Premature thoughts

Might it be permissible, after less than a week in Cape Town, to offer a few thoughts on our new home away from home? Well, hell - given that I began writing about fatherhood before I became a father, it ain't like I'd be ignoring some enshrined precedent. And, anyway, isn't blogging - and its hyperactive younger brother, tweeting - all about instantaneity, gut reactions, and reason be damned? So, friends, here you go: Cape Town is a beautiful woman whom you love even though (or perhaps partly because?) she has been repeatedly unfaithful, and will be unfaithful again. It's a husband who rarely comes home when he promised, and may arrive in a storm of violence, or with the sweetest bouquet of flowers and a lilting love song rendered in a pure tenor. For every sublime view of the mountain above, there is a fresh puddle of shattered car window glass to your side as you walk on a gentle Wednesday morning. The beauty of the developed piers on the waterfront beckons, only to fall to pieces as police roughly escort a handcuffed and scarred man past you and your toddler. The lush parks and innumerable emerald sports grounds are crisply counterbalanced by the bracing poverty of row after row after row of shacks in the township to the north of the superhighway.

And what does this have to do with fatherhood, you ask? Nothing, and everything. As we walked a playground that occupies a meadow beneath a coffee shop, a dignified black man peered at us through the grates of the fence - everything, everything fenced - and handed me a xeroxed and typewritten note describing a plight: want taxi; no money. Had he really waited so long for a ride that he'd had time to type up his predicament, and make copies for distribution? Of course not. But did that matter? Of course, again, not. And so the small joy of a wooden bridge successfully traversed evaporates, its shallow degree of relief nearly invisible against the brasher, harsher chiaroscuro of the city.

Can one be said to be betrayed if the traitor is merely being herself?

Lot people sleep

Cleo, the child psychologists and the how-to books tell us that you won't remember, with any meaningful clarity, a single day of this, your third year. So allow me to step in, and to act as a sort of virtual memory:

On Monday, you went to school for the first time. The daycare center for the University of Cape Town: a series of small concrete rooms and galvanized tin roofs over a modest playground. Your teacher was named Elsie, and she exuded a patience that can only be accrued with years of child care under one's belt. We explained to you, for the fifth or sixth time, that you'd spend several hours in school, and would come get you; we led you about the room, and met some classmates of yours - a lovely young boy named Nils, and a docile, obedient girl named Audrey. We then had to say our goodbyes, and we could hear you crying from the other end of the daycare center. But when we came back, three hours later, that was you sitting with a certain heroic self-composure, eating macaroni at the tiny table as all of your classmates took their early nap. And, later, when I asked you what you thought of school, you said, in a matter-of-fact tone that beautifully recalled the voice of your great-grandmother Betty, "Lot people sleep."

South by southeast

And just like that - and that, and that, and 31 more hours of that - here we are. BWI to Cape Town; Sabina Avenue to Sylvia Street. And L. and I didn't even ask once, folks, for extra mini-bottles of Scotch on the two long haul flights.

But even if we had, it likely would have been a cultured late-evening exercise in enjoyment, and not an act of simple desperation. Because, really, the trip went as well as it probably could have. Cleo was both patient and tired, which makes for a docile toddler, and she slept for the majority of both flights, robbing us of sympathy-generating stories but allowing us to get some rest and to finally get caught up on Hollywood's output over the past two years. And the nine-hour layover in London? A lark, an etude, a chance to explore a random English suburb: we took the Tube six stops to Boston Manor, and soon found ourselves pushing Cleo in a swing next to a charismatic 3-year-old named Toby on one side and a precious cottage serving fruit pies on the other.

Can I sum up the trip, then, in a few words? We were both struck at times, I think, by the utter simplicity with which we used to travel: I faintly remember a time, long ago, when we didn't have to push large carts of luggage, and when a layover in London would have meant a race to the British Museum instead of to a playground, and when our first thoughts on boarding a plane wouldn't have involved assessments of the overhead bins, to see if they could fit a stroller. Yes, yes, we used to travel simply, and selfishly, and happily for all of that. But there was a happiness in this trip, too. In Cleo's sustained delight in a new cast-iron engine that could be rolled over the meal tray of a 747, and in her calm but grammatically accomplished proclamation, near a large window at Heathrow, that "I see plane coming." A different brand of happiness, then, but a real sort, nonetheless.

Along the way, when we weren't pouring orange juice into sippy cups or watching Owen Wilson, we both read, for fun, a bit of Allison Pearson's very sharp and pitch-perfect 2002 jeremiad on modern motherhood, I Don't Know How She Does It. I'll simply say that our trip confirmed the sense of a sentence uttered by the mother of two, on page 31: "Close my eyes and try to imagine a world without Emily and Ben: like a world without music or lightning." Such worlds are not impossible to imagine - and, indeed, both L. and I once loved traveling without children. But recalling such past times can take some effort, when they've been eclipsed by a new, and equally rich, order.

Summer daze

So you begin this blog, you know, on fatherhood and music and the various connections between them, and you work on it for TWO YEARS, and you touch on classical music pretty regularly and all, and then you qualify for the Jeopardy! auditions in D.C., and you make it down there, and you even review your presidents and Oscar winners, and then suddenly you're asked to name, well, you're asked to name the composer of La Traviata.

And, somehow, after 225 posts on music, you actually don't know the answer. And you end up writing Rossini. Even if it was, in fact, Verdi. Giuseppe Verdi.

Oh, it's enough to hurt a man, it is (although, really, the abysmal, Rasputin-like initial photo and a clear lack of telegenic effervescence - for some reason, I just can't SHOUT my answer to How are you today? - had surely already doomed me). But will such a mistake erode, as it probably should, my blog readership, as well? Who wants to read musings on music by a man who doesn't know his music?

Well, perhaps you do. After all, here you are. But perhaps, if we're being honest, you really came for the photo of the adorable toddler, rather than the thoughts on music. And, if so, I'm feeling chastened enough to accommodate. Photo above, y'all. Enjoy.

Fond farewells

Well, since a dearheart of a reader just sent me a Starbucks gift card, in anticipation of Father's Day, and since pretty much everything I write is powered by coffee from that joint, this blog is back in business.

And, since it happens to be May 20, the day of Clara Schumann's death in 1896, let's think for a minute about goodbyes. Cleo will soon be leaving for a summer in South Africa, and yesterday was her last day at the house of her buddy Quentin - who, in turn, is moving to Dallas. So we spent a few moments trying to explain - not easy, to someone with no command of the future tense - that she likely won't see the apartment in which those two have spent many days again. A few goodbyes were said: bye-bye, windows. And then we were off, to less ceremonial activities of the sort that are actually much more meaningful to your average toddler: pushing strollers, flirting with rope swings, and so on.

But those of us who have said goodbye before, many times, found ourselves, nevertheless, in a slightly nostalgic mood. And why not? Moments of farewell remind us of the fortuitous, chancy luck that brought us together in the first place. We'd never met Quentin and Stephanie before, when we first got together to discuss the possibility of sharing a nanny. And now it's hard to imagine the last year without them.

The last music that Clara Schumann heard, before expiring, was her husband's.

Liszt and Cleo

All right, then. With my other writerly duties temporarily fulfilled, it's time to get back to the thick of things: to a certain monkey, that is, and her ongoing attempt to teach us the rudiments of toddler logic.

So: did you know that, in July and August of 1847, Franz Liszt was invited to Istanbul, where he played repeatedly at the Tchirigan Palace, before Sultan Abdul-Medjid, and was decorated with the diamond-encrusted Order of Nichan-Iftikhar. Big deal, right? Admittedly, Liszt was not the first Westerner to play in the Ottoman court; after all, the sultans had long been interested in, and alert to, European tastes. In fact, while in Istanbul, Liszt was hosted by Giuseppe Donizetti, an Italian bandmaster who had served as the Ottoman instructor general of music since 1828. But, still - the leading lights of Istanbul rarely got to listen to a top-flight performer, and Liszt clearly thrilled them.

You could think of Liszt's visit, I suppose, in several ways: as one in a series of cross-cultural encounters that occurred regularly in the Ottoman capital; as a symbolic cessation, in artistic circles, of ancient animosity between Hungarians and Turks; as an intriguing late moment in the touring life of Liszt, who traveled less ambitiously in later years. But today I'm enjoying thinking of it as a simple ambassadorial moment between two very different cultures. Liszt, the technical virtuoso, his hands dancing on the keyboard, playing for the so-called Sick Man of Europe - and yet marveling, reportedly, at the fact that he could, simply by turning his head while playing, see both the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. What he could offer, they had never seen, and what he saw there struck him as wonderful.

Cleo is Liszt; I'll be the Ottoman court. I don't always understand the phrasings, the references, the cadences - but I've been around long enough to know that what I'm seeing is special. And Cleo, meanwhile, marvels at what I now merely take for granted: moving ants on the ground in this direction, and a pile of sand over there, in that.

Caca

For months and months, you control most of what goes into your little girl. Sure, there are occasional moments where the grocery store's music system play an Eighties ballad that you'd just as soon your little baby never heard. But, still, you decide whether she'll eat squash soup or peas, and you decide when she's ready for Dr. Seuss. And that first sip of chocolate milk? The choice is all yours.

Until it's not. L. and I spent a little time this weekend trying to write down all of the words that Cleo uses, on an ordinary basis. It was a surprisingly interesting task: we came up with around 210, and they grouped themselves neatly into a number of categories (animals, of course, and foods, and parts of the body, and colors). Helicopter and octopus stood out as the most complex. And it turns out that you can successfully navigate this world for 23 months without knowing how to say either American Idol or It is what is is. But what was perhaps most notable about the list was that we'd taught her every word but one.

Which one? Well, that'd be caca, which she usually says in rapid combination with pee-pee and poop, when she decides to report on (usually falsely) the condition of her diaper (or, sometimes, on the whereabouts of a parent). So, we wondered: whence caca? And the answer, in turn, took form: from the mother of Quentin, Cleo's playmate, who speaks to Quentin in French, and who thus uses the neat Gallic equivalent for poop. You say po-tay-to; I say po-tah-to. Poop, caca. No big deal - aside from the fact that Cleo's now saying words that we never taught her, and that we never use.

And that, in turn, is a jarring fact. Just this morning, I was reading a book about modern Arab art, and I came across a candid passage by the Palestinian artist Tayseer Barakat, who was commenting on the fact that easel paintings were entirely foreign to most Middle Eastern artists, before around 1900. "We, as Arabs and Middle Easterners," he wrote, "did not know this [easel painting]... We were not accustomed to a hanged painting on a wall. From its foundation, this idea which is based on something not Arabic not Easterner, demolishes the whole creative act for us."

References to caca don't quite demolish our entire creative act. To the contrary, in fact, they usually make us smile. But they do contain, I'd hold, an element of the foreign, or the imported, and thus of the unheimlich. Cleo is almost entirely, thus far, made of what we've given her. But, more and more, she'll be made of what she encounters on her own, without us: an amazing, but also unsettling, prospect.