Taking stock

With a bottle of prosecco in the fridge, and 2010 calendars scattered about the house, and a slate of meaningful AFC games on tap this coming Sunday, we at 1202 Sabina are currently all about looking forward. Folks, tonight we will be the change we want to see: slightly tipsy, perhaps, but full of love and resolutions and the persistent hope that this year really will see a resurgence of heavy metal. We'll buy the new Mastodon album, I promise, if it's worth buying.

But the last day of the year, of course, is also about looking back. And so even as we prepare to raise our glasses, and to ring out the old, we're feeling Janus-faced. 2009 was, after all, a pretty doggone neat year. From the streets of Kairouan to miniature golf near Paw Paw, W. Va, we saw some neat sights. And then, too, a little girl came into our life.

Like 99 percent of the nation's newspaper section editors, I'm tempted, then, to do a year-end best-of list. But let's give it a slight twist: let's simply use today as a microcosm of the year. After all, I spent a good part of the day reading about early Islamic architecture and drinking coffee: two activities that probably consumed a healthy slice of my 2009 pie chart. Too, there was a lovely two-inch frosting of snow on our lawn when we woke up: a reminder that the year was filled with moments of unexpected beauty. True to form, L. was both beatific mother, generous sister, and unpredictably ambitious cook: while I type this, she's making chicken something or other. There was great music in the background: Beethoven's Trio in D Major offered a stately background while I read on the Timurids.

And then, as in so many days over the past seven months, Cleo was at the center of things. We took her for a walk in the morning, enjoying her cool, been-there demeanor as flakes fell about her. I managed to get a series of baby giggles - rarer now, as she's seemingly becoming more discerning in her humor - with a series of raspberries on the back of her neck. L. nursed her; we both sat her, in turns, on our thighs while she opened her mouth wide, like a tiny bird, towards spoonfuls of pear, and apple, and rice. She managed to crawl backwards, for reasons unclear, for about a foot, and she showed a sudden fascination with a radiator.

In other words, it's been a full day, and a full year. And here's hoping that the next one is just as good.

First syllables

Home today, after a wunnerful six-day trip south for the holidays - a trip that was illuminated by the generosity of friends and families, that was bookended by two stops at Virginia Cracker Barrels, and that felt, at a few points, like a blog tour might feel, if there were such a thing. What do I mean by that? I'll explain, by means of thank-yous: thanks to Janet, for the remarkably kind words about the blog; thanks to Dad, for the Satie and the Beethoven, which will soon make their way, surely, onto the Cleo Top Ten playlist; thanks to Jaro, for the warm encouragement; thanks to Alex and Faith, for giving us a place to stay, and for the wireless that made the last post possible; and thanks to L., for the hardbound volume (a lovely gift, although you, L., remain my favorite embodiment of memories shared). Six days, folks, and I must have met half of my readership. Try that, John Grisham.

But - he says, suddenly remembering his place - this blog ain't about me; it's about the little one. And the little one is suddenly beginning to vocalize, in patterns that might be called intentional or recognizable. While it's true that she does still cry rather regularly, and that at other times she can sound quite like a yeti, as my brother pointed out after several of her miniscule roars, she's also been practicing her mas and her bas.

No big surprise there; those are among the first syllables that most babies utter, and it's usually around the six- or seven-month mark that they start to be said with any sense of intentionality. But, still, it's really endearing to here her in her crib, long before sunrise, starting to wake up and mouthing what sounds like a devout chant of ma, ma. And tonight, she even participated in a very brief conversation: I offered the inquisitive opening (ma, ma, ma?) and she, in turn, offered a reasonable response (ma, ma).

Do the sounds mean anything? It's hard to believe that they do; she utters them at such varied times, and in such different company. But, still, as we realized a few days ago, even such a small arsenal of sounds should allow her to:

1. call for L., when she needs a good hug from her mama.
2. effectively imitate a sheep.
3. predict the winner of the BCS title game (so long as it's Ba-ma).

All of which, it seems to me, is rather impressive, for a little girl who just went to sleep at 5:45.

The letter C

Today, dear readers, let's think about the letter C.

C, of course, in this context is for Cleo - Cleo the baby, who is now six and a half months old, who has spent a fraction of the past week practicing her first intentionally vocalized syllable (maa, maa, maa), who still approaches the world by trying to pick it up and then put it in her mouth, and who is starting to crawl backwards, in an apparent first step of sorts - an awkward and inverted step - towards moving from place to place.

But C is also for Chapel Hill, where the three of us are spending the holidays. And it's thus for the generosity of two friends, who have lent us their lovely house for several nights, and it's for two wonderful sets of grandparents, who watch Cleo wriggle, and hold her, and offer gifts and open arms and unconditional smiles, and it's for the memories prompted by any return home (L. remembering 411's whole wheat pasta with chicken, and me, today, recalling afternoons spent playing video games at what used to be the Pump House), and for 47 degrees, and for not having, necessarily, to lock your car when you park.

And C is for Christmas: for the 12 Days of Christmas displays that kept Cleo entertained this morning as she and I walked around a pre-dawn Chapel Hill, and for parking meters covered for the holidays, and for breakfasts with Santa, and for brothers flying in from New York, and sisters flying in from Chicago, and for baristas in Santa hats, and tins of shortbread, and pecan tassies, and fudge.

And, finally, C, say the Romans, is for 100. In cricket, 100 overs represent a century. And what of a hundred posts in a blog? I don't know if there is a term for such an odd combination of egotism, verbosity, and perseverance, but, regardless, this is the hundredth in my proffered series of meditations on Cleo, and I'm thankful, deeply thankful, to that little girl for so much fun over seven months - and thankful to you, reader, if you've read any of the previous 99.

The unexplainable

That was a tough last entry, folks, and the overnight ratings from L.A. are down, down, down. Too serious, they said, and nothing about music. So let's grab the steering wheel and get this thing back on track.

In A Primer for Critics, George Boas observes that “A Neapolitan sixth usually causes an agreeable feeling, but not one person out of ten can recognize a Neapolitan sixth and no one whatsoever knows why it should be so moving.”

Or, in my case, knows what the heck a Neapolitan sixth is. (Learning, from Wikipedia, that it's "a major chord built on the lowered [supertonic] scale degree" does not help. That's something like explaining that Merv can be found in the Murghab river delta).

But I think I know, nevertheless, exactly what Boas is trying to identify, as a phenomenon. It's this: the illogical but absolutely true and even ravishing pleasure that I can get from touching Cleo's absolutely smooth little cheeks. Why should it be so moving? No doubt, the evolutionary biologists probably have their explanations, and Freud would probably like to weigh in, too. But I discount, preemptively, all of their reasons. No one whatsoever knows, really, why it should be so moving. And yet it is.

Original sin, part II

After reading yesterday's post, L. told me that perhaps I was coming down a little hard on Cleo. Evil? Ahab? Really? I mean, she's only six months old. And, yes, well, that's true. But then, L. hadn't yet come face to face with the black sludge (as I did, again, at 4:40 last night). Sure, we all know, in the abstract, that Everyone Poops, but let's just say that infants have a way of doing so that's rather endearing. And Cleo, I guess, is no longer an infant.

But that's just a long way, really, of saying that I'd meant yesterday's post to be lighthearted. And lighthearted for a reason, for shortly after Cleo's passage from infancy we both came face to face with something much more sobering than a soiled diaper. With temperatures in the mid-50s, and an afternoon before us, we walked over to Whole Foods, for some salmon. Nothing very special there; that grocery store is, for reasons largely geographic (we're hemmed in on the other three sides by large roads), a cross between an oasis and an amusement park. But yesterday afternoon, it was also somehow on edge. As Cleo and I neared the checkout counter, I saw a number of the cashiers conferring, and standing rather nervously next to their registers. And then I looked down - Cleo, in her stroller, was simply looking at the coffee counter, as far as I could tell - and saw a man sprawled on the floor, on his back, with a halo of blood around his head.

He'd fallen, apparently, and hit his head on some sharp surface. I didn't pursue details - why add to an awful scene? - but as we walked to the far end of the store, we heard two employees note that he had moved, and was thus alive. The manager called, over the p.a. system, for a doctor. And a few minutes later, as we left in a stunned sort of haze, the EMT team arrived in a blare of sirens. I don't think we'll ever know, for sure, the rest of the story.

But why, regardless, do such things happen? What logic, what existential or religious logic, could explain a man doing something as benign as shopping suddenly coming face to face with death? As I noted yesterday, some of our most cherished stories emphasize the sudden appearance of threats, or mortality, in our lives. Snakes wander into Hercules' crib; the Fates hover over the threads; Deus vult. But, still, whichever narrative you choose, the basic question remains: Why?

This father does not yet have an answer to that question. But I'm open to suggestions. And I'm open to the idea that suggestions can occur, like the tragedies that necessitate them, in the most unexpected places. A few hours after we left Whole Foods, I took Cleo to the doctor, for the last of her 6-month immunizations. As we made our way towards the building, we passed a woman, who looked at Cleo, and simply said, aloud, "Look at God's precious angel."

Serpents, angels: we navigate a seemingly pedestrian world that is interrupted, occasionally, by the possibility that we see only the surface of a much larger whole.

Original sin, part I

It's fair to say that the books that we've been reading to Cleo probably won't ever make it onto the reading list of a graduate seminar on narrative complexity. Instead of a plot, one book gives itself entirely over to pictures of fruits, and vegetables, and animals. Another places Teddy the Bear in a number of reasonably interesting settings, but we never learn how he arrived at the breakfast table, or where he chooses to drive his nice red car. In fact, the closest we've gotten to any real sense of narrative conflict is in That's Not My Dragon, where we're allowed to look at a range of dragons that allegedly don't belong to us - the text is quite emphatic about that, in fact - before we reach the climax, or the resolution, on the final page, when we see our dragon, with its scaly wings.

But, as one of mankind's oldest narratives reminds us, into every Eden comes a serpent. In time, Teddy at his table is no longer enough; we want motives, or tensions, or (if we're French) frisson, and (if we're French academics) obtuse semiotic relationships. Complexity, in short, eventually enters the picture. And it often does so in shocking ways. Captain Ahab finally comes into view, or Judas decides to accept the silver pieces. We look to the sky, and suddenly see the imperial star fleet approaching Tatooine.

Today, our six-month-old narrative arrived at such a moment. As you may remember, Cleo's been trying solid foods for about a week now. She's downed a few tablespoons of boiled pear, and nibbled rather critically on some strained squash - all while offering a range of expressions that range from plainly disgusted to wavering, and uncertain. But if she was withholding opinion regarding these new foods, she was also withholding something else: her poop, that is. For three days, nothing.

Until today, when the dam finally burst. A better writer, perhaps, could come up with an original description; for my part, I'll simply refer you to George Orwell's description of Sheffield's slums, in The Road to Wigan Pier: "And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begin smelling gas." Or begun to throw up alternative smells, as roadblocks: after tossing the heroic diaper that had tried, valiantly, to stem the tide, and after giving Cleo the most vigorous bath I've ever given her, I retreated into the back rooms with her, and began to remember where we keep the incense.

Now is a good time to reconsider the photo, above. Look at her: she sleeps, untroubled, scent of baby, angelic, as though made of cotton and milk. And yet, I now realize, that center could not hold. The story was simply too dull, and evil had to enter the picture. And now it has done so, and the complexion of our tale is irrevocably changed. There are forces of darkness, folks, and they suddenly crowd our horizon. We will remain strong; we will continue to feed her pears. But we now do so in a world that is no longer innocent.

Da solo (sola)

My apologies, folks, for the diminished pace of late: I've been trying to gracefully steer my fall courses towards that final landing strip (classes end this coming Friday), while also preparing the first few class meeting for the spring (which has meant, among other things, reading the Qur'an for the first time). Add to that the fact that I spent most of my word hoard on a conference talk and a revised article, both due earlier this month, and am blocking out a 1,500-word exhibition review due next week, and you'll begin to see why I haven't won any recent Blogger of the Week awards.

But here's one for you, written while eating a sandwich, before driving to campus. Although it's true that Cleo is rarely more than a foot from either me or L. at any point in the day, there are still a few rare moments, every now and then, when she's clearly doing her own thing, and seems almost oblivious to our presence. The reasons for her distraction vary - it might be a good ceiling fan, or a bout with a stuffed something or other - but the effect is always rather touching: there's a unique appeal about watching her simply involve herself, without depending on us or gauging our reaction. Think about it: we'll be driving L. to work, and there will might be a happy occupied silence in the back, and then suddenly a little shriek of excitement, or a long string of carefully rendered nonsense syllables.

In an essay called "Patrimony," Michael Hofmann once observed, of his son, that “I feel he exists most strongly when he is independent of me in some tiny way. (My looking at him does nothing to help establish him.) When he lifts his hands to touch the tufts of hair over his ears… or taps at his head with his wooden hammer to test the effect. Then he is agent and acted upon, and I am nowhere.” Or, if not nowhere, I'd add, perhaps in a delightful somewhere: in the role of parent, to a child who's becoming an individual.

That's not to say that I'm aiming at a completely detached or voyeuristic parenting style. Not at all; in fact, most of my experience so far has been characterized by a virtually total immersion. There's no distance, literally or symbolically, and so I spend much of the day with Cleo in my arms, or against my chest, and milk stains on my sweater. And, sure, there's an appeal to that closeness, too. It's the appeal, roughly speaking, that Ellen Johnson once noted in the paintings of Jackson Pollock: “Being in their actual presence is somewhat like sitting in the front row at a symphony concert – one feels mixed up with the music, physically involved in the very process of making it.” That's a good description, I think, of parenting an infant.

And it's also a good explanation of why it's nice, occasionally, to hear or to see Cleo establishing her own independence. Sitting in the front row can be wonderful. But so, too, can listening to the absorbed cellist from the back row.

When the levee breaks

It often happens suddenly, and dramatically. After writing few compositions in the previous years, for example, Allen Sapp resigned as Dean of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, in 1980, and a "torrent of ideas" (in the words of Alan Green) suddenly came to him, resulting in a number of his best-known works, written over the span of a few months. Or Paul Hindemith, a 23-year-old when World War I came to a bloody close, suddenly embarked on a whirlwind of activity, writing what Arnold Whittall once called a "flood of compositions." A change of career, a long-awaited armistice - and the floodgates are open.

For Cleo, like many babies, the floodgates seem to open, at least temporarily, around the six-month mark. For several weeks, she's made few dramatic strides: sure, she's more comfortable on her belly, she's getting close to sleeping through the night, and she's increasingly able to grab objects with strength and confidence. But these are changes in degree, really, rather than radical novelties.

Or, at least, that's what I thought when I got home today, and played with her for an hour and a half. Suddenly it was like dealing with an entirely new person. The nanny reported that she'd eaten a tablespoon of pear puree: that's big news, after she'd offered only bored expressions to my lovin' spoonfuls of yam, and peas, and had actively rejected Lisa's proffered zucchini. And then Cleo was sitting up, ramrod straight, for minutes at a time, after months of wobbling like a reed in a strong wind.

Does she know that she's changing? I'm not sure, but I'd guess the answer's yes. For weeks, she seems to have been in a sort of cocoon, evolving, and biding her time. Now the moment's come, I gather, for a sort of emergence. So why not simply enjoy it? As Thoreau wrote, in Walden, "Life in us is like the water in a river." Both have their own logic, and their own pace, and they pursue their own destinations.

The moral of the story

Here's a good story for you: Borius Goldovsky, the pianist and conductor, was once leading a rather tentative pupil through a Brahms capriccio that's apparently often used as a instructional piece. After she played a certain note midway through the composition, he stopped her, and told her to correct her mistake. She, however, pointed to the score, and said that she’d played what was written. Goldovsky, dubious, checked the score, only to find that indeed she had – but that there was an apparent misprint in the music. Later, curious about the source of the printing mistake, Goldovsky eventually looked up other editions of the score, and found that every one of them contained that same misprint, substituting a G-natural for a G-sharp. While widespread, though, the error had apparently never caused problems in live performances, as professional pianists had simply inferred from the local context that the intended note was a G-sharp. In other words, professionals looked through the error, not even noticing it; it took an amateur to actually take the mistake at face value.

If I were Malcolm Gladwell, I'd likely work this little (but true! I promise) anecdote into my latest top-of-the-list tapestry of socio- and psychological observations. I'm not, though - the hair I've got left is less muppet-like, for one thing, and I'm not nearly as big on the public speaking circuit as he is - so I'll simply massage it into a simple parental truism. It may take a village to raise a child, but it can take a child to point to the fallacies in our accustomed logic. Why is the sky blue? they ask, and we wonder at how rarely we actually look at the vault above us. Or, long before they can even ask questions, they voraciously stuff paper receipts into their mouths. And us? We take the receipt, and throw it out, and neither look at nor taste it. We look through the thing, for years, until a tiny, clumsy pair of hands shows us what it really is.

Ideals

New parents don't always speak very openly to one another. Sure, they'll occasionally admit that they're not sleeping very much, or they'll voice some uncertainty about whether they should be imposing a stricter schedule, or making the change to solid foods. But generally - and I suppose this blog is just another example of the tendency - they speak in rather rosy tones. The baby's always thriving; things are great; life is good.

Which is is, of course. But every now and then a parent does speak with complete honesty, and it's almost as though a dam has broken. That, at least, is how we felt when a good friend of ours recently expressed some relief that his two small children are now in a day-care program. Really, he noted, they're not very exciting conversational partners. And, he went on, about an hour or an hour a half a day with them is probably enough.

Wow! Was this that rarest of all individuals, one honest enough to call the king naked? Or was he simply (we wondered, like sheep now unsure about why we flock) something less than the ideal parent? Was he saying what we wanted to, but felt we couldn't, or was he saying something that probably shouldn't be said? Or both?

In thinking about this, L. and I didn't really ever answer any of those big questions, but we did try to tackle his implicit question. What is the ideal length of time, per day, with a baby who can't yet talk? Is it, as the saints of motherhood might claim, as much as one can get? Is it whatever the baby seems to need? Or is it, posits Homer S., the time between the football game and the trip to the donut store?

In his A Short Guide to Long Play, Martyn Goff suggests that the perfect length of an overture is between 5 and 10 minutes: such a duration allows a composer to establish a range of ideas without detracting from the body of the piece. Similarly, in his Radio: The Book, Steve Warren argues that the ideal length for a demo, for prospective on-air d.j.s, is between 7 and 10 minutes: enough to give the producers a taste of one's work, but not so much as to seem pretentious. And of course the song most often forwarded as the greatest of all rock tunes, Stairway to Heaven, clocks in at 8 minutes and a second. There's something about an 8-minute span.

Okay - but surely other forms of activity demand other lengths? Well, sure. Take, for instance, an unsigned piece in a 1958 issue of Current Opinion, which wondered what the ideal length of a novel should be, and concluded that many prefer books that take a reader no more than around 4 hours (which meant, in turn, about 35,000 to 40,000 words). Admittedly, the writer added, there are many (including A. Conan Doyle) who say that a successful novel demands a longer form - that a novel, in other words, should last a reader a good 12 or 15 hours, at a minimum. But, he concluded, "under existing conditions, reading, as people are reading, simply for pleasure or recreation, the short novel holds out an undoubted attraction."

I like that phrasing. And I wonder if it could be massaged into a summary of attitudes towards parenting - something like, "under existing conditions, parenting, as people are parenting, for both love and a vast range of other variables, is often attractive if..." If what, though? Well, if they're working Australian dads, I recently learned, they probably spend around three to four hours with their infant. That's pretty generous: another study estimated that Aka fathers (who are nomadic pygmies) only hold their infants for around 10 to 20 minutes per day. Maybe they spend the rest of their day reading long novels by Doyle.

In any event, put L. and me down as comfortably Australian. No offense to Cleo, but we both felt that around 3 to 4 hours of one-on-one time with her, per day, might be ideal. Which, when you realize that Cleo still sleeps for roughly 14 hours per day, works pretty well. Add in a little bit of full-family time, and there's a complete 24-hour day, with no hard feelings. But also, we might add, with little time to perfect that d.j. demo we've been working on...

Finding it out

Think about it: for nearly six months now, everywhere that Cleo has been is somewhere she's been taken. That is, instead of actively going somewhere (for Cleo can't even crawl, not yet), she is always somewhere she's been carried, rolled, or driven. And, generally speaking, that process doesn't involve any active consent. Sure, once or twice I've steered away from a destination if she seems especially upset by it (usually her bedroom, at non-nap times; once a lovely park, for reasons that lay, inaccessible, buried in the depths of a 4-month-old brain). But, on the whole, she simply goes with the flow. Or, more specifically, with her two parents.

Which puts, it seems to me, a certain amount of pressure on us. It's something like the eternal predicament of the tour guide: we don't want to wear our charges out, but we also don't want them going home and then having to answer the relatives' disbelieving questions: "What, you didn't went to London and didn't know about the Soane Museum? You traveled to Slovakia and never made it to the painted wooden houses of Cicmany? Your guide didn't know about the juice bars of Aleppo? But they make the best smoothies in all of Syria," they'll say, and our clients will hang their heads. Or, in Cleo's case, will tug in a vaguely disconsolate way at her right ear.

But, at this point, another, broader analogy suggests itself. The other night, in a brief moment of what might be called reverie (or, less generously, wool-gathering), I began to think that the way in which we experience music, over the course of our lives, is something like the way in which Cleo has experienced the world. That is, it's a largely passive process. We turn on the radio, and hear a piece by Brahms, or - if we're 12 and we're really lucky - by Cinderella, or Ratt. A friend lends us a CD by Natalie Merchant, thinking that we'll like it. Or maybe a jazz act comes to town: we can choose whether or not to go, but we're still largely at the mercy of their tour itinerary. If they hadn't come to the mid-Atlantic, we might never have seen them.

Obviously, as our tastes mature, we can do some active searching. We might, if we're in a Nick Hornby novel, wander into a Camden record store and ask for suggestions that are similar to the music we like (but we'll likely, if we're in a Hornby novel, be mocked, or even thrown out of the store). Or we might, in recent years, visit one of several online sites designed to point us to work in genres we enjoy.

But even these processes, are - aren't they? - largely contingent ones. We depend on the advice of others, or on increasingly nuanced marketing techniques. And, all the while, even as we're led to various musical monuments, we may get an occasional random glance of something greater. I still remember sitting in a the Daily Cafe in New Haven in 1997 and hearing Dead Can Dance on the stereo. I still remember coming across the music of Thievery Corporation while searching for music for our wedding reception, in 2006. These were deeply powerful moments of discovery for me, and they were totally unplanned. (Or at least mostly unplanned: a small part of me always sensed that hanging out at the Daily might make me cooler. But I sat in the front, away from the really cool smokers in the back...).

So: does Cleo have comparable moments? Maybe, although it's really hard to tell. Sometimes she grabs at a leaf, or simply rides in contemplative silence, or falls asleep. I take these as signs that she's in, at least temporarily, the right place. But there must be moments, too, when she senses that there's still more out there. And perhaps wonders if her guide can get her there.