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.