes of Beauty and the Beast, which was one of her favorite videos back in the spring, but which had since given way, in her video rankings, to more alternative and more surreal offerings (like the episode of Magic Schoolbus in which the kids take their bus into the throat of a sick Ralph). Anyway, as she watched in a warm pair of inherited ballet-themed pajamas, Belle's small village took shape before us, and Belle began all over again to chafe at the associated limitations of life outside the city. Sure, she has her local library, and, sure, her dad is a lovable inventor - but, still, there are times when a girl wants something more, well, cosmopolitan. Or, as Belle puts it in a song that Cleo then echoed minutes later while gliding through the dining room, "There must be more than this provincial life!"

And, indeed, there is. The opening section of the movie was over by 7:45, and the rest of the day still lay before us. So: what can one find to do on a Sunday in a city of 600,000? Quite a lot, it turns out. The first order of the day was a sunlit table outside a cafe, where Cleo painted and L. and I actually got to read some of the Sunday Times. A few games of Crazy Eights and dominoes acted as an interlude, before we drove to the Walters, where Cleo manufactured a Japanese-inspired book binding and then toured the early medieval section with me, before posing for this photo:

Next, it was on to the city's book festival, where she hand-colored a Wonder Woman mask, and then to Druid Hill park, where she and I gamboled, played keep-away with two balls, and eventually met up with her classmate Jasper, for some impromptu narratives involving a princess, a knight, and two large swords.

Soon enough, it was 6:00, and the sky was beginning to look slightly like the peachy vault behind Belle, above. So we packed up, drove home, and met Mom, who'd taken in a play and attended a book club meeting. In time, we would watch another section of Belle's story. But for a time, I thought that our day had functioned as a neat embodiment of Belle's own aspirations. The city provides, on many levels, a respite to ennui. And we who live in it can thus only fantasize about characters who wish for much broader horizons.

Decisive moments

As a boy, the photographer Cartier-Bresson seems to have been interested in a career in music; frustrated, however, by the demands of that field, he soon took up painting, at first under the direction of his own uncle, Louis. By the late 1920s, Cartier-Bresson was enrolled in an academy - where he began to see, and to show interest in, contemporary photography; he began to traffic with the Surrealists at the Cafe Cyrano, and then met Harry Crosby, who encouraged the Frenchman's interest in film. Life, to be sure, intruded on any purely artistic interests: Cartier-Bresson had a lengthy affair with Crosby's wife, prompting Crosby's suicide - and then, too, after Caresse ended the affair, Cartier-Bresson's flight to Africa. Feverish and near death in Ivory Coast, he wrote home and asked that he be buried in Normandy, and that a string quartet by Debussy be played as he was interred.

But he didn't die. Instead, he made his way back to Paris, where he was soon struck by a 1930 photograph by the Hungarian reporter Martin Munkacsi:

Depicting three boys on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the image delighted Cartier-Bresson, who later recalled: "When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, Damn it, I took my camera, and I went out into the street."

And the rest, as they say, is history. Cartier-Bresson soon became renowned for his street photography - or, more precisely, for his ability to capture what he called the decisive moment, or that creative fractions of a second when the elements of a scene converge into something especially meaningful. In the image at the top of this post, for instance, the soft rhyme between the rippled water and the iron hoops, and the poetic match between the leaping figure and the dancer in the posters beyond suggest an insistent unity that is not at first wholly evident.

I'm no Cartier-Bresson. And Cleo's never seen Lake Tanganyika. But at about 5:35 yesterday, she leaped, and I clicked. Was anything decided, in the moment? Likely not. But look: she flies nonetheless, in a manner that loosely recalls both the suspended jumper of Cartier-Bresson and the exuberance of Munkacsi's youths:

And then suddenly

And then suddenly it's late September, or week four of the fall semester, and somehow the steady demands of life have yielded a gaping hole in this feeble attempt to create an online record. A week, two weeks: they melt, they evaporate, they - well, instead of grasping at verbs, let me quote from E.P. Thompston's famous "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," which I read today as a stunning sun arced overhead:

"[D]espite school times and television times, the rhythms of women's work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock. The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of 'pre-industrial' society."

Well, um, yeah - what he said. Only I'd like to see E.P. broaden his pronoun choice at least slightly, because any dad who has attended to a diaper change, or served up a snack between two other snacks to a hungry four-year-old, will also know the sensation that he's describing. 1:30? 5:30? A few days? Two weeks? Due to my cell phone, I always have a clock on me. But when I'm with Cleo that's not always the most relevant way of measuring time.

And yet we get by. Every now and then I sit down at our ancient piano and slowly shape arpeggio chords. Almost always, Cleo runs to join, leaps up on the piano stool beside me, and claims roughly 75 of the 88 keys as her own. She also introduces, inevitably, a new rhythm to my sluggish composition. 4/4 time gives way to something polyglot, something unmeasurable. But, too, I always end up smiling at the fresh chaos. No metronome would condone it, and yet. And yet.

So, yes, it's been 17 days since our last post. But now you know why. We've been attending to other tides.

We have a book

And, speaking of transformations, Cleo utterly surprised me yesterday on a walk home from the light rail stop, when she began to tell me about a book that she's enjoyed at the nursery school - and then, seemingly out of the blue, rendered the title in an ominous, dramatic voice almost worthy of a Hollywood trailer (well, if Hollywood trailers were commonly voiced by 4-year-olds). I asked her to lay down a version for posterity, and you can see it above; when I showed it to L., we both agreed that it seems to offer a window into what our girl will look like, or into how she might move and gesture, years and years hence.

Magic, in your hands

Open the rear passenger side door. Wait for her to climb, carefully and accurately, up onto the sideboard of the car, and then onto the lip of the seat; watch her pivot, and settle into the car seat. Gently wrap the safety straps around her obliging, dutifully raised arms. Click the latch. Walk around the car, slide into your own driver's seat, turn the ignition on, begin to move, and listen for the little voice, from the back: 'May I please have my Mozart music?"

It's a sweet request, and usually sweetly worded - and it refers to Cleo's current favorite CD, a creative retelling of The Magic Flute, in which a young girl whose mother plays the role of the Queen of the Night in a local opera company mistakenly wanders into the enchanted setting of Mozart's libretto. Carrying nothing but a flute, she's initially terrified when she encounters a knight errant fighting a dragon. But she quickly learns that in fact her flute bears special powers, which allow her to navigate a richly strange new realm.

Occasionally, the CD involves snippets of the original opera, although the sung words are altered slightly, and sung in contemporary English. Still, it's neat to see Cleo's enthusiasm regarding a relatively ancient work of music, and I'm occasionally shocked at the depth of her understanding regarding the motives of secondary characters (is Papageno courageous, or not? All you have to do is ask the back seat, and you'll learn the answer). Above all, though, I'm touched by the way in which the CD casts magic as the natural province of children. The world of magic, in this production, is democratic; it's always at hand.

And, occasionally, that sense then spills out of the car, into the world at large. A few days ago, on a lambent Wednesday afternoon, I took Cleo to a local creek, so that we could pretend to be the dwarves, looking for Snow White as they return from a day of mining. Along the way, though, she told me that she happened to have a number of treasures in her two small dress pockets. And sure enough: when I asked to see, she soon pulled out the trove that you see above, laid out on a rock in the middle of the coursing water. Plastic bear, cardboard mirror: the world of magic is never, it seems, as remote as we might first imagine.

De do doo doo

And sometimes you find yourself poking around online for lists of good songs with nonsensical lyrics. And when you do, you count yourself lucky when you stumble on this one, with brief glosses, pertinent defenses of the value of silly syllables (Sting, on how the simple can be powerful: "Why are our favorite songs 'Da Doo Ron Ron' and 'Do Wah Diddy Diddy'? In the song [De do do do, by The Police], I tried to address that issue"), and embedded videos. Consider the issue addressed.

But don't consider it exhausted. Cleo likes to sing, too, and sometimes the results of her improvisatory effort are - when they're not baffling - deeply entertaining. You might here a laconic commentary on her decision-making process, or a dirge about being bored, or an ode to a prince. Of course, none of that is really very nonsensical; rather, a theoretician might say that she's crafting positions, or testing possibilities. Point ceded. But surely there's an element of pure, silly play in some of her iterations, too. After all, she's four - and, as we saw yesterday when we got her together with a fellow Redbird, silliness is the current rage. Dadaist knock-knock jokes, absurd noises, and daring claims that these tiny people will poop on our crowns represent, at the moment, the height of humor and joy. A couple of weeks ago, Cleo took to calling, jubilantly, her uncle a sillybottom. But while she shrieked with laughter as she said it, the term wasn't solely funny; rather, it was also clearly a term of deep endearment, in its very application. Why is 'Da Doo Ron Ron' so durable, as a song? Because we're all, at some level, sillybottoms - and some of us even more than others.

What we learned

With summer winding down, Cleo and I drove out to West Virginia for a last splash of hot weather, wading in springs, and looking for dragonflies. And now we're back, class, to report on what we learned. I'll boil it down for you, real quick:

1. As you can see in the photo above, Cleo learned - from a gregarious 5-year-old boy who was both self-promoter and generous teacher - how to pump vigorously enough on a big-girl swing to keep herself going indefinitely. Wonderful it was to step back and simply watch her arch her little body to generate the energy needed for a good session.

2. I learned that fairies are, well, complicated. This morning, shortly after she woke up, Cleo looked lost in thought. Her brow was furrowed; her posture frozen. So I asked her, building on what I saw, 'What's the hardest thing you can think of?' And she, in turn: 'Fairies.' Ah, I thought, but wanted to know more. 'Is it because they're hard to imagine,' I continued, 'or because they're complicated.' 'Complicated,' came the answer, as sincere as can be.

3. And, finally, we both learned about life, from the local country station. As we drove home after a picnic o a field near football and cheerleading practice, we turned the radio on, and promptly learned that one singer couldn't forget the object of her love; that another's love went on, and on, and on, and on, and on; and that sometimes you've got to sing like you're not getting paid, and dance as if no one is watching.

Or swing, we now think, as if summer just might never end.

Transfers

With a very pleasant week at a North Carolina beach now in our rear view mirror, and the realities of I-95 in our near future, it's hard to forget a simple fact: we've spent a good deal of time in the car of late. Much of it has been, of course, utterly pedestrian, but some of it has been surprisingly beautiful. About 10 days ago, for instance, after dropping L. off for work, I turned to Cleo in her car seat, and told her, perhaps just a bit too meaningfully, that I loved her. 'You don't have to say that,' she immediately replied. Wondering if she was somehow embarrassed by my emotionalism, I asked her why not. 'Because,' she answered, 'I already know it.'

That's a comforting answer from any angle, but it touched me especially because I'd recently heard a related song. It was on my ancient IPod, which is chock full of tunes from the 90s - including the weirdly frank and disarming 'Sleeping Bag,' the best-known song by Paw, once heralded as the next Nirvana. Most of Paw's music was rather straightforward aggressive, Southern-tinged garage rock, but this song was different; in it, the singer described learning that his brother had been in a car accident. And so, he howls, 'This is pretty hard. Cuz you're my only brother. And I can't say I love you.' Why not? we wonder. Is this some code of cool, gruff macho silence between brothers? No: rather, his brother, laid out on a gurney, simply can't hear. And so our narrator begins to feel almost responsible, in his grief, for the accident: 'And the tears in my eyes Make the road all wet And hard for you to drive.' The one who wasn't driving apologizes, ironically, to the one who was.

Tomorrow, of course, it'll be me, apologizing to the one who's in the car seat. Are we there yet? No: it's still five hours, or more. But I've got an ace up my sleeve. Beneath the new activity book, below the volume of connect-the-dot pictures, is a pirate transfer design. Don't know transfers? They're like stickers, only you scratch them onto a laminated background, to compose a picture of your very own creating. And Cleo's no different from the 8-year-old me in loving them. In fact, her delight in learning to use them on the way down was so evident that she doesn't even have to articulate it. I already know. And I'm betting that it'll make for an even better time in the car as we head home.

Old wine in new skins

So Cleo and I dropped by Artistic Costumes and Dance Fashions the other day, and ordered up a tiny ballerina outfit, in preparation for her eventual free weekly classes with Dance Happens, a loose collective of small people who like to spin (and parents, if we're being honest) who like to watch them spin. Cleo then took a part of that outfit for a test drive last night, as Keith Jarrett played in the background.

Swingin'

For the past few days, our DVD player has housed a borrowed copy of Toy Story 2, the surprisingly strong 1999 sequel to the Pixar blockbuster. It's an appealing film for a variety of reasons: Jessie, the cowgirl, adds a degree of complexity to the roster; Woody and Buzz affirm their friendship by working hard to save each other, in turns; the composed parodies of outtakes during the credits are both silly and clever. And above it all soars Randy Newman's adroit soundtrack, which moves deftly from a retro-swing evocation of a 1950s t.v. Western to, briefly, backing overtones of a crooner ballad.

Cleo, of course, is too young to know her crooners, but such references are already inevitably familiarizing her with the form. And I, meanwhile, can recognize the references on a generic level, but don't always know the precise referent. At least, that's what happened two days ago when, after dropping her off at school I sat down in a coffeehouse to read and found myself next to the house record player, from which Frank Sinatra's voice confidently boomed.

'Make it mine,' I heard, as I looked up, interested. 'Make it mine!' And then nothing but the placid, slightly wobbly turn of the record and the diminishing tones of the song.

If you're more clever then me, you may already have recognized the source: it's 'Three Coins in a Fountain,' one of Sinatra's bigger hits. At the time, though, the specific details mattered less to me than the realization that I was in my daughter's shoes: newly exposed to a classic, and only beginning to learn the rudiments of a beloved genre.

Make it mine, Frank. And she, in time, will make it hers.

Without declaration

Did you happen to read about the discovery of a 59-page letter summarizing many of the composer Mahler's most intimate relationships? Yowzers: while some of the language used by the author of the letter, a viola player and friend of Mahler's named Natalie Bauer-Lecher, tends towards the euphemistic, some of it is downright steamy. Take, for instance, her description of her own affair with Mahler:

"As we were immured in the very narrow room and isolated from all the world in fervently animated Scheherazade-like tales, up until the graying of the morning, we unfolded our entire lives before each other. Without declaration, question, and vow, our psyches and physiques melted into each other."

Well. As the critic Max Graf wrote, of Mahler's Tristan, such passion had been unheard of in Vienna. The leaf, perhaps, does not fall far from the tree.

Anyway: here at Half Step, we like to keep things more solidly in the G range. And yet, despite such basic resolutions, even we sometimes stumble onto declarations of passion. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, we arrived at Bolton Hill Nursery to learn that Cleo had married one of her classmates, in an elaborate ceremony that included an exchange of rings. In piecing things together, through the varied accounts offered by Cleo, a classmate and a teacher, we learned that Cleo had told the boy (a fine young lad named Oliver) that she loved him; he'd responded by offering that he liked her head. And then he failed to show up for camp the very next day.

But Oliver's unintended treachery (I assume his family was on vacation) was nothing compared to my own, in Cleo's eyes. Deep in another princess story the other day, I thought I would point out that princess can, after all, marry princesses - at least in 15 countries around the world. And princes: well, they too can choose. Yeah, said Cleo, and I'm going to marry you and Mom. Well: while I liked the feeling behind the thought, I wasn't sure how that would work, exactly, and - surely pushing my role as source of facts about the world a step too far - noted that the list of countries acknowledging those unions would be even shorter. And Cleo, bless her heart, burst into momentary tears. But I just want to marry you, she said, crying into my lap.

I can't say that our physiques melted into each other. In fact, they didn't. But we did make up quickly, and, recomposed, headed out to pick tomatoes in the garden, back in the world, far from immured, and delighted with each other's company.

Sometimes

Sometimes the most beautiful music is music unadorned, music unarranged - music that's not even, perhaps, music. The patter of raindrops on the porch roof in the middle of a summer night. The rip of water, as Cleo jumps ambitiously into the mushroom pool against a background of untrained chorus of playful shrieks. The sound of L. to Cleo reading softly in the quiet hour before bedtime. Or, yesterday, the focused silence in the Toyota's back seat, as Cleo worked on her magnetic drawing board, before suddenly producing this sweet emblem of musical notes emanating from a flute: a silent, static melody that grew out of a brief ride on the highway:

Spaghetti heads and air heads

You might recall, you insightful and voracious reader you, that a few months ago I wrote about Cleo's fondness for a CD called Beethoven Lives Upstairs. Part children's story, part musical lesson, and part Viennese promotional literature, it's an appealing fictional epistolary account of a young boy's growing fondness for the quirky but talented composer who lets a room above his house. But it's also, it turns out, part of a series, and due to L.'s attentiveness and diligence, Cleo's now moved on to another entry in the group, called Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery.

Arguably, it's even better. It's certainly more relevant, as it's set in Venice, and it's fun to hear Cleo joyfully repeat references to monuments (such as the Bridge of Sighs) that she saw in person only a few weeks ago. It also does a nice job of integrating samples of Vivaldi's compositions with the story, which is a mystery that centers upon a talented orphaned girl with an unclear past. And, finally, it can also be rather funny - at least, on a plane that appeals to your resident four-year-old. Whenever Vivaldi chides his forgetful students for acting like spaghetti heads, I can hear a small laugh in the back of the car. The laugh, in turn, eventually gives way to experimentation, as Cleo tries to find comparably silly insults that can provoke a smile without being censored by whichever parent happens to be the target. Butt head? Not acceptable. Table head? Well, okay - although it leans towards the nonsensical, it's at least a funny image.

So imagine Cleo's delight when I taught her the phrase air head. I did it self-mockingly, after forgetting for the fifth or sixth time to unbutton a sun dress before trying to pull it over her head. I'm an air head, I said, and she immediately repeated the phrase.

But I think that Cleo, like Vivaldi, knows that terms like air head and spaghetti head are ultimately terms of affection more than they are degradations. At least, one of her recent pronouncements seems to imply as much. A few days ago, as I was buckling her into her car seat, Cleo looked at me meaningfully, and said, 'You know, you guys aren't dumb. And you're not mean, either."

I may be an air head. But I'm smart enough to know that little girls don't mind being called spaghetti heads, when they know that they're loved at the end of the day.

Old music, new music

Maybe a few of you saw, or remember hearing about, Ray Allen's clutch three-pointer in Game 6 of this year's NBA finals: the shot that helped the Heat erase a 5-point deficit with 28 seconds left, and that made their eventual series victory possible. LeBron James certainly remembered it: after the game, he was quoted as saying, "Without that, I'm boarded up in my house right now growing my beard and listening to old music."

Well, now, wait a minute. That's more or less how I spend some of my days: in fact, if you're one of the millions of web users to whom the 1980s seem old, and if you're willing to count benign negligence of a beard active growing, that's arguably how I spend most of my days. And, folks, I'm here to tell you that it ain't half bad. One can do worse than to listen to Bach, as I did today, while stroking my stubbly chin and mulling over PowerPoint images for the fall's classes.

But of course it's not that simple, either. Ray Allen did hit the shot, with a few seconds left. And Cleo came along, just over four years ago. And now each day, instead of being a retreat into the familiar, is a trek into new territory. Yesterday it was a sudden, unexpected conversation about how pork, her favorite meat, can make her sad, because she hates the idea of killing an animal. (Although it felt out of the blue, I can't say that the topic was totally unprecipitated; she and I were rubbing spices into a 2-pound pork shoulder, to make a batch of pulled pork). And today it was little laps - one-yard glides, in Cleo's parlance - in the pool, without the comfort of her water wings: a small first step towards actual unaided swimming.

The beard grows, as a matter of course. The music grows older, day by day. But Cleo grows, as well, and keeps us young in the process.

Words

High summer in the city, and while that does mean sticky asphalt, it also means sno-cones and Natty Boh - and some relatively free time, as classes don't begin for another 50 days, and Cleo's happy at day camp. So I've had some time for the gym, and in fact I've even had a few spare minutes here and there to dig up our ancient IPod, and to upload some songs that make that extra set of flies go down a little more easily. But since our CD towers are essentially monuments that were constructed in the 1990s, any time with the IPod is essentially time spent in the Clinton years. And that means, in turn, a lot of drastic changes in volume, earnestly political lyrics, and, too, some wonderfully creative lyrics.

I'm thinking, for instance, of this brief segment of Eminem's 'Lose Yourself,' in which he evokes the anxiety of a white rapper in the intensely competitive arenas of inner-city Detroit. Rabbit's ambitious, and he's got talent, but as his moniker implies, he can also tend towards the timid, when his moment in the spotlight comes:

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti.

It's a classic, of course, and hardly needs my support. But check out the wobbling rhythm of the opening line, where the ellision of 'are' in the central clause implies the lack of strength in his knees. Check out the creative rhymes - three ways of echoing sweaty - and check out the final image, in which his panicked regurgitation acts as a proof of both his fear and his lamentable status as a mama's boy. No hardened gangsta, here.

And then the IPod pauses, and the next track is Dead Can Dance's American Dreaming, a beautiful ode in which Brendan Perry sings in a wistful mode:

We've been too long American dreaming
And I think we've all lost the way
Forlorn somnambulistic maniacal in the dark

Did he just say 'Forlorn somnambulistic maniacal'? He did, indeed - and in fact the audience breaks into warm applause at the end of the song.

Well, anyway: the gym has its pleasures, and sometimes unexpectedly ambitious wordings are among them. But they can turn up in other contexts, as well. Just yesterday morning Cleo surprised me when, waiting for me to cue up her DVD of Dinosaur Train, she pointed out that I wouldn't have to watch with her. "The next one will start automatically," she pointed out. Automatically? That's like an 18-syllable word, and yet it had just issued from my 4-year-old's mouth. And then, later in the day, she told me that when she and L. had returned home from the dentist, she had "discovered that my pink pinwheel is missing." Discovered that it was missing? Who was I talking to, a character in a Doyle short story?

Well. Eminem can turn a rhyme, and Cleo can say automatically. And I, in turn, struggle to put words together in my mundane manner. No blog entries recently, you coolly note. So I, in turn, point to a just-published essay on the alleged crisis in criticism in the inaugural issue of Kapsula, and just finished a draft of a curious extended essay on a memory of Richard Serra's. And, finally, Pearson's editor just contacted me to let me know that my book on criticism was their most-requested title, at a recent conference and book fair. Words, words. They do take time, but they carry rewards, of various sorts.

First times

There's a nice page on the RadioBDC blog site on which staff members recall their first concerts. Some of them happened to attend relatively momentous shows - Bowie in the mid-1970s, Pearl Jam shortly after the death of Kurt Cobain - while others had slightly less dramatic experiences. Mark Lewis, for instance, recalls being taken to a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden in 1982 - and falling asleep, midway through the fifth song. The Piano Man can be compelling, but so can a nap.

Given that, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I took Cleo to her first full-length feature film yesterday: Monsters University, a prequel to the wonderful 2001 Pixar film Monsters Inc. We've been watching 25-minute segments of the latter on DVD over the last few weeks, and as Cleo has come to know the world of Sully and Mike she's also come to understand the concept of sarcasm ("Why does Mike say 'Great plan' when they are put into the ice world??), the cynical deceitfulness of Randall, and the retro appeal of Roz. But, still: how would she come to terms with a full 1:45 of new material? Could she stay awake, in a dark theater? And would she really tell me if she needed to go to the bathroom?

The answers turned out to be, in order: Well; yes; not quite. In the cool of the air conditioning, she sat in my lap for the whole film, making it through six previews and a short film before taking in the pleasant but hardly transcendent feature attraction. I tried to clear up a few of the plot complexities during quieter moments, but the storyline was generally clean and accessible, and Cleo confidently demonstrated, in an inappropriately loud voice, that she was on top of the other details ("They're sitting," she correctly announced to the nearly empty theater at one point, "on a bunk bed"). I asked her a few times if she wanted to stay, and the answer was always a focused yes. And when we left the theater afterwards, chatting about the film, it was clear that she'd understood much of it, even if the references to fraternity hazings were aimed more at me than at her.

But the first thing that Cleo said after her first film was in fact less directly related to the plot. It was: "I'm a little wet." And she was: just a touch, as the result of a minor lapse in bladder control that might be seen as a testament to the film's appeal more than anything else. Some find the memory of spectacle indelible; some fall asleep. And some forget about slight pressures. But the first time out is often, in various senses, absorbing.

Finding oneself

But let's put our Dante down for a few days, and acknowledge the fact that summer's also for easy, low-friction fiction: for Dan Brown, read onsite (as above), and, for part of this past weekend, Christopher Krovatin's youthful but rather touching Heavy Metal and You. Written when Krovatin was just 20 (and a PUSH intern), it's the story of a West Side prep schooler who finds himself torn between his allegiance to metal and his love for a warm but straightedge girl across town. Drawing heavily on Nick Hornby and Junot Diaz, and nodding reverently towards Salinger, Krovatin manages to craft a sweet story that fairly evokes the intensity of those years, and that is ultimately about the importance of being true to oneself (or of avoiding, as Salinger would put it, the phonies).

But finding oneself can take, of course, many forms. And while some of us go about it with our toes buried in the poolside sand of Meadowbrook, other folks begin to discover themselves at - well, at the neighborhood trattoria. That, at least, seems to be Cleo's way. On one of our last nights in Venice, we joined the fourteen students and several colleagues at a restaurant in Dorsoduro for a farewell meal. Generously, a waiter placed a bucket of pens and several sheets of paper on the table, and so L. and I let Cleo take care of business, as we chatted with others about upcoming travel plans and about the Angola pavilion. And then I happened to glace over at what Cleo was doing - only to find that for the first time ever, she was writing phonetically. And no small potatoes, either: the girl had tried to figure out, on her own, how to spell sailboat. Granted, she says it a bit differently than us: it's more sao-bot than sailboat. But that only helps to explain her spelled version, as you can see here:

I was floored. Of course, every kid eventually figures it out. But, still, when it happens, it's a small miracle. As is, I suppose, a high schooler's realization that he wants one thing more than another. We find ourselves in the strangest of places: in mosh pits, or Venetian restaurants. But the environment doesn't really matter, in the end, for as we remove the sheath, all else momentarily disappears.