Don't know

For the most part, Cleo, this blog has been about things that have happened: things that we've seen, and done, and heard together. But yesterday I realized that a substantial part of parenting - of living, perhaps, but of parenting, too - is about what has not yet happened. It was late afternoon, and I was at Camden Yards, watching the Pirates and the Orioles, as Mom prepared to pick you up. Comfortable in my seat, and in the generally familiar environment of lineups, statistics, and innings, I sank into the game. But from time to time I thought, as well, of you, and of how you don't yet understand the rules and the pace of the game, or the relevance of the organist's choices. Someday, I'm sure, you will, and someday we'll be able to watch a game together, with focus.

In The Infinite Variety of Music, Leonard Bernstein speaks at length about his practice, and his views of the history and the future of music. He argues against an easy biographical interpretation of music, and he insists upon a tragic element in Mozart. But at one point, he becomes interested in the difficult idea that even he does not always know where his own compositions will lead him, and that the act of composition thus feels both odd and inspiring. "Let's say that you get an idea," he explains, "and you go to the piano and you start with it; and you don't know what you're going to do next, and then you're doing something else next, and you can't stop doing the next thing, and you don't know why. It's madness and it's marvelous."

Even the composer, in other words, doesn't know what comes next. So why should a parent? I assume that someday, in some park, in some city, as some teams go about their infield battle, you will throw your arm up and yell, 'Charge!' Perhaps; perhaps not. Will orchestras, Bernstein wonders, someday become mere museums of the past? And he soon finds himself in a realm of unsolvable complexity. "No; yes," he offers. "No; yes. Yes; no. What is really true?"

We don't know what will happen. But the thought of what might exerts a consistent pressure on what is.