It takes courage

Well, after having spoken with, I think, my entire readership in the past three days, I'm not sure that I promise a great deal of new material. But here's one thought, at least, that didn't come up in the weekend's many conversations: I've been struck, of late, by how much courage people exhibit on a virtually daily basis. I mean this broadly - as in, say, the courage to undergo a day of written exams that will determine one's future (congrats, Melissa!), or the courage to attend one's 50th college reunion, and to strike up conversations with people one hasn't seen in decades (and many thanks for the stuffed animal, Helen Ann!). But I also mean it in relation to my own experiences. Just this morning, L. and I were chatting with a family friend, and articulated our concerns about our upcoming 30-hour trip, with Cleo in tow, from Baltimore to Cape Town. Oh, said the friend, I can relate - and promptly told us about flying alone, with a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, to the Sudan in 1972. The courage of others, in short, puts our own ultimately modest accomplishments into perspective. As usual, though, Cleo's my most familiar lens. And she, too, has demonstrated some courage in the past week. Last Monday, on a balmy day, I took her to a playground with a tall, spiral slide. Cleo had been there before, and we'd gone down the slide together several times - but on that Monday, she made it clear that she wanted to try it on her own. And so there she stood, above my eye level, on a small perforated platform at the head of the slide. And stood, and stood - and then squatted, turned, and lay down on her belly, feet pointed towards the bottom of the slide. A few seconds later, she was at the bottom, hair frazzled with static electricity, and resolved to try it again. I forget so much, and so quickly. But if this blog is in any way a mechanism against forgetting, then let me remember, years hence, Cleo's resolve as she stood, a tiny girl, at the top of the slide high above the rest of the playground.

All I Want is Potato Chips

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life. And give a man with a kid a copy of the above CD, and you condemn him, sweetly but surely, to many months of requests for Ella Fitzgerald's hyperkinetic Old MacDonald.

At least, that's the lesson I've drawn from a seemingly well-intended New Year's gift. The CD came to us from parent friends in D.C., one of whom was unable to take, any longer, the rapid rhythm of Fitzgerald's opening track. Otherwise, though, they assured us that the CD's full of good tunes, and wondered if Cleo might like it.

Can roughly 100 requests, issued from the back of the car over the course of three months, for yai-yo be taken as conclusive evidence that, yes, she likes it? But those parents were right, too, that there are some neat tunes once you get beyond MacDonald's farm. Hearing Slim Gaillard's bizarre ode to potato chips usually makes me smile, and Lionel Hampton's 'Rag Mop' is a weirdly creative anticipation, in swing, of postmodern poetry. And I'll happily debate the Google's view that "the only song that seems out of place is Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," as it injects a serious air that is missing elsewhere." In my experience, that track forms the lovely soft ending at the end of the CD, and offers a perfect backdrop for a evening arrival at home, or for a gentle point of departure into a car nap.

Still, though, anyone who has heard of Ringu knows that sinister things can come in innocent packages. And while Ella Fitzgerald coming out of our speakers is preferable, by a long shot, to what happens in the the climax of that film, we're still reeling from the everyday consequences of the gift. It's amazing, in its own right, that a few moments of passion can lead to a lifetime of parenthood. It's only slightly less amazing that a simple gift, weighing a few ounces, can lead to a what seems like a lifetime of cute, but insistent, lobbed requests that float from the backseat to the front.

In fishing, one throws back the occasional smallfry. Is it acceptable, by the same token, to toss certain CDs from the pier every now and then?

Big shoes

Cleo's current fashion obsession involves a pair of shoes passed down to her by her stalwart playmate, Quentin - who outgrew, and then shared (with the gentle aid of his mom), the gaudy silver sneakers you see above. And while we don't think that Cleo had actively envied the shoes when they were on Quentin's feet, there's no doubt that she's in love with them now. Cleo big shoes, she earnestly intones, as she works on taking them on and off. Big shoes, she repeats, admiringly, as she clomps around the house like an astronaut on an unfamiliar, distant sphere. Her handsome brown shoes, so reliable for so many months, lie abandoned in a basket; her soft leather slippers are ignored. It's the big shoes that she wants, and no others will do.

Who knows why we choose what we do, and when? I remember with some specificity, and mild embarrassment, my first forays into classical music. At some point in high school, I bought a copy of Dvorak's New World Symphony; shortly after, I paid a few bucks for an LP version of several of Beethoven's symphonies, at a used record store in uptown Chapel Hill. I remember, too, owning a cassette of Holst's The Planets. Predicable, right? It was poppy, accessible music, for the most part, informed by coarse taste and an impressed regard for perceived reputation. But there I was, with Holst in my knockoff Walkman, and Dvorak pouring out of the speakers of our Reliant K. Big music, I might have said; certainly, it felt exciting, in its own way.

And yet we rarely realize, as amateurs, that more educated observers and more refined arbiters of taste are all around us, should be desire their advice. My dad, had I asked him, could have let me know that the titles in my small classical collection were as inevitable as the rows of Rand, Kerouac, and Kundera that line the shelves of college seniors' dorm rooms. And we'd be happy to remind Cleo that her squeaky Carolina shoes can light up a room of surprised diners much more effectively than the blocky, Buck Rodgers-ish footwear she now favors. But what does it matter? Taste and experience, at such moments, are never the issue. In discovering a new vein of material, we don't yet want to be told of its reputation. We'll learn, soon enough, that Holst is not Chopin, and that small shoes have their appeal, as well. That will come, in time. For a few moments, though, everyone simply needs a few uncritical days in their big shoes.

Underneath her clothes

One of the more modest highlights of last summer involved a late afternoon - lambent, the poets would call it - at Patterson Park, where we fulfilled a Baltimore goal of mine by seeing the locally famous All Mighty Senators live, on the slope. And, months later, what still sticks with me from that show is the tight, focused energy and controlled humor of one song, whose joyful refrain ran: "Everybody knows I've got no clothes on / Underneath my clothes."

Roughly nine months later, one of Cleo's favorite words is nuku, which implies nakedness, is usually pronounced with a cavalier delight, and which may derive (say the local etymologists) from 'no clothes.' Did the roots of Cleo's neologism first take shape, before she could talk, while she watched the All Mighty Senators?

I can't answer that. But, for the moment, I can assure you that there's rarely any ambiguity about what Cleo's wearing, underneath her clothes. Delighted that she can put on her own pants, but still unable to pull them up all the way, she proudly shows the world that she's sporting a onesie, underneath those clothes.

Ritual

At some point in the late summer of 2009 (we think, straining our viscous memories), Lisa put the above disc into a C.D. player in Cleo's bedroom, while nursing, and slowly rocked our daughter back to sleep, to a gentle, eclectic soundtrack.

Since then, Cleo's gone to sleep with these sounds in the background at least 500 times. She's heard it in Santa Monica; she's heard it in Chapel Hill. It's played in dark rooms, curtains drawn, in both Virginia and West Virginia. And, this summer, it'll likely make the trip to South Africa.

There's nothing necessarily exceptional about the songs; the artists aren't particularly well known (although Carlos Santana does make an appropriately restrained appearance), and the songs are largely in languages other than European tongues, rendering the lyrics meaningless to us and to Cleo. But mommy (and the designers behind the disc) chose well: throughout, there's a restfulness, a fullness, and a soft presence that are perfect for bedtime. And so, over time, Cleo's not the only one who's come to associate the songs with an easy slope into sleep. When I happen to be putting her to bed, and I hear the sounds lilting in the background, my eyes grow heavy, as well.

If the disc has real soporific powers, though, it's also done neat work as a ground, against which Cleo can grow. A year and a half ago, she was a little bean that we planted in the field of her crib. Now, she sometimes wakes up, stands in her crib, leans over the rail, opens the C.D. player, grabs the disc, puts it in, lowers the cover, and presses play. The first time this happened, it caught me by surprise: I entered the room at the end of a nap, and found Cleo listening to a very, very familiar soundtrack. Who'd been, I wondered, in the room? And what intruder knew about our C.D., or would care enough to play it?

But miracles, repeated often enough, become merely unusual, and then become rote. The very fact that we can press a button and hear Carlos Santana bending notes is, in a way, miraculous. So, too, is Cleo's ability to summon him. As time has passed, though, both have become merely pleasant aspects associated with a disc that forms the center of one of our oldest family rituals.

In praise of bells

Bells, I'm coming to think, deserve a slightly more vaunted place in the jumbled pantheon of musical instruments.

They seem to be assigned to, tacitly, or quietly, or thoughtlessly, a second tier: they occupy, I'd argue, a place on the same mental shelf as the mandolin, or the harmonica, or the sitar. Yes, we know they have their place, and their moments - but, really, bells? How many glockenspielers can you name?

But they deserve better, as a certain toddler is teaching me. Since we spent, a couple of weeks ago, a full half hour in a tiny, toddler-scaled wooden locomotive, ringing the stout brass bell at least 50 times, I've noticed that bells are much more common, in the fabric of our lives, than I'd imagined. And not only are are they consistently present: they almost always acquit themselves in style. The clock on the spire of Corpus Christi, across from my office at MICA? Its daily chime at 12:10 is a timeless reminder of larger concerns. Two small bells, brought back from Japan by thoughtful grandparents, sit on a counter in our West Virginia barn, awaiting the arrival of Cleo's small hands, in whose grasp they tinkle gracefully. A cow, in one of Cleo's board books, wears a bell, and the thought of its sound in the colorful meadow beyond brings no small pleasure. And then there's the light rail train, with its satisfying bell delicately heralding its bulking presence, as we take a sharp turn.

Violins, pianos, and saxophones all have their partisans, their odes. Toddlers, not yet drenched in the canon, openly admit the fascination of other sounds, as well.

Through the generations

A few months ago The Times ran a rather simple, but surprisingly touching, feature about a man named Dave Levitt - a 40-year-old music specialist who now works at a largely Jewish daytime care program for retirees, but whose experience as a klezmer player is rooted in generations of familial experience. His great-grandfather, Max Levinsky, was a shtetl violinist who emigrated from Ukraine in the 1880s; his grandfather played the trombone with a group known as the Boibriker Kapelle, and his father headed the Marty Levitt Orchestra. As a result, when Levitt plays his klezmer before a few dozen aged men and women - some Jewish, and some not - he can draw on decades of accured familial experience. Or, to put it in rather sappier terms, his playing is both informed by, and gives voice to, his ancestors.

Over the past nine eight days, we've been lucky enough to enjoy weekend visits by all four of Cleo's grandparents. And while Cleo can't claim, like Levitt, a premature talent on an instrument - today she struggled with a whistle, emitting nothing more than a tiny whisper, before giving up - it's certainly clear that she's inherited an array of other sorts of gifts from them. Some are only nascent; some have not yet manifested themselves. But in years to come, she'll be, I don't doubt, her grandparents' child, in many ways.

Of course, in at least one sense, she already is. “I was brought up," Levitt told The Times, "with an elderly audience." And that's more or less what Cleo enjoyed, as well, these past Saturdays and Sundays. Whether she was riding the light rail, or taking a bath, or merely eating her yogurt, she had a warm and appreciative audience. But don't be too cocky, Cleo. Although they love to watch you, you need to remember that you are what you are because of, and only because of, all four of them. They're not merely audience, in other words; they're your past, and in many ways, your future. You'll get better, I'm sure, at blowing that whistle. But you'll never be the first, I can tell you now, to do it well.