A clearing in the jungle

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that there's an imperfect analogy coming up, in about two paragraphs. So consider yourself warned - but let's see, anyway, where it leads.

Last night, still puzzling over Cleo's sudden rash and ragged moods, L. and I ate a quick dinner after putting the girl to bed, opened the door to our babysitter, and went out for an honest-to-goodness date. It was time for The Stoop, a series of occasional collections of live stories, with a house band and a generally reverent audience. With Veterans Day less than a week behind us, the night was dedicated to stories that centered on war and conflict. And even the band nodded to the evening's theme, offering an affecting song that opened and closed with a stirring version of Taps, on trumpet.

I hadn't heard Taps in a long time: it's just not something, I suppose, that you encounter if most of your time in the real world is spent on playgrounds and in libraries and sports bars. But my unfamiliarity with it only intensified my interest in the rendition we heard last night, and I was struck by the simplicity of the melody, and by its powerful use of repetition. It consists - and you may well know this, but I certainly had never realized it - of what you might call 8 three-note units. 7 of them rise; only the seventh falls. And, as the first and the eighth are exactly identical, the piece leaves a listener where s/he began, but, at the same time, slightly changed. Juxtaposed with the descending triad immediately before it, the final restatement of the opening notes is profound and newly rich.

And here's the leap in imagery, the straining in the metaphor. Today, in many ways, was a very ordinary Tuesday for me and Cleo (who has made a quick recovery from what we realized, late last night, was roseola): we dropped L. off at work, we took a brief walk, we went to Children of the World, a co-op for wee ones, and we lunched at Panera and spent an hour at the Towson library. Back home, we leafed through a couple of books, pieced together a puzzle, and shared a mozzarella stick. Nothing, for the most part, unusual: it could have been any relatively recent Tuesday. With the exception, that is, of two happy, jarringly unexpected moments. At the co-op, I was holding Cleo while we began to put away all of the toys, for song time. When I lifted the mirror that I usually carry to the back room, Cleo suddenly said, quite distinctly, 'Mee-uh.' I paused, never having heard her say that word before, and asked her what she'd said. 'Mee-uh,' she repeated, unimpressed by the fact that she'd more or less increased her roster of spoken nouns by 25%. Hours later, at home, we were playing in her bedroom when she gestured to the stuffed penguin in her crib. I fetched it for her, and then went to pick something else up. When I turned back, Cleo said "Hi,' and used her right hand to wave the penguin's fin back and forth at me. Suddenly my little daughter was using a doll as a vehicle for her own imagination.

As I said, the rest of the day was exceedingly routine. It was a Tuesday, you might say, of repeated triads. But while the familiar tableau that greeted L. when she came home - Cleo and I, on a bed, Old MacDonald on the CD player and a puzzle between us - may have looked familiar, it was seismically different, to me, because of what had come before. I was now playing with a girl who can say mirror, in a manner of speaking, and who can role play. The same triad is not the same, once we've experienced the entire melody.

This evening, in preparation for a class tomorrow, I was reading Carol Duncan's essay 'The Art Museum as Ritual.' In her deservedly well-known piece, Duncan quotes several luminaries on the experience of attending a museum. Among those quoted is Sir Kenneth Clark, who once remarked that exhibited artworks "produce in us a kind of exalted happiness. For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle: we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky." Yes. Yes, we do. Back in the jungle, back in the bedroom, or back at the side of another soldier's coffin, we are shaken and moved by the momentary exception.

Ars sine dolore nihil est

There's no doubt we've been having a rocky few days, as parents and as parented. Cleo, for reasons that are just as obscure as the reasons behind the popularity of 'There Was an Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly,' has suddenly begun waking up at 4:30, thus reverting to a schedule befitting a 17-week-, rather than 17-month, old. In the process, she's jettisoned her relatively civilized afternoon nap for two brief dozes that barely give this daddy a chance to check his e-mail and down a granola bar before a bottle of milk is requested, by means of loud sobs lobbed from her crib. She's also developed an enigmatic rash that has already inspired, in a mere half day, about as many crackpot theories as the Zapruder film. And, to top things off, she fell on her face while walking at the zoo yesterday, cutting her lip and then jarring me out of the soporific world of NFL halftime scores when she and L. arrived home, both crying and shaken up from the incident. In short, we've got a real one-year-old on our hands.

But what's beautiful about, well, an unbeautiful stretch like this is that there are still sublime moments of grace. Cleo, above, after eating much of a loaf of bread at Bonaparte, while watching the boats bob, and before throwing one slice, in tiny pieces, to the ducks of Patterson Park. Cleo, on a jungle gym, smiling while watching other, older children run and leap. Or Cleo finding the turning bookshelf at Barnes and Noble today, and laughing out loud, repeatedly, while managing to slowly turn it, a few inches at a time.

Jimmy Page didn't always feel his best, after visiting his various girlfriends on entirely separate floors of the band's hotel, when strumming his guitar before the adoring thousands. The online critics gave credit to American Idol aspirants in Season Four, when they sang through sickness ("The health-plagued group of Jaclyn Crum, Rashida Johnson, and Faith Gatewood," wrote The Trades, "sang well despite their problems"). And one assumes that Chopin likely played strongly through the various ailments brought on by Polish winters. Illness and obstacles are everywhere - and so, too, is beauty.

Instant zoo

If you're willing to accept that there is a genre that consists of vocal evocations of animals, then you might also be willing accept that the first 30 seconds or so of Bobby McFerrin's Blackbird represents one of the more ambitious entries in that genre. But where does one start, before arriving at such an intricate and rehearsed series of sounds? Well, with the basics, presented here by a 17-month-old Cleo, whose earnest repertoire, often available on request, now includes idiosyncratic renditions of cows, cats, mules, sheep, ducks, elephants, and:

Nature, nurture

Every now and then, in order to remind myself that there are in fact books that are made of paper, rather than boards, I take Cleo into Barnes & Noble. Usually we end up, in short time, in the back of the bookstore, and I thumb through the choose-your-own-adventure offerings and the atlases designed for middle schoolers while Cleo diligently works her way up and down toy stairs or plays with the sprawling train sets. Last week, though, I paused to look at the tables of recent releases, and found myself face to face with Keith Richards' new memoir, Life. And when I opened it, searching aimlessly for a good anecdote involving a 1960s supermodel or a trashed Parisian hotel room, I was soon rewarded in an unexpected way - with the photo, above. That's Keith, aged four, on his first tricycle, in Southend-on-Sea.

Who could have known - and who would have wanted to know - that inside that proud, serious boy was a leering, debauched smack user and blues lover, just waiting to get out? Not I, not I. And, in the same direction: in what way could a beachside ride on a pier produce a Rolling Stone? Eternal questions, in other words: to what degree did the childhood make the man, and to what extent was the man already destined?

They're questions, of course, without full answers - or, rather, with inevitably qualified answers. Environment matters, but so do genes. And yet, despite that, L. and I still find ourselves tracing the lines between ourselves, our house, and our daughter. Is her love of shoes (she'll sit happily, for ten minutes at a time, trying shoes on and taking them off) somehow inherited? Surely not from this half; I haven't bought a pair of shoes, I don't think, since Obama was elected president. But the way she devours bread and beans points straight to me, and strangers claim to see my face in hers. And yet, the way in which she mimics sirens and helicopters clearly, and also a bit sadly, points to the importance of environment. We learn from our surroundings, even if it feels something like a police state.

Or, I'm reminded, if it feels like a mansion. In 1972, the Stones recorded Exile on Main Street, which would become one of their most celebrated albums. They laid down some of the tracks in London, and then rented a sprawling mansion called Nellcote in France, where they lived for several weeks, strewing bottles of bourbon on neoclassical cornices and finishing the album. Years later, Mick Jagger was asked about the degree to which the decadent setting of Nellcote influenced the sound of the record. "It's probably true," he conceded, "that the atmosphere affected the feeling of the music, and the sound of the studio. But you've no idea how much or how little." And then, when asked if he could still tell which portions of the record had been recorded in Nellcote, he added this: "I've no idea which is the Nellcote stuff and which isn't, to be honest."

Which, of Keith Richards' traits, is the tricycle stuff, and which isn't? Which of Cleo's tendencies are my stuff, and which aren't? They're hard questions, and ultimately Jagger's almost certainly right: you've no idea how much or how little. But, that said, the moments in which the lines of influence do seem clear are riveting, if fleeting, and they are powerful in an abiding way.

Capriccio

I suppose that we all have, in our thoughts about any broad field, certain concepts that have never quite come into complete focus, or that remain only hazily defined. Reverse loans, value investing, chastity bonds: who really knows, beyond the brokers who share manhattans and alpha-male jibes at Trinity Place after a day of trading, what such terms mean? Or take musical terms: yeah, I'm pretty sure I know what a downbeat is, but a cantata? Scordatura? Not a clue. And capriccio? I've enjoyed many pizze cappricciose, but I had to turn to Merriam Wesbter to learn that in music the word denotes "an instrumental piece in free form, usually lively in tempo and brilliant in style."

Or, at least, that's the third meaning of the word. The first is more familiar: a fancy, or a whimsy. And, to learn that, I didn't have to open any dictionary. Rather, I just followed Cleo about the Patterson Park playground on a cool, sunny, windy Monday morning in mid-November. Clad in a flowered shirt, a white sweater, a pink hat and pastel blue pants over tights, Cleo wandered the largely empty playground in fine form. A couple of minutes were spent climbing onto a table and chairs that might have sat two large squirrels. She then tottered over to a rock, explored its cold surface, and next wandered towards an elevated bridge. From there we took a long detour to the playground door, an iron gate that occupied Cleo for about five minutes. Back again to the core of the playground, for a snack, and then a few minutes spent spreading a diaper cloth on the wood chips that surrounded the play area. None of the sequence following, as far as I could tell, any grand logic, but each of them in accord with a seemingly implicit inevitability. Rocks need to be felt, cloths spread. And, in the process, the meaning of capriccio became clear. Whimsical, lively, and brilliant in style. I wonder why it was ever less than clear to me.

Force of presence

Let's begin with an image. 1985, I think. I'd just bought Mr. Mister's Welcome to the Real World, on tape, at University Mall. Walking back home, along Willow Drive, I popped the tape into my cheap cassette player, which I'd scored at a yard sale on Long Leaf, and turned the volume up.

Way up. Way, way up, because there didn't seem to be any sound. Until, suddenly, there was - and not just sound, but a sheer sudden painful wall of sound that seemed to occupy the very core of my head. The album begins, I suddenly realized, not with a soft and subtle grace note, but with a violent sustain. Mr. Mister, in da house.

Four years later, I was in a music appreciation course in college. We listened to a wide range of pieces from the Western canon, and learned to pick out minor modes, and differences between movements. But one of my clearest memories of that class involves a curious composition that was, I believe, a French baroque motet or cantata and that began with a uniquely bright and forceful proclamation. "C'est mai," perhaps? I can't recall, exactly, but what I do remember was the streamlined boldness of the male voice singing the line.

Why the memories? Because they evoke, or resemble, how I've felt about Cleo the last few days that I've spent watching her. She currently seems so remarkably present, so wholly here, that I can't refrain from shaking my head at her, at times. If playing with sand, she's wholly focused on the tasks of pouring, and patting. If eating, she meditates on the taste; if steering a wheeled toy horse, there are no distractions worth mentioning. Bullet-shaped, and the weight of a generous sack of rice, she's a solid, real thing. She's a conversational partner, as well: we can ask her if she wants some milk, and receive a vigorous head shake in return. And she's autonomous; already she's walked up to us at several points, with a book version of Old MacDonald in her hand, and proclaimed, Aye Aye O, to get the singing started. Or paused, in a playground, and gestured upward to a quietly whispering airplane overhead.

So sing bright, troubadours. Turn up your knockoff Walkmen. Cleo is present. And presence is grace.

Transportation

As Cleo and I were driving to the Tot Lot for some autumnal playground time today, I turned on the radio, and heard a few minutes of an interview on David Dye's World Cafe with the Indiana-based band Murder by Death. A comment by the singer, Adam Turla, stuck with me: "If there's a cool, sort of, technique you can steal for just a moment of a song - a hint or a suggestion - it can really transport a listener to an exotic place," said Turla. "And that's very much what I like to do..."

Not five minutes later we pulled up to the long green mall, and Cleo and I wandered over to the bright slides, the solemn swings, full of promise, and the generous sandbox.

I've never been, in any meaningful sense, a musician. But transporting a 16-month-old to exotic playgrounds scattered across the city... That's very much what I like to do.