Guardians

We just had a wonderful visit from L's sister, Tasha, who may or may not be thrilled about being pictured on the good ol' World Wide Web (above), but who acted like a true patron saint to Cleo during her weekend stay in Baltimore. Nothing like an experienced mom to offer sage, practical advice, and nothing like a true CHHS '88er to pitch in and clean a bathroom. Thanks, Tasha.

Cleaning bathrooms is not, we should vigorously emphasize, expected of our houseguests. In fact, the only expectations around here these days resemble the codes imposed on any visitor to a medieval Benedictine monastery: we retire at about 8, get up several times in the middle of the night, and rise with the sun. And, as Benedict insisted (in rule 22), no knives should be worn to bed.

Such rules are on our mind because we recently hired a part-time nanny to work a couple days each week in the fall. She seems great, and came with glowing recommendations, and so we're hopeful that Cleo will take to her - and, as importantly, that she'll take to Cleo. Still, it's already weird to think about asking someone else to participate in helping us to raise this little girl.

Weird, perhaps, but not without precedent. In fact, it turns out that Beethoven - along with many, many other children in his era - was largely raised by parents who were not his own. As a youngster, he gave piano lessons to the daughters of the von Breuning family, and he gradually became so close to the family that he spent many nights at their house. In Beethoven and his World, H.P. Clive summarizes the composer's feelings for the family: “Beethoven would later refer to the von Breunings as the ‘guardian angels’ of his youth." More specifically, he singled out the mother, Helene, noting that "she knew how to keep the insects away from the blossoms."

Hopefully, we've found a nanny who knows similar tricks. And we've already found out that Cleo already has a guardian angel, in the form of her only aunt.

Predictions

Outside the Roland Park Starbucks the other day, a Kind Woman - the sort who appears in Curious George books - peered admiringly into our stroller and said, What long fingers! She'll be a pianist.

Cleo does have long fingers (and toes); in fact, that was pretty much the first thing that I noticed about her, after birth. And, yes, it does mean that she shares, for now, one trait with pianists such as Rachmaninoff, whose hands - pictured above - could allegedly span a thirteenth. On the other hand, when it comes to the piano, it's clear that biology is not destiny: the well-regarded Spanish pianist Alicia De Larrocha, who is roughly 4 foot 6, can only span a ninth with difficulty.

Regardless, though, what struck me about the Kind Woman's comment was the implicit desire to predict a child's future. L and I have been enjoying a book called Crib Notes of late: a collection of statistics, tables, and facts related to parenting, it includes several traditional ways to predict the sex of an unborn child, some of which I now wish we'd explored. How does the expectant mother pick up a key? If by the round end, it'll be a boy. By the long end, and you'll have a girl.

And so on. What color will the child's eyes become? What will her first word be? It's all common grounds for speculation, and, really, I understand: speculation is interesting. But there are times, too, when it seems enough to simply remain in the moment. As I'd noted on Saturday, these first few months pass quickly enough, without our trying to hasten their passage.

So, yes, she may learn to play the piano, in time. Or she may not. L might have grabbed a key by the stem, or might not have. But all that really matters, right now, is that Cleo is a little girl with long fingers.

Pacing

I have a confession: over the past few days, while holding Cleo, or playing with her, it's occurred to me that I might be able to speed up her development in certain areas by prompting her. If I hold her so that her feet just touch the ground, for instance, might she be walking at 11, rather than 12, months? If I were to recite the numbers 1-10, again and again in as we amble about the lawn, might she develop prodigious mathematical talents? Could a baby's neck be strengthened through three sets of six reps?

These are just passing thoughts; for the most part, we're thrilled (to the point of boring our friends, no doubt) with her small, natural signs of progress, and need no designed program. But of course such thoughts do open onto an entire industry, calculated to play on parents' fears and ambitions. Play Spanish tapes to your baby while she's still in the womb! Infant massages may stimulate muscle growth! And of course you'll need the entire line of Baby Einstein products.

How to resist the desire to keep up with the crowd, or to create a superbaby? Here's one way. I mentioned yesterday that I've been listening to the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. I've got the well-reviewed version by Vladimir Horowitz, and so yesterday I found a few minutes to read a rather famous 1992 discussion of Horowitz by Tim Page, who won the Pulitzer Prize five years after that for his music criticism. In the 1992 piece, Page argues that, while Horowitz was certainly technically proficient, his interpretive skills were not always strong. A master of control and as fast as any pianist, Horowitz can be seen as lacking, in other words, a certain subtlety or sophistication of feeling.

Such claims can feel subjective, to be sure. But Page wasn't alone in his feelings. In fact, he ends the piece by quoting a portion of a letter that Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote to a young Horowitz after hearing him play in the 1920s. “Mr. Horowitz," wrote Rachmaninoff, "you have won the octaves race. Nobody has ever played them like you. But I will not congratulate you because it was not musical.”

And that, friends, is how one resists the urge to speed up Cleo's natural clock. She'll crawl, in time. She'll read, in time. But no need to hasten. Instead, let's only try to make sure that, when she does so, she does so musically.

The point of it all

Babies need baths for roughly the same reasons that fraternity kitchens do: weird spills, late-night accidents, and inexperienced and occasionally exhausted roommates. So every few days we haul out the bright green baby tub, set up shop in the kitchen, and scrub Cleo down.

It's a ball. First of all, there's something simply right about summer, water, and total nakedness. As my first witnesses, I'd call Thomas Eakins' adolescent creek divers, Bouguereau's waterside nymphs, and a young fisherman painted at Akrotiri to the stand. But, really, is there any need for witnesses? Lolling naked in a warm body of water simply feels right. And Cleo has begun to realize this, too; although her smiles are still fleeting and often seemingly unintentional, she's at least calm and composed as we wash her back and (more embarrassingly) the folds in her neck.

Okay, then: so she likes water. Most babies do, shout the heckling old men in the loge box. What is the bigger point? Well, here you go. There's a fun little piece by Jill Lepore in this week's New Yorker. Nominally a review of two recent books on parenthood, it struck me as I read it (in tiny segments, over 45 minutes, as I tried to walk Cleo to sleep) last night as more of a meditation on memoirs and on writing, really, than on parenthood. Essentially, Lepore seems to be wondering why, and how, one writes on something like parenthood.

A fair question - and one that has occurred to your faithful blogger, as well. In fact, anyone who writes on parenting probably realizes two things very quickly:

1. It's pretty amazing.
2. Pretty much everyone has experienced, or will experience, it.

In that sense, writing on parenting is something like writing about high school, or even about buying a new house. Memoirs about parenting are not, by definition, like those airy accounts of teaching Nabakov in tense Tehran, or of founding public schools in remote corners of Pakistan. Granted, writers who do write on parenthood often do try to emphasize the uniqueness of their experience: their remarkable shortcomings as mothers (Ayelet Waldman), or their experience at an allegedly transitional moment in history (Michael Lewis). But these angles often seem more like camouflage erected to conceal the commonness of the subject at hand than truly defining circumstances. In the end, in other words, a baby bath is a baby bath: it has its own peculiar charms, but it's hardly earth-shattering.

So why keep reading? Well, Lewis, Waldman, and Lepore have their own answers to such a question. As for me, I'll quote a passage from the preface to Domenico Scarlatti's Essercizi, a series of brief studies on the harpsichord that have kept me occupied over the past couple of days. "Show yourself more human than critical," wrote Scarlatti, "and then your Pleasure will increase." Cleo's just three weeks old, and nothing she does alters the world, but if you can't see the beauty in a baby, naked, in the water, then you're missing something nevertheless.

Peter's theme

Yesterday - and I know this will sound a touch ridiculous, but it's simply where things are at the moment - yesterday Cleo and I discovered the Best Sidewalk in Baltimore. After a week and a half of bouncing over canted courses of concrete, of pausing before chasms and steering around fallen branches, we hit the jackpot. At the end of Longwood Avenue, in beautiful Roland Park, there's a sidewalk set into a sloped hill (for a look, click here, and on Street view, and then face south): it's smooth and as it clings to the hill, below several large houses, it really resembles, in miniature, a path in the Cinqueterre. At points a full 7 feet above the street below, it's nothing if not picturesque.

And it has, it seemed to me as we rolled along beneath spangles of sun, an actual narrative value. It begins with a soft ascent and eventually reaches a sort of climax at its greatest height. There was even a hint of conflict, of work to be done, in the strong scent emitted by a pile of mulch. All leading to a resolution: a gradual descent, until our stroller was deposited, like a paper boat sent by a stream into a larger river, back on the street.

I spent a moment trying to think of musical parallels: are there themes that have a comparable rise and fall, a similar narrative implication? Well, one example came to this weary, unmusical mind: Peter's theme, from Peter and the Wolf, Prokofiev's 1936 musical symphony for children. I don't know much about Prokofiev, but I know that piece well: it got some airtime on my dad's record player when I was little. You probably know it, too, even if you don't think you do: often narrated, it tells the story of Peter, a young Soviet pioneer, who wanders into a meadow, where he eventually meets and captures a wolf.

Each of the characters - Peter; the wolf; a hunter; a duck - in the symphony is associated with a particular theme, and Peter's is undoubtedly the most famous. Here's a link to an MP3 version of it: just click on Preview All. Prokofiev seems to have been thinking impressionistically; the lush strings suggest a fertile meadow, and the strong rhythm evokes a gamboling, wide-eyed boy. But what I'm really interested in is even more evident in the published score: Peter's theme, like our sidewalk, rises and then falls. It leads upwards, and implicitly outwards, and then suggests a sense of familiarity, or relaxation, through the descent of tones and the longer, held tones at the end. It bounces, like a boy, and is utterly whistleable, as any tune meant to be associated with a walk should be.

So if you happened to be driving down Longwood yesterday at about 11:30 (but I know you weren't; there's never any traffic there), and looked up to your left, that was Peter, wandering into the meadow and leaving the gate wide open as he pushed a stroller.

Standardization

As I wheel Cleo around the sidewalks of Baltimore, other pedestrians sometimes pause to ask questions (usually about her age; not a single inquiry so far about the snap in her curveball) or to offer comments. One of the more common observations made by experienced parents is at root a piece of advice: "Enjoy these first few months; they go quickly."

We'd agree with that. Even though there are the predictable occasional interminable stretches of 10 or 15 minutes, when nothing seems to appease Cleo, the days do roll past - something like the large white clouds that have been drifting overhead for the past couple of days. And, as they pass, Cleo changes, visibly: she's much larger than she was two weeks ago, and she's now pulling and pushing, where in her first few days she was incapable of exerting much force at all, in any direction. Over time - even over a relatively short stretch of time - things change.

That sounds trite, but here are a couple of ways of making it more concrete, and less cliched. On Saturday, I picked up a used copy of a 1973 bestseller among parents, The First Twelve Months of Life. On page 41, I read that “Although hospitals are beginning to allow a man to stay with his wife through labor, only a very few permit him to see his child born. After delivery, wife and child are unavailable to him. He is allowed to see his wife only in prescribed, short doses of time so that she can rest…” Amazing: 35 years later, I was present for - and participated in, to an extent - L's 13-hour labor, and I then spent all but about three of the next 60 hours in the same room in the maternity ward with L and Cleo. Things change.

Even the most seemingly static things can change, in fact. One of the most incredible facts about Western music, in my eyes, is that the sounds assigned to notes in the common scale have varied considerably. This was apparently especially true in the 1700s, when vocal music was less highly esteemed than instrumental work, and players - unencumbered by the abilities of singers - thus tuned their instruments higher and higher, to achieve brighter sounds. That practice, combined with simple local variations in taste and quality, led to what now seems like a wild diversity of sounds. One 18th-century English pitch pipe, for instance, played A above middle C at 380 Hz, while several of the German organs played by Bach played it at 480 Hz.

In 1955, A was officially standardized: since that year, it's been defined as 440 Hz. And, given modern technologies, a greater consistency has been relatively easy to achieve. Viewed broadly, though, the attempt seems naturally flimsy, or inevitably stopgap. Practices in labor rooms can change dramatically in a generation. Cleo can smile one moment, and frown the next. And so, as every parent pausing to look at a baby knows, nothing ever stays quite the same.

Father's Day

So it's my first Father's Day as a father, but it sure as heck feels like it should be a Mother's Day - as has pretty much every day over the past couple of weeks. L's been amazing, nursing at all hours, reading to Cleo at 4 in the morning, and gracefully receiving the pleasant parade of guests who have stopped by in recent days.

Compared to that, I've been doing very little, but I have at least enjoyed trying to give L some deserved rest by taking Cleo on long stroller walks in various neighborhoods. It's worked rather well so far; we rumble slowly along the irregular planes of sidewalks or the smoother asphalt of quiet streets, under the sounds of birds and, occasionally, a splash of sunshine.

It turns out, of course, that this means that I'm now part of a community of stroller pushers, and am slowly beginning to sense my place on this unfamiliar spectrum. For example, I'm not serious enough to gauge our progress by means of a splashy strollometer, even if that means that we'll never know, exactly, our maximum speed or average ambient temperature. On the other hand, I do enjoy trying to offer loose narratives as we roll along. Admittedly, these are often pretty mundane, and sometimes little more than descriptions of what we're passing. But the very fact that I'm talking at all to Cleo as we stroll, combined with the fact that we have a rear-facing stroller, seems to put me on one side (without my realizing it) of a fierce debate regarding early childhood development that recently played out in the New York Times.

Perhaps certain types of strolling may help or hinder a child's linguistic skills. Perhaps. Really, though, such claims seem to me fall into a pretty familiar genre: parents, after all, have long exaggerated their contributions. In 1777, Mozart sent his employer a letter that had actually been written by his father, Leopold, but was signed by the young Wolfgang. It read, in part, "I therefore owe it before God and in my conscience to my father, who indefatigably employs all his time in my upbringing, to be grateful to him with all my strength..."

All his time? Hardly, at least in my case. That'd be mom. And even the time I do spend with Cleo, of course, won't ever be consciously remembered by her. Still, there's something about these regular outings that feels right, and that, compounded with the thought of L sleeping for an extra hour or two while we're out, means that we'll probably hit the road again tomorrow, as well.