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.