Last words

For just over five years now, I've been writing about music and fatherhood. Since explaining, on a May day, how the two were linked, in my mind, I've turned the subject over, and over - and have also had the happy chance to see the two nominal protagonists interact, repeatedly, and delightedly (see above). But now, with the grandparents driving north, and Cleo a full five, it's time to put the laptop away, and simply live, and love, without such mediation.

It's tempting, you know, to try to close with a momentous final line. Something like "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle," say, or "and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." But I'm no Joyce, or Dante (or, as Dante says, Aeneas, or Paul). And so I think that I'll end, instead, by doing what L. and I do for Cleo at the end of pretty much every day: reading from a children's book. And on this fine afternoon, I have a 1981 book by George Selden in mind:

So we're in the middle of the book, and Chester has just started chirping, out of a sheer pleasure in feeling the earth beneath him. And we read:

"The song went on for several minutes. It was slow, then fast; then low, and then high. Like a thread of bright silk, it ran through the darkness. And then it ended. Chester never knew why a song ended. He could feel the end coming - and the music was over."

Thank you

And, about to sign off, I need to thank you, the reader, for visiting. Whether you stopped in by chance, or followed this blog for its entire span, I thank you. If you posted a comment, or forwarded a post to a friend, I thank you. You may have snickered, or scoffed - or perhaps you felt momentarily interested. Regardless, thanks. For a text remains inert without a reader, just as a musical performance depends, in some sense, on its listeners for its completion.

In Metin Arditi's The Conductor of Illusions, the protagonist takes his turn giving thanks. "He turned," we read, "again to the audience and thanked them with little nods of his head, looking first to the left, then along the boxes, across the back of the hall, where the cheapest seats were, then back to the boxes on his right, ending his courteous round of thanks at the presidential box."

Are there cheap seats on the Web? A presidential box in the internet? Arguably not: the connections may be slower, or the resolution slightly sharper, in certain locations. The table on which your dad's laptop sits may be a little high. But all seats, in our view, are important. And so, wherever you sit, you have my thanks.

The streets of Lynchburg

You think you know a place, you've got the general lay of the land - and then something comes along and throws it all into a new light. Take Lynchburg, for instance. Over the past decade, I've been there at least half a dozen times, and I thought I had a decent sense of the city: I've eaten in a number of its restaurants, played a few rounds of golf, tracked down a Starbucks coffee - heck, I've even tried the local vineyard. But just a week ago, L., Cleo and I sat down on the deck just visible to the left of this photo, and saw this: a reminder that the city also has complex, and meaningful, musical traditions. As Wikipedia puts it, in a memorable phrasing, Jordan "was an American blues guitarist and vocalist of some renown." And yet, his very existence was unknown to me, until I stumbled across this marker.

But why speak in parables? What I mean to say, Cleo, is that I had a false security in my knowledge of the world at large, before you came along. I thought I knew the contours, the general outlines - but in five years you've showed me that there is always more to learn. With you, through you, I've learned what onesies are. I've learned to tell the difference between Aurora and Cinderella - and I've (almost) learned the difference between blue and purple. I know, now, how to make soup in a hot tub, and that a functional variant of myths is mythis. I've met Steve, from Blues Clues, but I've also met Jasper, and Fred, and Eve, and dozens of other children and parents. And I've learned, too, that that house that I'd seen on various occasions when I walked through Bolton Hill

is not merely a house: it's a hive, a world, a place where real friendships and networks (and finger paintings) take shape. Yes, it's a school of some renown - but it's also a reminder, in short (as are you) that the world is always richer than we might initially imagine.

Future (im)perfect

On page 180 of the 1950 edition of Bergson's Matter and Memory, I read: "That which I call my present is my attitude with regard to the immediate future; it is my impending action." And so, if I understand correctly, we might say that the present is a realm of imminence. It is the about-to-have-happened.

Which is very different from, say, the view of Jacques Brel, when he describes the life of a girl who has turned to the streets in 'Timid Frieda:

Timid Frieda, if you see her,
On the street where the future gathers
Just let her be her, let her play in
The broken times of sand

Ouch, right? In such a conception, the future is now cast as a mere reprisal of a lost past. And the present? Nothing but a broken environment, to be overcome.

Here at halfstep, though, we're never quite wholly French. We're baffled by ethereal theory, and we eschew the poetic, as often, for the literal. The future? Well, from my perspective, dear reader, you're living in it. And the past, and present? Both seem to us to be realms characterized by a rich possibility.

But I'll let Cleo explain what I mean. Last night, as we walked home from getting ice cream, Cleo asked about the function of a flag pole base. Well, I said, it holds up the flag pole. But let me tell you a story about that. Years ago, before you were born, it was Mom's birthday, and I made a sort of treasure hunt for her. I put a clue behind that base, and the clue led to another clue, and that clue to yet another - and then the last clue took her to a restaurant, where some of her friends were waiting for her.

Cleo digested this anecdote. And then asked: "Did you do that because you were too shy to speak to her?"

Well, I hadn't thought of it in that way. I had thought of those clues, in fact, as guiding impending actions. But, now that they're in the past, let's play with them, in the broken times of sand.

Dissonance

We're rolling, once again, towards school, and all seems well. We've got warm chocolate chip cookies for your classmates, the sun is raining down on us, Eric Coates' The Three Bears Phantasy is on the radio, and I'm thinking about the stretch of Frozen that we watched this morning.

And then suddenly, Cleo speaks up, from her car seat: "I think you'll be the first one in our family to die."

Um. What's that? I mean, you're probably right - and, indeed, you then calmly explain that I'm the oldest, and so probably have the shortest time left to me - but, really? That's what you're thinking about?

But, hey, I understand. Or at least I can try to. Five days ago, Anthony Tommasini published a lengthy piece in the Times on musical dissonance: a condensed history and typology, in essence, of discord, instability, and sudden changes in color. And one of the points that emerged is that dissonance has often been valued by composers, precisely for its jarring qualities. Or, as he put it:

"Romantic-era composers loved to milk and savor moments of dissonance to enhance the emotional impact of a crucial turn in a piece. Schumann, for one. An example I love comes in 'Ich kann's nicht fassen, nich glauben' ('I can't understand it, I don't believe it') from Schumann's song cycle 'Frauenlieben und Leben' ('A Woman's Love and Life'). The woman singing is almost incredulous that a man she desires seems to have chosen her. 'Let me die in this dream,' she says. Sure enough, there is a foreboding in the suspenseful, poignant music of the song, especially at the end, where a short melodic piano phrase repeats three times, each time slipping up to a slightly higher top note. That final melodic peak is enhanced by an achingly dissonant chord full of inner tension that demands harmonic relief, relief that eventually comes as the phrase, and the song, ends quietly."

Well, then. I'm not Schumann. And so, dutifully literal, I suggest that the very fact that we don't live forever is what makes life special. This fifth birthday that we're so excited about? It wouldn't carry quite the sheen if we had an infinite number of birthdays. And so on. But, really, Cleo has already said all that she had to. That air of dissonance recasts the glamorous morning, which now seems, frankly, laughably beautiful and incredibly improbable. Harmonic relief? Perhaps not. But, yes, there will be cookies.

And it's my birthday!

The day, Cleo's fifth birthday, begins early, once again. I'm downstairs in the half-dawn, quietly wrapping her present and checking the baseball scores, when I hear the light percussion of her feet on the floor as she gets out of bed, and then the canter as she totters over to the top of the steps. And even though we're separated by a floor, I can almost see her: naked except for panties, hair disheveled, sleep still in her eyes. Then she speaks:

"Dad! I'm dry and it's my birthday!"

It is, Cleo. You're five. You're your own little girl. You can skip, and hop on one foot, and do toe taps with a soccer ball. You can immerse yourself in a game of monsters and wolves, and then sink equally deeply into a set of Legos. You are not unlike, in some ways, Clara, in The Nutcracker: expectant, curious, excited - and young enough to believe in the native heroism of dolls.

But why tell, when you can show? Here's a message that you wrote me months ago, when you were first thinking about turning five.

And here's the outcome of that message, just before we headed out to school:

You're a good girl, Cleo, and always have been - dry or wet.

With rainbow sprinkles

Last night, as we cleaned house, Cleo got to choose one of three CDs for our background: on the menu were a collection Tansman guitar melodies, a Richard Thompson sampler, and Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling towards Ecstasy. She chose the last, and so suddenly it was as if we were in a coffee house in mid-1994.

McLachlan's music can recede into the background - that's one of its virtues, really - but the opening lines of track 10 nevertheless caught me by surprise:

Your love, she sings, is better than ice cream
better than anything else that I've tried

Hm. I mean, pop music doesn't have to be Yeats - but, really? And, to be honest, I'm not even sure I want to go along with the premise of the comparison. Love better than ice cream? Do we really have to choose? Can't we simply enjoy our cup of chocolate, with sprinkles, even as we also love?

It turns out that we can. Tonight, after Cleo played for an hour, almost entranced, with a new Lego kit (thanks, Aunt Tasha!), we ate a modest dinner and then hit the road. Could there be a better night for a walk to the local ice cream store? I don't really think there could be. And while I realize that a blog that veers too far toward the purely celebratory is a blog that will never deserve a large readership, I can't resist. We walked; we held hands; we actually chatted. I pointed out that it's Cleo's last day as a four-year-old - an idea that seemed to strike her - and taught her the difference between a lake and a pond. She, in turn, found a long shard of bamboo and showed me how to sharpen it. We saw three rabbits, two terrapins on the bank of the river, and a pair of groundhogs. The shadows grew slightly longer. And then, soon enough, we were sharing a kiddie cup of Taharka Brothers' best.

So: better than ice cream? I dunno. Both, it turns out, are pretty good.

But nowhere near so exciting

It was March of 1969, and John Mendelssohn, a Rolling Stone critic, was just sitting down to write about the debut album of a band called Led Zeppelin - and he was not impressed.

The band, he wrote, "offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better three months ago." Jimmy Page, he continued, struck him as "a writer of weak, unimaginative songs," and lead singer Robert Plant was "as foppish as Rod Stewart, but nowhere near so exciting."

Well, now. (Ahem.) We might point out, at this point, that the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004, and that in the past twelve years Rolling Stone itself has twice given the record the number 29 slot in its list of the 500 greatest records of all time. Critics, undoubtedly, are entitled to their own view. But there's a reason that if you Google "infamous music criticism," Mendelssohn's review appears as the most relevant hit.

And yet, there's something wonderfully admirable, too, about a critic who sticks his head out, takes a stand, and speaks honestly. And that's no mere truism. Just yesterday, in fact, I was on the receiving end of such criticism. I was trying to explain to Cleo that I've been writing these thoughts about us for five years now, and that I'm going to bring the blog to a close tomorrow. Doubtless oversentimental, I then added that I hoped she might look at it at some point in the future. And if she did, I wondered out loud, what might she think?

She didn't hesitate. "A little funny," she said, "and a little boring."

Ah, Cleo. Years after the release of Zeppelin's first album, John Paul Jones tried to recall the band's reaction. "In our naivete," he said, "we thought we'd done a good album and were doing all right, and then this venom comes flying out. We couldn't understand why or what we'd done to them. After that we were very wary of the press...  We avoided them and so they avoided us."

Well, there are many, many ways in which I am not Zeppelin (for one thing, this blog will never reach number 29 on any top 500 list). But here's one more: I don't plan to avoid you, ever, regardless of the sting of your criticism.

You held the baby

We are driving south to school on the JFX, surrounded by brilliant sun. If we had a convertible, the top would be down; if we were in a movie, we would be somewhere just outside Malibu. As Cleo plays with a doll, claiming that she gave birth last night and that we may need some small new diapers and soon, I turn on the radio, and we hear Sinead O'Connor, singing 'The Emperor's New Clothes':

It seems like years since you held the baby
While I wrecked the bedroom

Well, I'll go along with that. Because nowadays it's Cleo, more often than not, wrecking the bedroom by flippantly discarding her tiny clothes in little pools across the floor and small deposits on her chair. But, that said, it's also Cleo who helped me clean the house last night, carrying her rustling dresses - rich signifiers, in some narrative that I can only partially decode, of a complex palatine life - upstairs, and collecting tiaras and crowns into a tidy cardboard box. And, come to think of it, it's now Cleo, too, who holds the baby. It's been years, indeed, since she was any sort of baby, and you, or I, could hold her in our arms. That story is past, long gone.

All I want to do, continues O'Connor, spent, is just sit here
And write it all down and rest for a while.

And again, I concur, nodding quietly as we flow south above the river, and Cleo, almost five, attends to her baby's imagined needs.

So we have to play

"The sky's awake," says the ever-eager Anna, hovering over her still-sleepy older sister's bed, near the beginning of Frozen. "So I'm awake. So we have to play."

At 5:12 this morning, our hungry cat played the role of Anna, waking me just as dawn began to take shape. A few minutes later, as I made a cup of coffee, I heard a thud from upstairs - Cleo, jumping out of bed - and the rapid patter of feet. And then her little frame, dressed in the thin blue cardigan that she had wanted to sleep in, and a tousled tangle of bed head. Sure, it was 5:19. But it was time to play.

A large part of parenthood, it seems to me, is a rapid toggling between roles. You sit down, ready to scroll through the newspaper headlines - and suddenly remember that your daughter, now making her way downstairs, slept without a diaper (but don't worry: this night passed, happily, without incident). You spend the afternoon in a library, reading mid-century studies of the Campidoglio - and are then a moaning monster, slowly careening from one piece of playground equipment to another.

Of course, parents are hardly the only ones to face such challenges. Sociologists have long told us that we wear a series of masks as we move from one social environment to another. And men and women who perform for a living are often acutely aware of that. One of Cleo's CDs, for instance, focuses in large part on Tchaikovsky's apprehensions about appearing onstage: a narrative twist rooted in the fact that he did suffer from debilitating nervous breakdowns. And the actor Ed Dixon recalls the moments before he was about to sing Gremin in a performance of Eugene Oregin - even though he had never met the conductor. "Sind Sie nervös?" a soprano whispered to him, as they waited in the wings before the show. "Nein," he replied - only to hear her, in turn: "Sie lügen." And, he says, she was right.

This morning, at 6:29, I'm not nervous. Cleo's getting dressed upstairs, and so I can act, for a few minutes, as an adult: legs crossed, tapping on my keyboard. But now she's done, and wants me to know it: "Ready! Ready! Dad, I'm ready!" And so I'll close, once more, the laptop, and assume again another role, for which I often feel only partially prepared.

Caesura

Ever wonder where that universal symbol for pause, used on audio and video equipment for decades now, came from? It's not arbitrary; instead, it's derived from the literary and musical symbols for a caesura, or break. Here's the jauntily diagonal musical variant:

Signs, signs: at the MICA commencement speech this year, James Turrell announced that he wanted to speak about signs. He told a story about a Native American acquaintance of his who suggested that people themselves can be signs, to other people. The first white men to land on this continent? Signs of a coming change. And so on: even as we look for omens in the world about us, we may be read as portents, too.

How does Cleo, then, see me? What do I signal to her? I would expect that the answer is more or less conventional. Structure, order. Support and encouragement, I hope. A potential playmate or monster, when needed. But somehow (and it still astounds me), she does not yet see me as a sign of restrictiveness, or distasteful authority, or - the parent's mind sags - age, or decline, or a foil to her own identity and sense of social currency. In short, she still smiles broadly and openly when she sees me (or L., of course) as I arrive in the playground. 'Daddy!' she cries.

And that, I often think, is the most wonderful sign of all.

Like heaven

The idea that dreams somehow comprise a place, a state, a territory, is of course an old one. It's rather easy, for instance, to think of musical illustrations of the idea. Bette Midler once offered this take on the subject:

There's a place worlds away,
Time has wings there, green with springs there.
Smiles and songs bloom on every tree.
Only in Dreamland, just wait and see.

Or there's Bob Marley, who, in imagining dreamland, perhaps predictably imbued his vision with an element of melancholy and distance:

There's a land that I have heard about
So far across the sea
To have you all, my dreamland
Would be like heaven to me.

Well, last night Cleo got to visit dreamland - and for an extended stay, at that. Worn out by our visit to D.C. - that's her watching a cricket match, above - she fell asleep at about 4:50, and slept through the entire evening and night, finally waking up this morning at 5:30. And when she did awake, after almost 13 hours of sleep, she had something she wanted to tell me:

If you catch a dream, she said excitedly, you get to go to dreamland. And dreamland is a real place. And last night I got to go. The world - not the people in it, but Mother Nature, choose it. And I went to see the goddesses. And Nathaniel climbed up and pushed the leaves away and we could see all of the goddesses. And I could see the muses, too. I don't remember if they called me beautiful. But Clio said to me, she said, Come back.

Well, why not? It's always there, Cleo. And it can feel, momentarily, like heaven. Even if it does seem, sometimes, worlds away.

As the world turns

One way of putting it, I suppose, would be that you try to give her something new, within a familiar framework, so that she can contextualize the novel, and so that unprecedented experiences are paired with comfortably known entities.

That is to say: when we took the MARC train down to D.C. for a day trip today, we touched some of our usual bases. A bagel with cream cheese at the station bakery: check. A rental bicycle, with burley: check. And, just as we'd done months ago, we stopped at the Jefferson Memorial, and looked about. From there, though, we branched out, taking in a cricket match just west of the Tidal Basin, and then pausing to examine, and think briefly about, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. More than 53,000 dead: can such a number mean anything to a 4-year-old? And yet she understood that each name had left a family, in some form, behind. And we even found a Clio among the listed names.

Travel, of course, can also make the familiar seem anything but. When we emerged from Baltimore's Penn Station, our trip almost done, I was struck by how modest the city feels upon arrival. No avenues lined with trees; no Capitol Building, of course, beneath sashaying American flags. But even as these thoughts occurred to me, we happened to hear, from a passing car, Pharrell Williams' 'Happy, the now-ubiquitous ode to simple joy.

L. tells me that that song is now KLM's adopted anthem; its light, airy melody greets travelers as they board, and find their seats,

Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth

I associate the song, meanwhile, with a different environment: with the Hopkins gym, where it seems to play on an hourly basis. Regardless, though, it seems to be a song that inspires comfort - and that's the feeling that coursed through me as I listened, nodded, and looked around at the city in which I've lived for twelve years, and in which Cleo was born.

And yet: on the drive home, we flipped on WTMD, and happened to hear David Neal Adams of the Ceramic Tones, a local band, speaking about the ceramic plate that he uses as an instrument. Sure, he said, there will always be a place for the guitar in pop music. But people, he speculated, are also always looking for something new.

You look for the new, within certain comfortable frameworks. Sometimes that novelty can burnish, in turn, those frameworks. And what we thought we knew is new once more.

Across time

It's June 1, 2014. This is my 487th post. Cleo will turn 5 in three days, and I will compose my last entry, following a native internal logic that tells me that she is about to cross a meaningful threshold, and that I need no longer represent her in this way.

Meanwhile, time distends. L. left for Cape Town yesterday, and so the contours of my afternoon began to stretch, as if elastic. If you really immerse yourself in the pacing of a four-year-old (and, honestly, what better to do with this brilliant Saturday afternoon?), familiar pacings yield to new ones: it might now take 45 minutes to eat that plate of food, as the slices of cucumber must be rubbed unthinkingly on upper lip, and family stories must be solicited, and considered. Mud puddles that would normally be skirted become an hour's entertainment, and there's really no point in leaving the playground before she declares herself done. For what lies at home, on a day like this? Only rival play options, or thoughts of a distant wife, or a book that is merely an alternative to the one that I read as she plays.

And even texts, on this confusing day, threaten to challenge any notion of stable time and place. In the late morning, as L. packs, Cleo and I draw up a card, wishing her well on her travels. When, and over what ocean or continent, will she open this card, and its accompanying gift (which alludes, in turn, to a future trip)? We seem to write for a recipient in some cloudy, unknowable future.

Then, later in the afternoon, Cleo and I sit down to read a small trove of colorful books that I wrote when I was myself a child. In 1978, when I was just turning 8, we were in Italy, and I seem to have passed much of the time composing brief narratives and collections of poor original jokes and games:

We leaf through them; Cleo seems truly interested, and I am both fascinated and occasionally puzzled, or softly embarrassed. An ambitious tale about a crew stranded on an island after a pirate attack reveals a stultifying interest, for instance, in numbers and lists: the members of the crew are enumerated, and food supplies detailed. In another book, we encounter an unseemly interest in precise sums of money: this cost this, and that cost that. And why, in a book of riddles about animals, is the pictured elephant so emphatically well endowed?

But, regardless, there is something magical about the moment. My 4-year-old daughter is looking at, and listening to, the thoughts of a 7-year-old me. Or, to put it differently: a younger me is writing, in the past, to a fully aged Cleo, in the future. Or is it the present?

It is, let's say, a present. A gift, across the years - to parallel the gift that L. now carries, and perhaps considers, as she traverses a broad ocean.

City symphony

3:00 in the afternoon, and she's asleep: worn out, I suppose, from her morning fun run with L. The medal that she earned for participating - that all of the kids, in a surprisingly literal illustration of the common complaint about this generation of kids, earned - dangles from her neck; her runner's bib is crinkled beneath her, still pinned to her back.

So I pull over the car on this glorious Saturday, park on the side of a quiet diagonal street, and roll down the windows. I take up Michael Walzer's The Revolution of the Saints, an influential history of early Puritan political thought, and idly leaf through it, looking for references to action and passivity. But soon I find myself unable to ignore the symphony of sounds that washes in through our windows:

The passing cars, behind us, whoosh like waves of surf on a gently inclined sandy beach.
A student rolling a large bin of household items drops a lamp, which makes a large, hollow sound.
A robin, hopping near to the car and eyeing me warily, twitters as if to reassure himself.
The wind occasionally picks up, filling the arena and overshadowing every other sound.
A passing police motorcade is accompanied by a series of blurting sirens.
A car door slams in the middle distance: a dull, airy, resolute thud.

And as I turn another page, the supple, leafy flexibility of the printed page rasps, as Cleo sleeps on, three feet behind me and a world away.

Light as an egg

We are talking about weight. Earlier in the day, I had come across a scale at the gym, and weighed myself; now, I'm asking Cleo if she wants to guess how much I weigh. "You weigh about 36 pounds," I remind her. "I weigh much more than that. I weigh about five times as much as you.So how much do you think I weigh?"

She deliberates. She purses her lips. Thinks a little while longer. And then comes to a decision.

"29 pounds?"

"That's a terrible guess!" I say, simultaneously honest and tactless, and urge her to revise her estimate.

But later in the day, I'm reminded of a story about Erik Satie, the unconventional and irreverent composer whose behavior sometimes verged on the impish. (The directives scattered throughout his compositions are legendary among musical historians: "Like a nightingale with a toothache," reads one; "Light as an egg," another). Supposedly, a publisher once offered him a certain amount of money to compose a series of piano pieces, as an accompaniment to a suite of watercolors called Sports and Diversions. Satie, however, refused - until the publisher agreed to pay him a smaller sum.

Those resulting pieces, writes Norman Lloyd in The Golden Encyclopedia of Music, are charming. And so, too, is my little girl, as she struggles to learn mathematical relationships and large sums.

Exercise

As you open the car door, near the playground, she's all ears: she can hear the shrieks of children, and she leans far forward in her car seat and twists, in order to get the lay of the land. When she's out of the car, though, she can grow shy, and she'll often announce a familiar goal - 'Can you swing me in the big swing?' - partly in order to alleviate any uncertainty. That swing also gives her a perch, from which to watch the other kids, to gauge the temperature of the place. And so, after about ten minutes on the swing, she's often ready for something else - as today, when she had her eye on the spiral slide. So, too, though, did another little girl. At first, the two seemed impediments to each other: Cleo awkwardly chose to climb up the slide, as the other girl tentatively slid down. Within a few minutes, though, there had been a change: it was as if the kindling had caught fire, or the magnets had rotated, or...

...well, it was rather like watching, or listening to, one of the exercises described by Bruce Adolphe in The Mind's Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination for Performers, Composers, and Listeners: "The flute continues to play this note," he writes, "and is joined by the trumpet. Hear them sounding together; hear the flute louder than the trumpet; hear the trumpet louder than the flute."

One girl goes up; one goes down. The two sit at the top of the slide together. The two slide down, at different paces, and say something to each other. And then, just as organically, the other little girl makes her way over to another slide, and Cleo saunters over to my bench, and says that it's time to go home.

"Now," writes Adolphe, "they both fade to silence." The exercise concludes.

Of the I see

If you happen to be hanging out near Cleo these days, and she's really engrossed with what she's doing, and you listen rather closely - well, you might get to hear an interesting rendition of 'America.' She learned it in class - or, rather, learned a version of it that makes sense to her, and that bears a general resemblance to the more widely accepted version. That is, she sings it something like this:

Tis of the
Sweet land of liberty
Of the I see
Land where my father died
Land of the pilgrims pride
On ev'ry mountainside
Of the I see

It's easy to smile at such a version, and its gentle misunderstandings and alterations. But don't try to correct it! When I suggested that in fact the song says, 'Of thee I sing,' I was met with a sheer wall of denial and criticism. And, really, why insist? After all, the original lyrics, written by Samuel Francis Smith in 1831, were simply set against the melody of 'God Save the Queen,' producing a patriotic variant on the British hymn to royal authority.

To an Englishman, in other words, the words feel all wrong. Or to an almost-five-year-old, who feels that her version is the one that matters.

Improvisation

Good times at Penn Station Plaza last night, as the Station North Arts and Entertainment folks had invited several parkour specialists to Baltimore for about a month, and then paired them, in a formal demonstration of their skills, with some local hip-hop artists and a marching band. Even the mayor stopped by, making calls from her shiny black SUV before emerging into the lambent evening and speaking to the hundred or so of us who were assembled in a rough crescent. Cleo, one of only two children in the crowd, ate a bagel, lay in my lap, and wagered that the mayor would be wearing some makeup.

And then the show began. As a track by TT the Artist (whom I taught, many moon ago, at MICA) played in the background, five men dressed in business casual and thin, pliable sneakers began to flow like mercury over the surfaces in the plaza. The base of the massive Borofsky statue served as one prop; a parapet beneath a landscaped garden another. The men leapt; they tucked their shoulders and rolled. Next, a solid wooden bench attracted their attention, and in a tightly choreographed routine they crossed paths, lifted each other into the air, and vaulted - all in a mode that was aimed at a soft, safely organic smoothness.

How many ways to reimagine a dull, inert object! The bench sits in the plaza, day after day. Perhaps commuters sit on it; set their coffee on it; read the paper on it. A pigeon might alight on it. But now it appeared differently, as a dense collection of possibilities. Could one somersault over it? Straddle it? Use it as a sort of pommel horse? Yes, yes, and yes. A potential obstacle had become part of an urban playground.

But perhaps that's hardly surprising. Most musical instruments, I assume, arose out of a similar sort of exploitative experimentation. What happens if I pluck this reed, and blow on it? Tie this thread to two pegs, and pluck it? Dry and stretch this skin, and strike it?

And, soon enough, we witnessed an answer, of sorts, to this last question, as well A shrill whistle turned heads, and the marching band lurched into action. The percussion was immediately gripping: the sharp tat of the snares, and the emphatic, conclusive punctuation of the bass drums united the square. Smiles on our faces, some of us gently imitating the majorettes, we fell into a loose parade, and left the station behind us, our vision of the city recharged, our sense of sheer possibility heightened.

I herald dawn

Cleo knows her days, and she'll know as soon as she wakes up that today is Friday. But her grasp of larger calendrical time is still shaky. How many days until my birthday? she regularly asks (and is now increasingly delighted with the answer). And is it summer yet?

That second question is a hard one. Do we hew to the astronomical definitions of seasons? Or do we note that her school is almost out, that Memorial Day is past, and that - well, you can see the picture above. In many senses, it's summer.

The poets can help here, perhaps. For example, Basho, the great Japanese haiku artist, knew the appeal of these soft mornings:

Summer moon -
Clapping hands,
I herald dawn.

Or herald dawn, feed the cat, and stir a cup of coffee, and listen to the music of the songbirds. But the birds are not the only sound of early summer. Think summer, and you have to think of the Beach Boys, as well, with their innocent odes to the pleasures of high summer on the coast. But even their tunes can be shot through with a recognition that summer is never infinite, even in southern California. Think, for instance, of 'All Summer Long':

All summer long you've been with me
I can't see enough of you
All summer long we've both been free
Won't be long until summer time is through

And in this sense, they belong to a much larger poetic tradition. If you flip through the roster of poems beginning with the word 'summer' in The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies, it's hard to avoid being struck by the frequency with which poets comment upon the diminishing of the season. Sure, there are poems about high summer, but reflections on the passage of summer are more common still.

One entry in that list, though, stands out to me, for its combination of celebration and an awareness of the season's fragility. It's by Khaled Mattawa, and it begins like this:

Summer, and a woman lowers her jug to the river.
She bathes and sings the word 'why.'

Yes, Cleo, in my mind it's summer. And so we make our way to the water, and in the midst of the quiet music of the world we take in what we can and perhaps shake our head at the meaning of it all.

No matter what they say

The two five-year-olds, members of our host family on a recent visit to Winston, pressed up close to Cleo, looking at her as she put her dress on. 'What is that?' they asked, pointing to a freckle just above her thigh. 'It's a freckle,' explained Cleo. 'It's really big,' said one of them. 'It's too big to be a freckle. It looks like someone spilled chocolate on you.' And Cleo, insistent but slightly aggrieved: 'It's a freckle.'

Slowly but surely, Cleo's entering that arena - that seemingly vast arena - in which attention is trained upon appearance. Differences are noted and dissected; opinions are offered freely. Sometimes, happily, the process is relatively gentle; on that morning, for instance, Cleo's two friends seemed satisfied with her response, and the three of them were soon fast playmates again, and went about efficiently erecting a fort in the living room. Inevitably, though, there will be more complicated moments.

As the kids slept, the four parents watched an episode of American Ninja Warrior, and traded casual conversation about t.v. shows. The Voice came up, and I asked if there were any talent show hosts whom our friends enjoyed watching. They each paused for a moment, looked at each other, and then nodded: Shakira, they said, referring to the Colombian singer who regularly appears as a voice coach. She's intelligent, they explained (and, sure enough, The Huffington Post recently reported that she has an IQ of 140). She can be funny, they added. And, then one of them, playfully: and she's hot as hell.

Fair enough. But even Shakira, it turns out, has had her doubts. As the Examiner noted, in 2010, the Grammy-winning singer has consistently seen a therapist for up to an hour daily in an effort to boost her low self-esteem. "I've become so much more comfortable with who I am and the body God has given me," she said. "In their 20s, women try to be somebody they're not and try to turn themselves into something different. Now in my 30s, I'm very happy with who I am."

20s; 30s. What about, I wonder, when they're 4? So far, Cleo seems to be doing fine. And yet, in thinking about all of this, I'm reminded of a song by another Latina artist: that'd be Christina Aguilera's 'Beautiful.' So, Cleo, I hope that you can draw, when you need to, on some of the resilience embedded in her lyrics:

I am beautiful, no matter what they say
Words can't bring me down

It may look, to some, as though a drop of chocolate has marred your skin. But I've always loved that freckle, and hope you do, too.

Love and litost

In the film Belle - currently in a theater near you! - Dido, the young mulatto protagonist, is urged to play the family piano as several potential suitors look on. 'And you?' one of them asks. 'What about you?'

The young woman sits at the piano, clearly nervous. Her mother quietly tells another woman that Dido has never played in public before. But then, suddenly, the finger find the keys, and a melody begins to take shape: a handsome, coursing tune, played brilliantly. Dido, it turns out, knows her Handel.

The scene, to be sure, is almost certainly historically inaccurate. We know, in fact, almost nothing of Dido's life, beyond an acidic journal entry written by the Lord Hutchinson, the former governor of Massachusetts, who met Dido and her family at a 1779 dinner party. Less than impressed by her, he nonetheless registered her responsibilities, in withering terms. 'She is a sort of superintendent over the dairy, poultry yard, etc., which we visited.'

And yet, in more abstract terms, the scene feels fair, or somehow essentially believable. After all, even children who are granted nothing in the way of responsibility somehow manage to master new skills and to impress with their courage and ability. A small example: this morning, at about 7:10, Cleo swam across an entire swimming pool, with no assistance, no flotation aids - and no apparent alarm. Her head bobbed just above the water, her little legs kicked, her eyes shone with determination, and after about 30 seconds she was hanging from the opposite edge.

That's not to say, though, that Cleo had impressed a flock of suitors. I was delighted, to be sure, but the rest of the hotel pool was entirely empty. And in fact, if she ever gets any better at swimming, she may find that the talent can also represent an impediment: I'm thinking, for example, of the moment in a Kundera novel when a female character, a gifted swimmer, leaves her boyfriend in her wake in the salt water of the sea, simply because she cannot resist the sheer pleasure of athletic exertion. He, in turn, feels litost: a Czech word that Kundera celebrates for its sense of forlorn desire.

I don't know if Belle's filmic suitors felt anything like litost as they watched her at the piano. But at least one filmgoer in the audience did, during tonight's screening. It's wonderful to watch the young girl find her confidence. But it's almost heartbreaking, at the same time, to watch her grow into someone who no longer needs my shoulder or my aid.

Off and running

I mentioned, in my last post, that we recently enjoyed a meal of fish and chips. And I meant what I said: we, as in, Cleo was eating fish. She's insistent that she only likes whitefish - no salmon or sushi quite yet - but, still, this is news: before yesterday, she'd never been open to eating it. And yet, just last night, she tried to order whitefish on three separate occasions (as the waiter tried to take our drink orders, for instance, and to ask if she wanted a side with her chicken tenders).

But, really, Cleo seems to be growing up in all sorts of ways. She's no longer a Redbird, for instance, for her graduation from nursery school took place on Friday. And this morning she swam - actually, literally swam, under her own power, with no boost from the edge of the pool, for six or seven feet at a time - for much of a delightful hour. Of course, not every change is welcome: lunch was accompanied by a series of odd threats involving the possibility that we withheld her pie, and a playground visit yesterday took a slightly awkward turn when Cleo began to tell the other kids sharing the slide that she was being flushed down a toilet, into the ocean. Growing older doesn't always imply, apparently, a gentle refinement of taste. But, still, it is intriguing to watch her becoming very much her own person.

Maybe Simon Leng's biography of George Harrison is helpful here. Noting Harrison's cynicism involving the Beatles' early American concerts, in which the crowd noise often drowned out his guitar entirely, Leng writes that Harrison was deeply attracted to the refined classicism of Ravi Shankar, whose work he began to listen to quite closely in the later 1960s. Harrison's personal goals were relatively modest, but his admiration seems to have been sincere. Or, as Leng puts it, "While George Harrison knew that his lifestyle would never permit him to become a true sitar player, his exposure to sitar study made him the best musician in the Beatles. It also gave him the basis of a new style that would only flourish when he discovered slide guitar."

Will Cleo ever become an Olympic swimmer? The odds are long indeed. Will she delight us at every meal, astounding us with the variety of her healthy diet? No; in fact, she proved as much at lunch this afternoon. But in trying these new things, she is developing what you might call the basis of her own style. And she has already, in fact, become the best developer of creative, outlandish threats involving dessert in our little family. Moreover, she's only five. And she hasn't even heard of Ravi Shankar yet.

Influence

A few evenings ago, we dropped by an English-themed restaurant for dinner. The walls were covered with banners of great Liverpool football squads, a hunting horn hung from the ceiling, and the men's room featured posters announcing upcoming concerts. And the joint was named Penny Lane.

In short, we were in the realm of Beatles hagiography - and, in fact, images of the Fab Four filled cabinets throughout the space. So we spent a few moments explaining the Beatles to Cleo; as I've mentioned, she's heard 'Yellow Submarine,' but the immense arc of their career is generally unknown to her.

But how, exactly, to explain the importance of that career? It's not enough, surely, to point to the kitschy steins that featured the faces of John and George and to say, 'They were huge!' Might there be some more objective way of quantifying influence?

Well. The very next day, I was looking at the back page of The Atlantic, which asked a panel of musicians and musical historians to offer their nominees for the most influential song of all time. And, of the dozen or so responses, not a single tune named was by the Beatles. Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' was, interestingly, the only tune to get multiple nominations; otherwise, the list implied little unanimity, as it featured an early aria, some archaic blues songs, Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' and 'Amazing Grace.'

In short, an interesting a rather diverse list. But how, again, are we to characterize influence? Surely David's psalms have exerted an immense influence on the history of religious and literary thought - and yet they didn't get a single vote. Of course, that's part of the point of such surveys: to kindle debate and discussion. Maybe, though, we could go a step further here, and conclude that the very diversity of the responses suggests that influence - musical or otherwise - really can't be easily isolated. How would we weigh, after all, the fact that the Beatles have inspired a Richmond-based restaurant against, say, that diffuse force that an anthem such as 'We Shall Overcome' emanated in the 1960s? And, similarly, how can I even be sure that Cleo will recall her visit to the restaurant, or my brief parental soliloquy on the Fab Four?

Influence, it seems, is diffuse and contingent. Our lives, happily, are the outcomes of millions of small forces, instead of one blunt push. And trying to average those forces, to chart a common vector, may make for good copy, but inevitably simplifies things.

So play, on Penny Lane. We' enjoyed our fish and chips - but we also enjoyed the Journey and the Duran Duran that play, for reasons that weren't entirely clear, from your sound system.

Mellow yellow

I may have mentioned this at some point - after 480 posts, you do run the risk of becoming occasionally repetitive - but I've always been struck by the haphazardly unsystematic way in which most of us learn about music. You're 15, and you turn on the radio, and maybe you happen to hear Merle Haggard, for the first time in your life. Perhaps your college roommate is a fan of Brazilian music. And at a yard sale you come across a suite of recordings by Keith Jarrett. Or perhaps you're four, and your dad is driving you to soccer practice, and the Saturday morning DJ decides to play Donovan's 1966 hit single Mellow Yellow.

It's hardly a logical, organized education - but at least there's a constant sense of unexpected discovery. And perhaps I shouldn't really be so surprised, after all: for while I work to craft classes that develop in a clear and almost organic manner, much of life is a crash course, built more around random encounters than around syllabi.

A few weeks ago, for instance, Cleo and I sat down with the Bible, looking for some good stories. We read about David, fighting Goliath. And then we turned to the story of Moses - and I suddenly learned that his wife was named Tzippora. I'd wondered about that name for more than a year, since teaching a student with the same name; she had told me that it means bird, but hadn't added that it had a Biblical prominence. All of a sudden, that snapped into focus - and so, when I saw her walking at graduation a few days ago, I mentioned the Mosaic association to a colleague. "Yeah," he duly added, "it's an early ancestor of Deborah."

Is it, now? And where was he, years ago, when I first met her? But that's how we learn, I guess: in jots and drabs, in drips and drops - and rarely without a larger pattern. And yet, somehow it all coheres, in time. Tonight, as Cleo was getting ready for bed, I heard her singing, "They call me Mellow Yellow."

We don't control the pace, or the rhythm, in which we learn. Electrical banana may - or may not - be bound to be the very next phase. But eventually the world becomes a part of us, and we a part of the world.

The blues is what it's all about

There must be many ways of defining the blues as a musical genre, but it seems to me that one way would be in terms of asymmetrical knowledge. That is, blues singers typically don't know enough, or know more than they want to. Think of B.B. King, for example, in 'Three O'Clock Blues':

Now here it is three o'clock in the mornin'
And I can't even close my eyes
It's three o'clock in the mornin', baby
I can't even close my eyes
Well, you know I can't find my baby
And I can't be satisfied.

Where is she? An all-night whisky joint? Another man's bed? B.B. doesn't know - and that's precisely the problem. On the other hand, Albert King sometimes mourns the state of knowing too much. In 'Get Out of My Life,' for instance, he says goodbye to his woman because he knows exactly how she feels:

Get out of my life, woman; you don't love me no more
I said, get out of my life, woman; you don't love me no more

Given such problems - staying on good terms with a woman is hard, in the world of the blues - it's not very surprising that there aren't many blues songs about parenthood. Blind Willie McTell and Robert Johnson are generally more worried about a delivery from romantic suffering than they are about the delivery room. Nonetheless, I would argue that at least in one sense - in the sense of an asymmetrical knowledge - there's a way in which blues songs echo parenthood rather usefully.

Here's what I mean. A few months ago, Cleo began to complain rather consistently about an aching stomach. We had no idea what it could be: was she simply hungry? No; at times she was momentarily doubled over in pain. A food allergy of some sort? No, it didn't seem so: she's always eaten dairy, and when we eliminated that and glutens from her diet as an experiment, nothing improved. Miralax and an X-ray were no better. She continued to tell us, once or twice a day, that her stomach really hurt; some days, her teachers told us that she had been unable to nap, as a result.

It was, I found, the not knowing that was hardest. We were letting her down, we felt, as parents - and yet, of course, neither we nor the pediatrician could get inside her. Was it really a serious pain? What was causing it? We simply didn't know. And then, finally, we started giving her probiotic pills in the morning. Cleo's been on a number of antibiotics in her little life - Lyme disease; ear infections - and it seems that they may simply have worn down her digestive tract. After a good week of probiotics, her complaints more or less dried up. And now it's rare that she mentions any discomfort at all.

There are still, though, things that we don't understand. Yesterday, I found myself momentarily stunned by the tendons in her ankles. How did her body know how to grow, to evolve, in that way? I know, I know: nearly every body obeys such a basic organic logic. And yet that sense of being wholly exterior to her - a mere observer, rather than somehow responsible for her - felt both amazing and crushing.

So, then. Middle-class parenthood is not the terrain of classic bluesmen. But the two may not be wholly irreconcilable. After all, with the change of a mere word or two, B.B. King's jeremiad, above, could be made into a suitable anthem for new parents:

Now here it is three o'clock in the mornin'
And I can't even close my eyes
It's three o'clock in the mornin', baby
I can't even close my eyes
Well, you know I hear my baby
And I can't be satisfied.

What's wrong? Who knows? And so we sing the blues.

From solid repose

Above, folks, is a photograph of a sculpture by Franz Rudolf Knubel. But it also pictures, as we'll see, a basic musical principle, and acts, I want to suggest, as a concise summary of Cleo's first five years.

Knubel's sculpture is not especially well known, but it was given a certain prominence when it was discussed on page 435 of the 1974 edition of Rudolf Arnheim's influential Art and Visual Perception. Noting that the piece was designed on the basis of a suggestion by Theodor Fischer, Arnheim then went further: "The central block is a cube; the others have the ratios of elementary musical intervals: 2/1, 3/2, 5/4, 1/1, 4/5, 2/3, 1/2."

Interesting, right? But to a Gestalt theorist like Arnheim, this had specific consequences, and he wasted no time in spelling them out. "The similarity of shape," he wrote, "and the gradualness of the changes in height and width induce the viewer to see a coherent event of transformation rather than a sequence of independent shapes. The event is compellingly dynamic: the object contracts and rises, thereby changing its character from solid repose on the ground to towering strength."

I'll buy that. But I'll also up the ante. Just over years ago, I described taking a ten-month-old Cleo to a party that featured a number of similarly young children; one of them, I noted, had toppled over into a "resolutely horizontal position." And Cleo, in the accompanying picture, was hardly vertical herself; instead, she lay in a solid repose, in her mother's arms. Scroll through the blog, though, and soon you may feel as though you're doing something more than merely looking at single posts, in sequence. As Arnheim put it, rather, you may be induced to see a coherent event of transformation. And at the very end of it, the object of the blog will rise, changing her character from lolling baby to - well, if not quite towering strength, something nonetheless undeniably distinct:

Wacky Wednesday

About a mile west of me, a little girl is enjoying the heck out of Wacky Wednesday. It's the last Wednesday of the nursery school year, and all of the four- and five-year-olds were encouraged to dress as wildly as they wanted. So Cleo appeared, this morning, at the top of the stairs in a pajama suit worn backwards, with a pair of pants draped across her head (the legs falling like a rabbit's ears) and held in place by a pair of princess panties. For most of a day, at least, Cleo and her classmates can thus delight in flaunting the basic rules of fashion: they can invert, as the Bakhtinian academics would have it, the natural order.

Meanwhile, about two miles northwest of me, there's an entirely dry flannel sheet, stretched across an entirely dry mattress. Which is no small deal: rather, it's another proof that Cleo is gradually putting the need for night-time diapers (or pull-ups, she would insist, with indignity) behind her. She doesn't do it every night, but when she's feeling hopeful, and has managed an evening visit to the bathroom, it's full speed ahead - and, more and more frequently, the results are wonderfully dry.

In Music 7-11: Developing Primary Teaching Skills, Sarah Hennessy thinks a bit about how children learn music - and about how adult teachers of music sometimes go through similar processes. Neither group, she argues, can learn entirely through texts, or verbal instruction. Rather, direct experience is of central value. "Making the sounds," she writes, "responding through listening and moving, and sharing ideas and feelings about the music are the ways in which we come to learn the necessary skills." And, in turn, this suggests a certain teaching style - even when the students are adults, training to become teachers in their own right. "Because of sometimes deep anxieties felt by colleagues about teaching music," Hennessy suggests, "the leader needs to be sympathetic, patient, encouraging, and not-over-critical. An atmosphere of trust is essential."

That sounds about right. A couple of years ago, when Cleo first became interested in sleeping without nighttime diapers (kids shed them at a remarkable range of ages, from 2 to... well, 7 or 8), we often told her that accidents were no big deal. Quickly, though, she embraced that philosophy a bit too actively, sometimes announcing, as we wiped her dry in the morning, that "It's not a big deal." In time, then, we shifted to a more aspirational message: wouldn't it be awesome to wake up in the morning all dry? And we waited for it to sink in: to make its way into those distant regions of the brain that control our basic, nighttime actions. And, throughout, we tried to be patient and encouraging, as Hennessy recommends - at least when within earshot of Cleo. And, finally, the student seems to be learning: to be mastering, that is, another central social norm.

Which means, happily, that on this Wednesday she could wake up wearing one dry pair of panties and then jam another, with no hesitation, onto her head, in preparation for an especially wacky day.

Perceived as

Father's Day isn't for a few weeks, but this past Sunday's New York Times seemed unable to wait, as it included several open references to fatherhood and its potential power. In an interview, Colson Whitehead heaped praise on Kevin Young's Book of Hours, calling it a superb and "wrenching investigation of what it is to be a father." He then went on to describe, rather self-mockingly, the tears that had overcome him at a New York BBQ joint as he read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. "I'd just become a father," Whitehead explained, "and something in the book about the dad trying to save his kid from nutso hillbillies - great, here I go again." But why such self-consciousness, Colson? After all, in a review in the same issue of the Times, John Schwartz singled out a moment in the audiobook version of Rob Lowe's Love Life in which the actor describes the powerful conflicting emotions that he felt as he dropped his son off at college. "Lowe's voice," Schwartz wrote, "grows husky when he recalls that he used to wrap the boy in a blanket 'like a burrito.'"

Rather like Whitehead, though, Schwartz seems to have felt compelled to qualify, or undermine, such open emotionalism. "Some may tear up," he wrote. "I cringed a little." Men opening up about fatherhood, after all, still occupy an underdeveloped territory, and their accounts are often muted or neutered through the use of stoicism or humor. Uncomfortable with Lowe's apparent sincerity? A curt proclamation of your discomfort can establish your own conventional manhood, in contrast.

Or perhaps a reference to Joy Division can do the trick. Shortly after acknowledging the potential emotional force of fatherhood, Whitehead enthusiastically recommends the music of the legendary post-punk band from Manchester. Talk about an antidote to weepy nostalgia: Joy Division is perhaps best known for a sound that has been called eerie and energetic, for lyrics that tended to focus on themes such as coldness, distance, and failure - and for the 1980 suicide of its lead vocalist, Ian Curtis. I remember at least one Joy Division poster in my college dormitory, and I recall associating it with a sparse, rugged individualism - and not with recollections of babies wrapped as burritos.

In fact, though, Cook's suicide did inspire a certain degree of nostalgia, and of what the literary critics would call re-membering. As the band's percussionist Stephen Morris put it, in 2007, "This sounds awful but it was only after Ian died that we sat down and listened to the lyrics. You'd find yourself thinking, 'Oh, my God, I missed this one.' Because I'd look at Ian's lyrics and think how clever he was putting himself in the position of someone else. I never believed he was writing about himself. Looking back, how could I have been so bleeding stupid?"

That's powerful, and understandable. But, looking back, we almost always see things differently. Indeed,as Jon Savage noted, in an obituary of Curtis written for Melody Maker, "Now no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous."

And so, too, to an extent with parenting. L. and I have spoken of wrapping Cleo like a burrito. But in time that offhanded and casually affectionate term will acquire a different patina. Will it prompt tears, or cringes? That depends, of course, on how, and where, it's framed, and with whom. But it seems worth remembering that what we do now will almost inevitably be perceived as something else when read in a BBQ restaurant, or heard 27 years after the fact.

Further answers

We're still chewing on those questions that appeared in our comment box a few days ago. And at this point are ready to report our latest round of findings:

You asked, what's the difference between a hero and a superhero?
Almost anyone can be a hero. You can pick up trash, or something like that. It's not like being a superhero. To be a superhero, you have to have some power, like flying, or being able to run really fast.

And are princesses superheroes?
No.

And you also asked: which is harder, singing or dancing?
Singing is harder: You have to know all the words. A song like America has a lot of hard-to-remember words.

So there you have it, folks: straight from the source. Again, our researchers will continue to probe the depths of the four-year-old's mind with diligence and propriety, and we will be sure to keep you posted should any data emerge.

Happy

So yesterday was a big day, from certain angles. Or at least, from the point of view of a certain 4-year-old. There was, after all, a New York Times article on the ongoing popularity of Frozen: Cleo and I read it, and afterwards she jokingly threw her hair back a few times, emulating the girl who likes to emulate, according to the story, Elsa's dramatic gestures. And then there was the realization, based on a story in the Yale Alumni Magazine, that I lived in New Haven at the same time as Robert Lopez, the composer behind the Frozen soundtrack. Can it get any better, really? No, not according to Cleo, who announced (as we lounged in a sunny playground), "Today is the greatest day of my life."

"I'm so happy to hear that," I responded, quite honestly. And then she, following up: "I always say that because every day is a great day."

Really? So it's not the realization that your dad might have played a game of pickup hoops with the man who scored your favorite movie? No. But that's okay: I'd be every bit as happy to know that it was simply the sun, or the game of monster chase, or the tent in the senior thesis show, that made you smile. The reason, in short, doesn't matter, given the sentiment. And here's hoping that you keep saying it.

Opera aperta

And, speaking of finishing: the Rainbow Dragons' spring soccer campaign wound to an end yesterday, with an enigmatic 1-0 victory over the red team that featured, to be blunt, rather nonchalant refereeing and a single shot on goal. One of our players notched the only tally of the game when he displayed a piece of nifty footwork and then slid the ball into an inexplicably empty goal, capping what can only be characterized as a complete breakdown in the opposing team's defensive logic. A few minutes later, the kids were all holding boxes of raisins and fruit juice, league badges were distributed, and players began to drift towards cars with their fathers and mothers.

Not an uncommon ending, perhaps. According to Max Graf, in his very colorful psychoanalytic 1946 book Composer and Critic, on the same day that Richard Wagner completed "The Flying Dutchman," he wrote his mother for the first time in years. Had he seen, perhaps, in composing a work that related to his own childhood, "the large bright eyes of his mother resting upon him?" Perhaps. Certainly, the Rainbow Dragons, if they had looked up from their raisins, could have seen the bright eyes of their parents, too (and at least a few digital cameras, as well). One form of closure involves a return to the arms of the parent.

But wait! Because Umberto Eco is here to remind us that many modernist works are characterized by something other than complete closure. Writing in the early 1960s, he noted (in "The Poetics of the Open Work") that "A number of recent pieces of instrumental music are linked by a common feature: the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work." Eco had in mind compositions by Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Henri Pousseur - but in fact his point was a larger one that encompassed, as well, the work of James Joyce and Alexander Calder. "Every performance explains," Eco argued, "the composition but does not exhaust it." We hear a version of the score; we see Calder's mobile sculptures in a certain arrangement. But if we returned to the work tomorrow, we could very well encounter a very different set of forms.

And that sounds familiar. For, it turns out, no two photos of the Rainbow Dragons are quite the same:

Which image, then, denotes the end of the season? Each explains it, perhaps, but does not exhaust it. We hold up our badges, and play on.

Beginnings

How does she know just how to begin?

Yesterday I got to Cleo's school as she, and another girl, were beginning to paint. The watercolors were set out, and they'd both retrieved brushes. Clean sheets of white paper stared up at them.

No big deal, right? Kids paint. And yet, beginning a work is a big deal, and always has been. Think of Homer, invoking the muses, asking for inspiration so that he can undertake his heroic song. Or Dante, gathering his strength before embarking on a particularly difficult descriptive passage. How to begin? Often, artists have begun by remarking on how difficult beginning is.

The same basic point plays out in many ways. I remember a college suitemate of mine handing in an essay that was stapled shut, on all four corners. When the professor finally managed to get beyond the cover page, the first sentence that greeted him was "Openings are always difficult." And, about three years after that, the young rapper Nas - who just began a set at the Preakness track infield, up the hill, about an hour ago - discovered something similar. As the background beats played in the studio and the tapes rolled, Nas delivered two quick lines, and then paused, and lost confidence. "I don't know how to start this shit," he mumbled. As DJ Premier later remembered it, "I'm actually yelling, 'We're recording! and banging on the window. 'Come on, get ready!... and then everyone was like, 'Oh, my God,' 'cause it was so unexpected. He was not ready. So we used that first verse." Rather like Inferno, then, Illmatic - one of the most influential hip-hop albums ever recorded - begins with an open crisis of confidence: a wobbly moment that belies an underlying ability.

But on Friday I saw no such thing. Cleo dunked her brush in the water, stirred some paint, and deftly began to make a small circle. And then another, and another. I simply watched, and the painting soon became more and more complicated; eventually, it evolved into an image that she said was inspired by Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. At no point was there discernible doubt, or uncertainty. One mark followed another. And then it was over, declared done.

Perhaps appropriately, I don't know how to end this post. How do children act so unselfconsciously? Why do adults doubt their own abilities so acutely? The questions quickly become complicated. But for now, we'll keep it simple. One simply begins, I guess - and then ends.

Game on!

Even occasional bloggers, of course, need material: they sometimes wonder what their next topic might be. But, every now and then, the topic simply pads down the hall and presents itself: like Cleo, this morning, at 5:45. Still wiping sleep from her eyes, she half-stumbled along the hall, looked at me, and mumbled something. Happily, though, I was already up, and so I steered her away from still-sleeping L., and we went downstairs to play some Blokus.

We've been playing a lot of Blokus - a cleverly simple game in which players try to lay colored tiles of various shapes corner to corner - recently. But in fact it's merely the latest in a relatively long line of board games and card games that have served as temporary favorites. Sure, for a brief time it was Candy Land; there was also a princess jewelry game, a world traveling game, and a quite handsome version of bingo based on a U.S. map. Recently, though, Cleo has begun to embrace games of real strategy, and I've been delighted to go along for the ride. There was Max, for example: a Canadian game in which players work together to try to steer little creatures out of the path of a hungry cat (typically, not all of the creatures make it, lending a sober edge to a rather quaint design). Mummy's Treasure, with its emphasis upon probability and geometry, fascinated for weeks, and now Cleo is trying her hand, too, at Mille Bournes, dishing out accident cards with the best of them. At 6 a.m. today, though, it was Blokus that Cleo wanted to play.

But even as the stack of manufactured games in the corner of the living room grows taller and taller, there is an equally rich vein of improvised games: brief moments of play or contest in which the rules evolve, as often as not, spontaneously (if, indeed, they're ever fully clear). It might be a variant on rock, paper, scissors, or a new permutation on the chase games that we've played on playgrounds for more than a year now. Or, last night, it was more of a trivia game: Cleo was in the bath, and the stereo downstairs was still playing the Disney channel that we'd called up during our after-dinner game of Mille Bournes. Upstairs, Cleo could just make out the music, and - given that she's seen a substantial fraction of the Disney corpus at this point - began to try to identify the compositions. "For the first time," I heard her cry, as she recognized a tune from Frozen, "in forever!" Moments later, though, a hint of doubt: "Is this Rapunzel?" And then, an admission of the limits of her abilities: "What is this one?" (It was from Aladdin, which she hasn't yet seen). I'd thought, in other words, that she was only taking a bath, but in fact she was playing Name that Tune.

And not only playing that. A few minutes later, I heard her clearly announce, "I'm going to throw a real duck in the water." A fraction of a second later, there was a clear splash. "I just threw a real duck in the water," she observed, aloud. And then continued, in the same vein: "I'm going to throw a real frog in the water. I just threw a real frog in the water." A hippo followed. And once again, rules had seemingly materialized, where moments earlier there had been no game at all.

Rather like, you might say, Cleo herself, at 5:45 on a Saturday morning.