Connoisseurship

Back in the late summer, on a visit to Chapel Hill, I joined my folks for a drink at the sublime Caffe Driade. You more or less know the setting, even if you haven't been there: a few bearded grad students on laptops; faint scent of American Spirits from an outdoor table; distant cry of a cicada. And, when we sat down inside, a jazz standard on the stereo.

D'you know that piece? my dad asked, genially. And I did, I'd heard it many times, but (shades of freshman-year art history exams here: Bernini? Borromini?) I couldn't place it with certainty. Coltrane? I think I said. No. That's Dave Brubeck, my dad said. Somewhere, in some remote Valhalla, the little-known god of jazz wept a few quiet tears.

But Cleo offers, sweet-faced, a chance at redemption. I may be no jazz connoisseur, but as Cleo played on her large red rug today, with Brubeck's famous Time Out (it was Take Five that was on the coffeehouse stereo) in the background, I realized that all parents, to some degree, are connoisseurs of their own children. That cry, in that tone, at that time: she must be hungry. Right leg kicking? She's content, and pondering her next move. That slight drag of the hand across the eye: it's nearly nap time.

And so on, and so on. Giovanni Morelli, one of the greatest connoisseurs in the history of the art, made a career out of a close study of the way in which details such as earlobes and fingernails, in Renaissance paintings, could reveal authorship. Less famous, but not always less astute, are the legions of parents who fluently read their own baby's specific vocabulary of wails and gestures, of hands and ears, and hands to ears.