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.

Concert

L. and I don't yet have the local babysitters on speed dial - frankly, the few quiet hours between Cleo's bed time and our own weary laying down are often so pleasantly simple that we don't even think of trying to Go Out. But when I recently won a pair of tickets to yesterday's Peabody Institute concert from WBJC, it was too much to resist. Get out your best blouse, wife: we're hitting the town.

For at least a couple of hours, in any event. After getting a sitter set up in the living room, we drove downtown, and were slightly stunned to see people out and about, as though they thought that it was totally normal to eat at a restaurant, or to emerge from the house after 7 p.m. I felt slightly like a World War II-era G.I. must have felt, when he returned from the Pacific to his Akron family home: Yes, I vaguely remember such a life, but it seems so far away now.

But that doesn't mean that we'd forgotten how to enjoy it! Jackets off, programs in hand, and now the perfomers ambled onto the stage: four piece by Francis Poulenc, a French composer who moved for a time in the same circles as Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. I'd never heard of him, but who cares? The pianist played with grace, we both had a crush on the bassoon, and the oboe, as it sparkled, looked like a jeweled find in King Tut's tomb. And the second movement of each of the first two pieces was lovely: a quiet duet between restrained voices.

There were four pieces, in all, but I'm afraid that I can't report on the second two: like schoolkids giddy with the advent of spring, we made a break for the doors at Intermission -oh, but don't be too angry, WBJC, for we really did appreciate the tickets! - and each ordered a drink at a local restaurant. A cider and a beer: nothing exotic, but made the more delicious by the knowledge that Cleo was asleep six miles to the north, and that it was not, after all, impossible to combine this world and that. Did Cleo know that her parents had closed their eyes and thought, for a few moments, of nothing but music? No - and neither did the bassoonist know that occasionally two of his listeners were momentarily distracted by thoughts of Cleo, back home. But even if the two spheres were thus distinct, they made for a happy combination last night.

Advice, for G.

Just got a note from an old, dear high school friend who's expecting his first child, a daughter, in late November - and who said that he's thus been reading this blog of late. Yikes! I already feel, in my day-to-day fathering, as though I'm navigating without a very reliable compass; trying to find useful, applicable hints in this blog would consequently be something like trying to learn a measure of European grace by watching old Ernest P. Worrell commercials. Really, folks: you're better off flipping coins and following the I Ching than using this blog as a model of any sort.

But, with that disclaimer in place, it's still tempting to try to provide. I mean, with four and a half months' experience, shouldn't I be able to offer some sort of Top Ten list of recommendations for expectant fathers? Or, given that pretty much every expectation gets rescaled with an infant in the house, at least a Top Three, or Four? I mean, if Jim Cramer can make millions as a financial advisor, what's stopping me from offering a few recommendations regarding fatherhood?

So here ya go, G. Not exactly the wisdom of ages, but with best wishes nonetheless:

1. Honor thy wife. Regardless of what you've done, and of how tired you may be, she's done more, and she's more tired. So take the baby for that long morning walk so that she can sleep in; splurge on that Red Door gift certificate; put the game on the radio and wash those breast pump parts. Fatherhood's a great role, but you're a supporting actor, in certain basic ways, for the first few months. She gets the star treatment for a reason.

2. Read; listen; learn. Mahler wrote, in a letter offering advice to a younger composer named Max Marschalk, "We must for the time being keep to the good old principles." Sure, sure: but just don't let that baby sleep on its stomach. And on, and on: conventional wisdom and recent research are two vast bodies of water that meet and form a complicated tide. Get your hands on more than a few books, with different viewpoints, and be prepared to be flexible. Like this blog, no single book, no single toymaker, and no single grandparent has all the answers. But if taken as a whole, they form a remarkably rich field of wisdom and possibility.

3. Bend with the knees, not with the back.

4. Onesies that snap along the inseam, instead of going over the head will save you time and tears.

And that, my friend, is that. Short, and sweet - and yet probably already too long. Reagan once said, famously, that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Only slightly less frightening, I suppose, is the wide-eyed new father who offers advice on parenting. But, still: may your last few weeks as a couple be good ones, and may you find your own voice and instincts as a father. I'm sure you will.

Control

One of the odder, and perhaps even paradoxical, realizations of becoming a seasoned parent is that the more one understands about raising a child, the more one begins to cede control over that child. Sure, there are a few moments shortly after birth in which, still stunned, we hand our infant over to the hospital staff for measurements and immediate care. But the two or three months after that are characterized largely by a relatively complete parental control: we hold our baby, we decide where to walk her, what to tell her, when to feed her, and so on.

And then, inevitably, that control erodes. When she's old enough for the Baby Bjorn, you walk to the Whole Foods, and as you walk Cleo by the bananas you realize that the speakers are playing a Police song that's about a teacher romancing a student. Outside, you show Cleo the branches of a bush - only to realize that she's now also old enough to grab the leaves, or berries, and shove them into her tiny maw. At night, you lay her in her crib, and then realize that she's speaking to herself, in wonderful nonsense syllables, for minutes on end.

The world is hers, as well as yours, in other words. And just as you can't control with very much specificity the contours of the aural landscape through which we move - the sharp, abrupt honks of aggrieved commuters in cars; the glorious honks of overhead geese commuting to Georgia - you can't pretend to control with any fullness this baby who's becoming a child. You may want to read a book, but she may want to sit and drool. Somewhere a sound engineer programs tracks for Whole Foods locations across the country. You may choose to enter a particular location, and you may choose to raise a child, but such choices ultimately only represent gradual surrenders to the tacit will of others.

Processes

Most of you gracious readers know that I teach for a living, and some of you know that as a teacher I tend towards the hamhandedly over-organized. Detailed handouts, verbose syllabi, mental outlines: I'm what the kids call anal, and while it's clear that some of them do enjoy the sense of structure I bring to class, it's also clear to me that I need to try to remain open to the possible appeal of good old-fashioned spontaneity.

Which is why I especially enjoy, as one of the great gifts of my job, the occasional tips, hints, and recommendations offered by students. A website address (as in the comment to one of my posts), an artist's name, an album worth listening to: students periodically lay their gifts on an instructor's doorstep in beautiful, unexpected ways.

This week, it was an upperclassman - one of our sharpest and more thoughtful majors - darkening the door of my office shortly before our Art Criticism class, and passing me a bowed copy of Morton Feldman's collected writings. The evening's class was dedicated to the writings of the New York School, and Feldman - not a name I knew - was a composer and music critic who was in close with O'Hara and other Cedar Tavern regulars. "I thought you might like this," said the student, and wandered off.

Oh, but I do. In a 1966 essay, Feldman wrote of "Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only in how it is made... The preoccupation with making something, with systems and construction, seems to be a characteristic of music today. It has become, in many cases, the actual subject of musical composition." Such an assertion is not completely new to me: I know something of Cage, and Schoenberg, and a few other process-oriented composers. But the conciseness of Feldman's formulation is appealing, and I've spent odd moments over the past couple days mulling over it.

And, because I've also spent much of those two days toting an infant girl from place to place, I've wondered how it might apply to a philosophy of parenting, as well. We're so often consumed with thoughts of outcomes in raising children. Can they sit? walk? how fast is their fastball? how high their PSAT scores? But what if we shifted the subject of such conversations entirely to process? The questions would obviously shift substantially. How is Cleo learning these days (textures, tastes)? What does she seem to like (chewing on items while lying on her belly), and what does she no longer like (being held on her back, facing me)?

Thus a modest thesis: I teach with ends in mind, but providence regularly offers reminders, both in and out of the classroom, of the beauty of process.

And a corresponding resolution: to apply the same attention, at least sporadically, to the raising of a baby.

Orchestra at large

This past weekend happened to include my 39th born day, and so we set out, the car packed like a camel prepared for the Silk Road, on our first real family vacation. Cape May! The very name sounds like a siren's song, and its position on the map - on the very southeastern tip of New Jersey, a land's end, a hanging chad - suggested exoticism and remoteness. Or, at least, remoteness by our current standards: while it's true that a friend was flying to Tajikistan on the same day, and that another will be leaving for Addis Ababa on Friday, three hours still seems, to these new parents, like an Epic Journey.

But it went well. The hotel was lovely and the town truly quaint, with tree-lined streets and a bevy of 19th-century Victorian homes. Louie's Pizzeria kicked out a delicious pie for us, and the box in which we took it home exhorted us to "Love America": advice that really wasn't hard to take as we strolled about, taking in the sights. Thanks to Cleo, we were up for a lovely sunrise on Sunday, and for flapjacks at Uncle Bill's at 7 -see above - and the weather was fantastic, making walks on the beach seem, well, beachy.

Even the familiar pleasure of the sand meeting the sea, though, is now different. The relatively narrow strand suddenly looked infinite and Saharan: an immense plain across which the stroller cannot be rolled, and in which Cleo seems subsumed. But if the beach's vastness was novel to me, think about the sight to a four-month-old who's been a landlubber for her whole life. The incredibly distant horizon line; the feel of sand; the visual rhythm of waves: what to make of such a spectacle? Cleo responded by lying on her back, smiling broadly, and stuffing three fingers in her mouth.

On some level, though, she must have been struck too by the sound of the sea. We could hear it through one of the partly opened windows in our hotel room, and it's such a basic pleasure. I suppose that it may not have been entirely unfamiliar: isn't the rush of the mother's blood in the womb somehow sealike, too? But novel nonetheless. As were the sounds of shod hooves on the streets outside, as horse-drawn carriages led tourists about the town. As L. noted, Cleo must be used by now to the sounds of sirens at night: what to make of this clipped rhythm, though?

Ah, she'll make whatever she wants to out of it. For now, it's enough to think that the world is an orchestra, and that each section begins to play at a different moment. First are parents' voices, and then the incidental sounds of home; soon the whisper of trees, and the quiet purr of the car. Strings, and then reeds, and then brass. Crash of breaking waves; clop of horses' hooves. Each month sees the composition grow more complex.

Not quite unlike a language

In paragraph 528 of his Philosophical Investigations - a wonderfully intricate tome of brief thought experiments that represents one of the major reasons I've been such a poor poster this week - Wittgenstein notes that “It would be possible to imagine people who had something not quite unlike a language: a play of sounds, without vocabulary or grammar.”

Well, indeed it would. In fact, one doesn't really have to do much imagining. Hang out with Cleo for an hour these days, and you'll get a pretty wide range of grammarless sounds: hasty, put-upon breaths; feline squeals; almost erotic moans; scratchy exhalations like the roar of a tiny dragon. And, moreover, they don't generally seem random; instead, they recur, and often seem knit to their context. A long, warbling wail suggests exhaustion, while a a rich, M-my sound can signify pleasure. Not quite, in other words, unlike a language.

But Wittgenstein is not quite done. In the next paragraph, he wonders, “But what would the meaning of the sounds be in such a case?” And then responds, in a different voice: "What is it in music?” What, indeed? Like music, the sounds of a four-month-old are abstract and seemingly not quite linguistic - and yet they're also structured, and sometimes deeply powerful.

Stolen moments

There's a furtive aspect to being a new parent: furtive in that each free moment now acquires a special significance. Awake before the baby? Finish grading those papers early? It's like coming upon a silver dollar, on the sidewalk: you look around, sheepishly, and then pick it up, full of ideas about what to do with it.

Five months ago, of course, I spent those free moments in ways that now seem ridiculous. A monograph on the deciphering of Mayan glyphs seemed like a reasonable investment of time. An episode of Head of the Class might occupy a free half hour. And then there was online Scrabble, as well.

But now we're lean, and efficient; we have lists of tasks, and goals, and aspirations, and when an unplanned, uncommitted moment happens along, it's almost already accounted for. The check's already spent, even before it's cashed.

Which is why last evening was so pleasant. My folks were in town, and they watched over a sleeping Cleo in the evening, as L. and I slipped out for dinner at Ethel and Ramone's. And soon we were sitting in the early autumn evening, gumbo before us, three years of marriage behind us, and, perhaps most amazing of all, two hours, unaccounted for, in front of us.

And how did we spend it? Oh, the manner wasn't exceptional; it was the simple chance to do so as we chose that seemed remarkable.