Amicitia

A few months ago, Dad recalled hearing a traditional definition of a new parent: " A new parent is someone who can sleep anywhere, at any time, for any length of time."

Well, how does a parked car on the north side of Colorado Avenue, at about 1:25 p.m., sound? Good enough, yesterday, for both me and Cleo; after visiting with L. during her lunch hour, we both passed out in the Prius - Cleo for a good 40 minutes, and I for a pleasant 25, which ended when I awoke to the rhythm of her tiny snores and to the voices of construction workers in a nearby lawn.

Is a joint snooze in a car bad parenting? Probably, probably - but I take solace in Tim Hilton's observation, in "In Tandem," that "Nobody can be an interesting parent all the time." I try to offer, when I'm watching Cleo, a relatively diverse course of activities. But sometimes, dammit, you just need to sleep. Especially after the clocks are rolled back, and your unaware baby is suddenly rising at 5 in the dark morning, rather than 6.

But here's what struck me about the nap afterwards. I've found myself in similar circumstances - that is, coming to in a car, groggy and unalone - only a few times in my life: with an old college friend near Urbino, in 1993, for example, or with my brother, in an Oregon parking lot, in 1998. In each case, it's been with someone I've known for years, and the rather squalid aspect of trying to grab some Zs with legs scrunched under the dashboard has thus been offset by the sense that all is forgiven, from the start. No, it's not luxury; but friendships don't always demand luxury.

Could I call Cleo, then, a friend? She had no say in the situation, of course - but at the same time she certainly seemed content, as she sawed twigs in the back of the car. And while all parents want the best for their children, sometimes, maybe, the best is simply answering what's needed with what's at hand. That's what friends do, after all, as a matter of course. Even as they iron the kinks out of their necks.

Winterabend

Sometimes in the mornings, as Cleo writhes and wriggles on her play mat and the sun rises, or near the end of a day, as we wait for L. to get home from work, I place a CD of Schubert lieder into the CD player in the nursery, and I forward to track 11. The machine whirs briefly, and then a varied, ruminative piano motif quickly takes shape, and we hear the baritone Dietrich Fischer's Dieskau's voice from across the decades.

Entitled Der Winterabend, or The Winter Evening, the song was written in 1828, and based on an 1825 Karl Gottfried von Leitner poem that begins like this: "It is so still and secret all about me. The sun has set, the day has gone; how quickly now the evening grows grey. I like it so; the day is too loud for me. But now all is peaceful; no hammering from the blacksmith..."

While it evokes the pensive mood of dusk, though, Schubert's song isn't necessarily restrained; as John Reed wrote, in The Schubert Song Companion, "A mood of stillness and serenity can be established either by music that scarcely moves at all or by music that is constantly in motion, like a dance. In this song..., Schubert uses the second method." And the result, I'd add, is quite bewitching: a texture of melancholy and gratitude, interwoven.

Cleo dances, in her way, with her Whoozit, and I think about the advent of the coming winter, and Fischer-Dieskau sings: "How good it is to have this blessed peace."

The sounds of silence

Since this is a blog, and since everybody knows that bloggers don't develop new content, but rather depend parasitically on the ideas of others, let's begin with a quote. In her recent memoir A Book of Silence (which I breezily admit that I have not read in full - cherrypicking being another prerogative of the contemporary blogger), Sara Maitland writes that "I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needs holding, nourishing and unpacking."

Re-reading that for a third time, I still can't say that I'm convinced that silence needs unpacking (which has become one of the worst of academic cliches; eventually some poor scholar working on a cultural history of the suitcase will unintentionally note that the suitcase has to be unpacked as a phenomenon). But I certainly agree with her primary point: silence is rare in contemporary America.

Do you doubt it? Well, to settle the point I suppose we could wander about, sound-level meters in hand. But, in the absence of such equipment, or such resolve (if I'm going to wander about with high-tech gear at arm's length, it's gonna be a metal detector, for obvious reasons) a five-month-old in a Baby Bjorn actually turns out to be a pretty good gauge of what is and what is not loud.

Cleo, as you know, goes everywhere with us. And, like most babies, she doesn't much like loud noises. She no longer exhibits the Moro reflex, and so doesn't startle, but a boisterous cocktail party or nearby motorcycle will pretty quickly upset her, while a walk by the relatively quiet Jones Falls tends to yield interested glances and a pleasant, placid mood. As a result, I've grown, by extension, more attuned to noise: like the handler of some hypersensitive diva, I try to avoid potentially upsetting situations.

But they turn out to be, unfortunately, rather common. Lisa, bless her heart, recently took Cleo into ESPNZone briefly to buy a co-worker a gift card -only to report that it sounded like a battle zone and that Cleo appeared simply overwhelmed (I think of the wavy lines that Schultz used to indicate Charlie Brown's common grief). When I drove Cleo to the Towson mall recently - it was rainy; an indoor stroll seemed a nice alternative to another hour of crinkly toys on a mat - I soon realized that it was impossible to find a space in the mall through which a soundtrack didn't weave. And when we wandered, for a brief moment (might jeans be on sale?) into Abercrombie and Fitch? Forget about it: Cleo burst into tears that were just barely audible over the crushing music.

Sure, those are stores. But even in more natural settings, manmade sounds intrude. I've already noted in this blog that we can always hear, from our tree-covered lawn, the traffic from nearby roads. So, too, along the river: yesterday our nanny opted to stay in, instead of taking Cleo for an afternoon walk, as a large lawnmower was at work. And the parks in the rich county to the north of the city? Well, even they are peppered by the barks of dogs, the occasional overhead airplane or distant beep of a construction vehicle or car alarm system.

In one sense, this is just a fact of life; it doesn't need unpacking so much as it needs accepting - and certainly Cleo isn't bothered by the regular noises of dogs and roads. But the very process by which she, and we, have grown accustomed to such noise can lead one, as Maitland writes, to forget the revelatory quality of silence. While we walk, I often offer an occasional commentary on what Cleo's seeing: A tree. That's a tree. I see a big puddle. And so on. Cleo sometimes follows my pointing finger, and I imagine that sometimes she's actually listening to me. But, now that I think about it, perhaps it's telling that she never complains when I don't speak.

Perhaps learning words is pleasurable, on some level, to a baby on a walk. But perhaps the quiet of a walk without a soundtrack is equally, or more so.

Excitement and litost

Perhaps we could think of babies as explorers. Initially, their discoveries are rather modest: in learning to track an object visually, or to open their little bunched hands, they're not venturing far from the town in which they were born. It's like discovering a nearby creek, or stand of willows. Over the next few months, though, they become more ambitious, and their finds more impressive. Smiling, grasping objects, laughing, raising the head: they're building canoes that wander up and down the local river, and they're mapping the foothills of the nearby range. And then things get really interesting. In the Middle Ages, Gael hermits found the Faeroe Islands, and European sailors charted the Azores. In their fifth month, many babies find their toes, and learn to sit, while holding pushing with their hands, and learn to roll over. New horizons emerge.

This past weekend, Cleo rolled over, intentionally, from her stomach to her back for the first time. She repeated the trick twice yesterday, and three times today (meaning that, if she keeps up the pace, she should be able to do it roughly 6,795 times in a day when she turns 19). In fact, the event's become predictable enough that I simply shot it on our camera today: see above.

Admittedly, that's not the most overpowering piece of footage, and in one sense, rolling over is a small thing: even after she's rolled over, after all, Cleo's still an inarticulate and totally dependent baby. But don't knock the video; after all, even the Zapruder film is rather unimpressive, on a purely visual level. Rather, it's what the images, and the acts they depict, suggest that can bowl you over. Here's what I mean. There have been many times over the past five months where I've passively assumed that what I'm doing must be what fatherhood involves: cradling, talking without meriting a response; feeding. But suddenly, in a single action, it became clear that there will be vast changes, and that slowly, slowly, Cleo will earn a total autonomy and eventually have little need of us.

That thought is both awesome and deflating, at once. I was simply stunned by the realization, made concrete in her new skill, that she really is a person who is slowly growing into something fuller and more complete. Amazed, I spoke to her in a different tone of voice, with new respect. But at the same time, I was also reminded of Milan Kundera's description of an untranslatable Czech word, litost. Kundera roughly renders the word as "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery," but the example that he offers is more memorable. Think of a boy, he says, who wanders into the ocean with his girlfriend, who is a strong swimmer. The two play in the waves, and then start to swim; the girl politely restrains her pace, so that he can keep up. But then her body simply follows its own athletic logic, and she pulls away, a graceful dart in the waves.

What the boy, left behind, feels is litost. What I felt, watching Cleo roll over, was similar.

Subito

Subito, from the Italian for quick, is a musical term for a rapid development or change in a composition. If I was a South Asian boy genius, and it came up in a spelling bee, I'd ask for it to be used in a sentence, and I might get something like this: 'The piece, much of is to be played pianissimo, includes a subito fortissimo at one point.' Last night, however, L. and I experienced an even more vivid illustration of the term.

It was about 9:30, and we were working on the Sunday Times crossword, with NPR's mellow (mellissimo, really, but that's not a word) Echoes on the radio. My small nip of bourbon had left only an amber shadow in its glass; our cat was curled up; Cleo slept. All quiet.

And then, suddenly, sounds of sirens, close, and closer, and a loud car crash on the avenue that lies just south of us. More sirens, and the chop of a helicopter, and suddenly the chopper's search light was clear outside. We both hurried to the window, and at that very moment saw a man vaulting the fence across the street, landing, and running across the street towards our house. And then he reached our gate, next to our front door, and was out of our line of sight.

Police arrived about two minutes later, and the chopper's light illuminated our whole lawn, as eerie shadows wheeled about. An ambulance pulled into the neighborhood. More police cars. As it became clear that our street was secure, the cops began to explore the woods that begin in our back yard, and then, realizing that our basement door was partly ajar, came inside, pulled their pistols, and lurched downstairs. No one there: all well. The cops, eminently polite, watched while we bolted the door, and then continued to search, with bloodhounds, until about 10:30. No luck, apparently, and we went to sleep much later, still slightly shaken and apprehensive.

Living in any city involves occasional crescendi and sforzandi: an angry driver; an ominous piece of news; a jackhammer. But this was something rarer, as it felt as though we were in the middle of the composition, with no obvious way out. We listen to music; we turn the volume dial; we may choose to change the station. Last night, though, the range of choices felt much, much more limited: things were loud, and intense, and that was that.

At least for two of us. As the police gradually took their dogs back to their trucks, we ventured into Cleo's room. She slept, rolled towards one side, untroubled and surrounded by fleece. And that image, more than anything, helped us return to calm. It took a while - the change was not subito, but rather more of a diminuendo - but eventually we all slept, one baby dreaming of who knows what and two parents shaken by the melody they'd just heard and hopeful that the next day's would be less stormy.

Evolving rhythms

Well, since we don't have any Baby Einstein videos to return for a full refund, I feel like I've got a little extra time on hand: Daylight Savings will give us one hour, and now the Disney Corporation has given us another, in a sense, as we don't have to wait in line at some soulless Babies R Us. And, given that Cleo's napping, there's no better way to spend those free hours, of course, then trawling the Web and blogging about her - the 43 student papers waiting to be graded will still be there, I assume, when I've finished my post. So get in, friend, get in, and let's go for a brief ride.

Perceptual psychologists have long noted that humans have a tendency (or an ability, depending on your point of view) to discern order in chaos. I know the idea largely thorough the work of some especially interesting art historians: J.J. Pollitt, for instance, once argued that the isolation, or imposition, of order in the face of nature's flux was at the core of early Greek art, and Sir Ernst Gombrich dealt at length with the notion of perceived order in his later work. But you might also think of music: consider, for example, the convergence of rhythms in a drum circle. Or here's Yehudi Menuhin, the American violinist and conductor: "Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous." When confronted with chaos, one of our instincts seems to be to spot, or to imagine, a simpler, recognizable order.

Of course, there's nothing like a 4-month-old to create chaos. A look about our house confirms that: unwashed bathrooms; toys scattered on surfaces like salt on a salad; unfulfilled lists of things to do; a pile of laundry to be thrown in the washer. But despite such disorder (or perhaps precisely because of such disorder), it's also surprisingly easy to spot certain patterns. Cleo, for example, almost always goes to sleep between 6 and 6:30, awakens briefly for a feeding between 1:30 and 2:30, and then awakens again between 5:30 and 6. She still naps 3 or 4 times during the day, and her naps are almost like clockwork: 35 to 45 minutes apiece. And her parents? We see the clock turn to 10 p.m. most nights, and then we're out within a few minutes.

Those are relatively obvious examples. But there are also subtler rhythms that have gradually come into focus, as well. Most days, for instance, I take Cleo for a walk in the Baby Bjorn, and we often stop at the rope swing in the nearby meadow. As we swing, one or both of the elderly folks who live (and have lived, since the Korean War) in the house on the edge of the meadow appear in a downstairs window, and watch for a short time. I see their silhouettes, but this is hardly Mrs. Bates in the bedroom; it's somehow instead a simple and comforting quiet conversation across generations.

After a few moments, we usually roll on, and another subtle pattern usually emerges. Almost always, Cleo's left hand finds a loop on the Bjorn, and holds tight for most of the rest of the walk. It's always her left; it's always without looking. It's a quiet order all its own, perhaps even unconscious at this point. But for that very reason, it appeals. We hear sirens nearly every night; this morning Cleo and I passed a dead squirrel, a condom on the sidewalk, and a team from the gas company drilling a hole in the road. There are complications, in other words, everywhere one looks. Which is part of the reason why, perhaps, we tend to appreciate a simple, well-ordered composition or melody so fully, and so naturally.

Favorite voices

Cleo's not yet at the age where she responds to the pronunciation of her name - to her, I guess, "Cleo" is just one more of the many nonsensical noises ("oatmeal," "toothpaste," or "defensive back") that she might overhear in a day. That means, of course, that we can gossip about her without inspiring any more interest on her part than if we were discussing, say, Brazil's foreign policy. But if she hasn't yet picked up on the meaning of her name, she sure does seem attuned to the sound, or the timbre, of certain voices.

Neither L. nor I have really developed, I'm sad to report, a really good, mealy-mouthed, full-cute-on baby talk voice. Some of our friends have masterful versions of the voice and even strangers who smile at Cleo in the store will sometimes bust out a bouncy, squealy version of baby talk. I'm always impressed, and curious as to where the talent comes from: is it genetic? was it something that was taught in Home Ec? Regardless, as Rummy taught us, you have to go to war with the army that you have, and so L. and I usually speak in simple, quiet, loving tones, and hope that that's good enough.

It seems to be; she often turns her head at the sound of one of our voices. Still, when we up the ante by trying on alternate voices of various sorts, the rewards can be high: an oafish DA DHU DA DUH DHUM that I've been offering over the past week or so has drawn some great smiles and one long burst of weirdly adult laughter. And L.'s got a wonderful soothing voice for the last few minutes of the day, as Cleo starts to slip into sleep. Somewhere, I imagine, these voices are becoming the core memories of her childhood.

But the other day it was neat to see her really respond to a wholly separate set of voices: to a CD by an a cappella band called Take Six. My folks had brought the CD with them on their last visit; it came recommended by a colleague - thanks, Kent! - and while baby taste is incredibly hard to predict (really? the plush blue monkey doesn't appeal?), this one hit the spot. As soon as the first track began, her eyes left her toy and turned toward the CD player. And while she rarely listens for more than 10 or 15 seconds at a time - c'mon, folks; she's 4 months old - she really does seem to listen to it.

When I began this blog, I wondered when she and I would really be able to listen to music together. And, so far, the answer's been, well, Not yet. Beethoven evinces no reaction; Chet Baker inspired only the occasional babble, and a general yawn. But Take Six clearly engaged her on some level. And maybe that makes sense: composed purely of voices, and of voices much more musical then ours, it's music that's built around something she knows.

It may still be months, or years, before Cleo and I listen to a piece together in any meaningful sense of the word. But it was fun nonetheless to see that one doesn't always have to use baby talk to interest a baby's ears.