I had a dream

I had a dream the other night that I had made a post on this blog that consisted merely of a photo and a brief, no-frills caption. No forced reference to music; no attempt at gravity; no meditation on the medium of blogging. Just a photo, and a caption.

Solace

In the few scattered moments here and there, between playground appointments and edits on my book manuscript, between zoo visits and the gym, I've been reading Dean Olsher's From Square One, a loose series of meditations on life and crossword puzzles. On page 78, he dives into a discussion of Scott Joplin's Solace, which Olsher claims "will dislodge any repressed pain and force it from your body, through your tear ducts when necessary."

Well. Folks pay $99 to have the trained masseuses at Red Door do that, so I thought I'd spring for the 99-cent version on ITunes, and consider myself fortunate. (Feeling cheaper still? You can hear a piano roll version here). But, after listening to it, I'm not really at all sure that I agree with Olsher. It's not that I feel I have a great deal of repressed pain (although I'd prefer it if nobody ever mentioned, again, Sid Bream's winning run against my 1992 Pirates). But the piece simply doesn't strike me - despite its title, and despite Olsher's reaction - as therapeutic.

To each his own, right? Some prefer peas, as Stendhal noted, and some prefer asparagus, and you can't every gainsay the fellow who prefers peas. So when I say that Solace strikes me, above all, as whimsical and offhanded, I figure that Olsher and I are simply in different places.

That said, though, one wouldn't want to always be the odd man out, interpretively speaking. Laughing at Don Giovanni, crying at a Lady Gaga concert: you'd simply feel odd. Which is why it's nice to have a one-year-old who agrees with you on certain basic truths. Like the fact that a warm bath is a good thing. That cubes of fresh mozzarella are a perfect snack on a summer's evening. And that naps simply make sense.

Mr. Olsher, I respect your profound engagement with Joplin. From my point of view, though, it's Cleo's company that currently offers sufficient solace.

Attainment

Perhaps it comes to you, if you're like Beethoven, as you're walking through the woods and the thickets near Heiligenstadt. Beethoven's best ideas, according to the biographer George Fischer, came to him as he walked; "at such times his mind became serene and he would attain that degree of abstraction from the world which enabled him to develop his musical ideas." And did the ideas come as hints, or as fragments, or as full motifs? In any event, Beethoven made a habit of carrying notebooks, and jotted down thoughts as they came to him. When he got home, he then developed the ideas, working them into shape. A whisper, in a grove, developed into a full idea, and then given physical form, in a score.

Or perhaps it comes to you, if you're like Cleo, as you swing. Perhaps, suddenly, the sound dog is no longer simply a noise, an abstraction, but it now actually seems to mean. And so, this Sunday past, when your daddy asks you what noise a dog makes, you arc back and forth in your bucket swing, and think, and then say, as quietly and as deliberately as any dog worth his salt would be loud and spontaneous, oof. Your first word, of a sort.

And, two days later, as you concentratedly play with a gate in the Towson library, perhaps your body simply finally understands its own logic, and its own potential. And, with your daddy a few feet away, you fold your hands together, momentarily done with the gate, and totter over to him, unaccompanied, for your first five steps.

Who can describe the arrival of babies' firsts? Do they start in deep sleep, with a whisper of a thought? Do they come, as with Beethoven, during a stroll through the woods, in a backpack, on a shoulder? Do they suddenly arrive, as fully formed thoughts?

I don't know. But at least I can provide, in this case, the notebook.

The scene, in two Youtube videos

So my folks arrived yesterday, to help with Cleo during L.'s absence. And if you're of a certain age, their arrival might have seemed as though it were attended by a certain piece by Wagner - simply because Coppola's use of that piece has come to evoke a massive response to a call for help.

And they have been a huge help - even if homemade pies and dedicated grandparenting don't parallel, exactly, a liberal use of napalm. They've been walking Cleo up and down, up and down the house, taking her for private swinging sessions, and stepping in for this flagging daddy in the heavy hours of the afternoon. And I haven't even mentioned the two cases of Charles Shaw wine that emerged from their car.

That said, Cleo, when she's on her game, can leave even three adults weary - especially on a day, like today, when she decides to jettison one of her naps, simply because the world is too much fun to miss. So, after a full summer's dinner we're completely tuckered. And about to sleep, and to dream - as in U2's epitaph to MLK.

Familiar motifs

On this day in 1933, I just learned, The All-German Richard Wagner Association, meeting at Beiruth to arrange for the Wagner Festival, decided to amend its by-laws so as to exclude all "non-Aryans," and to instruct its branches throughout Germany to expel Jewish members.

That decision cemented, in some circles, the composer's reputation as an anti-Semite. But he's also famous - famous enough to leave a mark on even my shallow knowledge of opera! - for his use of leitmotifs, or musical figures associated with particular characters in his operas. Each time Tristan, or Isolde, appears in a production of Wagner, they're accompanied by a variation on a musical theme.

And so I wanted to write, today, about one of my favorite leitmotifs involving Cleo. And that's her little white UNC Tarheels hat, visible in the photo above (taken at the zoo, while staring at chimps). Cleo's now worn that hat, nearly daily, for more than four months. And of course one-year-olds lose things at a relatively constant pace: from plastic giraffes jettisoned from strollers to small pieces of banana dropped beneath a car seat, there is a wake of items behind nearly every toddler. Certainly, Cleo's hat has been cast into that wake repeatedly: she's elegantly extended a hand from her stroller and deposited it on a dirt road, and she's thrown it with an almost flamboyant vigor in the pool. It's been pushed to the floor of a Panera, and in fact Cleo offhandedly let it fall to the ground at the zoo, while riding on my shoulders, just a few minutes after looking at the chimps.

You might think, then, that Cleo's no fan of the hat. But it's not that simple. In fact, she also often enjoys putting it on, and will contentedly wear it for long stretches, without complaints. But she doesn't seem to realize that the pleasure of throwing an object away will often lead, in turn, to the permanent loss of that object.

Often. But not always. For, like a leitmotif, the hat keeps coming back. At the zoo, a friend walked back several dozen steps and spotted it. At Panera, when we returned a few minutes after realizing, in the parking lot, that Cleo was now hatless, a kind stranger had placed it on a ledge, out of harm's way. I've found it lying in the grass, and once I came across it while walking Cleo home from the pool - completely unaware that we'd lost it at all.

We may lose that hat for good, eventually; certainly, Cleo seems intent on making that happen. But for now I love the hat, and its patient, buoyant tendency to return.

Energy

So L. left Baltimore yesterday on a 10-day trip to Capetown, increasing my African readership by one (and likely, if we're being honest, to one), and increasing my dependence on playgrounds by tenfold, as I'm now Cleo's fulltime parent (with some big-time help from grandparents and our nanny...) for a good long stretch. And Cleo, it's increasingly clear, is all about swings. She points vigorously to them when she spots them, sometimes even starting to breathe rapidly as she gets closer - and sometimes she'll even point in the general direction of a swing that she's visited but that may not be in the current line of sight. Want more proof? This afternoon, she even invented a sign for swing: when she signed for help, I asked her , as I usually do, what she wanted. She responded by rocking her upper body back and forth in time.

So we went, and we went, and we went. And, as I pushed her during our second of four stints, I felt the familiar first wave of tiredness wash over me. It's a familiar feeling now: a combination of simple responsibility, of the wobbly frustration that comes from trying to communicate with an infant, and of the realization that one still has hours to go before one sleeps. In this case, about 15 hours: it was 9:15 a.m.

How to generate, then, enough energy to grant this little girl a creative day? Coffee, schmoffee: you know I love the stuff, but in this case I'm talking about something more existential; a more spiritual kick in the pants. And so my mind turned back to something I learned during my first teaching post, in 1992. The details (all-night party in Trebic; Pirates playoff victory on Armed Forces Radio, ending at 4:30 a.m.; consequent lack of lesson plan) don't really matter, but what I realized when I stood, exhausted, before my class has always stuck with me: a teacher can draw energy from the students, instead of always merely projecting energy. Throw a simple spark to teenagers, and it can catch, and turn into a fire that's actually hard to put out. A good question, honestly meant, can be as effective as 15 minutes of all-out lecturing.

I learned that much in 1992. And today I realized - belatedly, no doubt - that such a principle isn't limited to a classroom. The world is made of energy. Cleo arced back and forth; around her, trees arced upwards, the sun burned an arc in the sky, and dogs pranced in long, arcing curves about the park. Tap in, tap in: for a day, I thought, I'll simply try to act as a conduit for such arcs of energy. And here I am, tapping away at the keyboard, Cleo now dreaming on her back.

The Iroquois flautist Tsa'ne Do'se once said, I've read, "I don't 'play' the music, the music 'plays' through me." By the same token, I don't push Cleo, while she swings back and forth. She pushes herself, through me.

Cleo Comes Alive!

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Yesterday's featured guest on World Cafe was Peter Frampton, the man behind what has always struck me as one of the most mysteriously successful albums of all time. Frampton Comes Alive!, released in 1976, is a platinum record six times over, and apparently remains the fourth best-selling live recording of all time. And why, exactly? Well, there are a few potent tracks, including the timeless, 'Baby, I Love your Way.' There's that memorable, if kitschy, voice synthesizer. And then there was the $7.98 price tag - a real steal for a double album. And finally, if you trust Wayne, from Wayne's World, there was the fact that Wayne Campbell alludes to the album's popularity by saying, "If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

But on live radio, the aging Frampton was actually very modest and disarming. The interview was pleasant, and involved some interesting moments - such as when Frampton was asked how he approaches a song - like 'Baby, I Love your Way' - that he is expected to play every single time he goes on stage. "If you've got to do a number over and over again," he said, "I really get off on hearing what my band do to it. And when I look out and see the audience, it just triggers a memory... and I really enjoy just scanning the crowd and seeing how they enjoy it."

Cleo, riding in the back seat, seemed less interested in Frampton's answer than in a board book featuring images of kittens. But I wanted to think that she understood, on some level, the basic essence of the issue: the pairing of music and repetition. As we move through the house now, Cleo often points vigorously to certain items along our course. It's a relatively consistent roster of items - a small battery-operated fortune-telling machine; the stereo; the medicine cabinet doors; the smoke alarm - although it does gradually grow every week or so, expanding to include a new fetish object. And so we make our way from room to room like a superstitious athlete who feels compelled to touch a coaches' bald head, or a plaque in Yankee Stadium.

Or like a musician, I suppose, whose crowd will be disappointed if a certain standard isn't played. Cleo may seem, to the casual eye, superstitious, or obsessive. But perhaps she sees herself more like Frampton, enjoying an enjoyment that she feels she is spreading. And it's true, I now realize: I'm happy if she's happy.