Where's Daddy?

We're only three days into the week, but it's already been a giving period, in terms of music. Today, a colleague turned me onto the work of James Vincent McMarrow, an Irish singer/songwriter whose gentle melodies and memorable voice intertwine to create a distinct mood - and whom I'm currently listening to on Grooveshark, a music-sharing site that I first encountered on Monday. Indeed, it was on Monday, too, that I learned about the music of Over the Rhine, a Cincinnati band (named for a Cincinnati neighborhood) that has quickly impressed me with a range of beguiling tunes. Three days in, then, but already a bit broader in my sense of the variety of sound.

Learning about Over the Rhine, though, was curious in one sense. For, while they are a contemporary act (indeed, they'll be coming to Annapolis in a couple of months), they're also an established act. They first formed, apparently, in the late 1980s, and began to attract some national attention in the early 1990s - at a time when I was more eager to hear Pearl Jam than female leads. I'm twenty years late to the party, in other words, and wandering through their songbook is thus a bit like walking through a space that offers an alternative to the one through which I moved. Where was I? I was swaying to Seal, and trying to learn some G'n'R on the guitar. But now, wonderfully, I can revisit a very different 1990s.

Or can visit, say, New Year's Day, 2009. L. and Cleo set out today for four days in N.C., and so after a lovely morning with Cleo I'm all alone at home. And that means, in turn, that I can pamper myself: write a blog entry, yes, but also watch the second half of Fruitvale Station, a taut, gripping film documenting the purportedly accidental but undeniably violent murder of a 22-year-old man on a Bay Area station platform just over four years ago. I won't say too much about it, in the hopes that you might enjoy it as well, but I will point out that a good deal of the film focuses on his clearly warm relationship with his 7-year-old daughter. And much of that relationship felt familiar: the impromptu races; the eager anticipation at the end of a nursery school day; the sheer happiness that comes from draping one's daughter on one's shoulders. Which is why, perhaps, the final scene hit me so hard: the daughter, woken up from a sleepover and slowly coming to her sense and realizing that something, something is amiss, pointedly asking, 'Where's Daddy?'

Today, on our doctor's advice, I took Cleo to a radiologist. She'd been suffering from stomach cramps over the past two days, and the pediatrician wondered if the problem might be trapped gas, or a slight intestinal blockage. So we drove up through icy forests to Lutherville, where Cleo donned the robe that you see above, and bravely put on a smile, aware that this was something unusual, but not sure if she ought to be worried or not. As it turned out, she needn't have been: the X-ray machine was more impressive than it was fearful, and Cleo actually giggled before the first image was taken: an image that revealed, indeed, a slight blockage that should give way to a few dried apricots and apples. We're fine, in short - but at least one of us is still slightly haunted by the sheer possibility that things could have been otherwise.

Of course they could have been. Indeed, they always have been. While I was listening to Pearl Jam, the members of Over the Rhine, unknown to me, were earnestly honing their craft. And a young boy in the Bay Area was growing into the man who would eventually lie bleeding and gasping on the unforgiving floor of Fruitvale Station.

Where's Daddy? He's here, thinking of you - whatever here, as you read this, might mean.