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.