We'll always have Timonium

Cleo, wherever you are when you read this,if you read this - in printed form, perhaps, in an attic, as part of some distant spring cleaning; or online, through the potent search engine of some university library where you're supposed to be writing a junior high essay on John Stuart Mill - wherever you are, I want you to know that on this day, the last day of August, 2010, you were deeply loved by both your mother and your father.

There are many, many things that we enjoy and admire about you: your devil-may-care daring in approaching, and scaling, rocking chairs; the way in which you open your mouth so wide, when we extend a spoonful of hummus; your adorable and flexible collection of four tiny words (woof, hi, uh-oh, and duck). The way you extend your arms towards your crib, near the end of every evening's bedtime liturgy, as if to embrace sleep, and the way in which, when I asked you today where the pool was, as we played in the sandbox, you turned, and pointed straight towards the pool. As if every one-year-old knows that. And perhaps they do: but 39-year-old forget that you do, and we thus feel compelled to write it down, to remember.

But what I really wanted to say, Cleo, was simply thanks for today's 9-hour-date. Date? Really? Well, maybe that's not quite the word - and if it is the word, then I'm a poor date, for I do almost all of the talking. (Although, I should point out, I do foot the bill for everything, too; you've never once offered to pay). But, whatever you call it, on days like today we head out together, and see what this old city can offer us, from bread bowls of black bean soup to the Science Center's water guns. Or, on this 96-degree Tuesday, a visit to the State Fair, in Timonium, where you saw your first llama, spent about 10 minutes watching milk goats being judged, pointed vigorously to the largest, fastest rides on Midway, as though you'd simply take your seat on the roller coaster, and peered long and hard at the ducklings, which we'd seen in books but never in person. And damn if they aren't, some of them, yellow.

But the high point for me, it turned out, was simply taking the light rail there and back. I don't think you'd ever been on a train before, and watching your initial fear - you cried, I'll admit, for a minute or two - melt into something like a cool, studied comfort was wonderful. The trees passed in a green swath; houses looked like toys. We saw fields, a part of a forest, and a lake, and as we sat together you drew cold water from a sippy cup.

So much of your mother's life, and mine, has been in motion, across boundaries, in trains, and buses, and planes. We love the thought that we can share that with you, and that you, a city girl, will pet goats in the county, or watch tiny ducklings hatched from their static pages, before you.

The elusiveness of presence

Cleo and I have found what I consider the perfect playground. In Rodgers Forge, an enclave that's locally famous for its family-centeredness, there's an irregular rectangle, bounded by two small lanes and two rows of brick houses and punctuated by a large grassy area and leafy trees. Near the western end of the rectangle are two large swing sets, a slide, a jungle gym, a generous two-part sandbox (that's filled with more than a dozen communally owned toy dump trucks, in tomato red, and bulldozers, in standard-issue bright yellow), and a towering play set for the 5-and-over crowd. Nicely sited benches - just far enough; just near enough - gather around the playground. And sunlight, on most days, filters through the maple leaves. It reminds me of some of the greatest small-scale urban spaces I've ever seen: of Connecticut town greens; of the main square of Telc, in Bohemia; of the Place Halfaouine, in Tunis.

Still not impressed? Maybe I should have mentioned the Mary Poppins-like figure who moved through the crowd today, passing out her card, in case anyone should need a nanny. Or the ice cream truck that pulled up - almost laughable in the way that it completed the iconic picture - this evening, broadcasting its recorded melodies. Or the fact that the playground even seems to have an ethos of conversation: the neighborhood's website even boasts of the sociability of most of the comers. Sure enough, I've had several pleasant conversations - and, in one, learned that the current gossip on the playground involves the forced removal of a number of toy houses that had once dotted the grounds, in a sort of idyllic inversion of a shantytown.

So, in short: it's great. But, even so, as Cleo usefully erected small pools of mulch on the base of the slide, I looked around - and saw three caretakers on cell phones. No big deal, I suppose, but the image struck me, likely because I'd just heard, on NPR, a story about how the availability of cell phones and e-mail has dramatically changed the experience of Peace Corps volunteers. You used to have no choice but to integrate, remembered a volunteer stationed in Zaire in 1982. But now volunteers Skype with their U.S.-based friends in the evening, or follow a ballgame online, instead of attending the local pig roast. Or, similarly, moms and nannies converse with husbands, or partners, or doctors, over the phone, instead of talking to their children, or to the dad pushing the swing a few steps away. Even in the presence of beautiful play, we seem (and I do mean we: L. texted me while I was there, and I'll admit to reading her note) to want to be, on some level, elsewhere, as well.

But wait. Look at Cleo. There she is, pointing to a bucket swing, kicking excitedly, being put in... and then pointing, within a minute, to the next swing over. And then, moved to that one, yapping about the see saw across the lot, unhappy until she's taken there - at which point, she'll want to move on to the jungle gym.

It's hard, in short, to be completely satisfied with the present. Even given lovely surroundings, we wonder, quickly, how things might lie elsewhere. And, elsewhere, people likely wish they were on a playground, besparkled and lambent.

Around you, everywhere

Today, as Cleo and I marched up Federal Hill for our second Serious Playground Session of the day, it occurred to me that the scattered constellation of play spaces strewn across Baltimore is rather remarkable. Wedged into vacant lots, pressed into city blocks, or designed from the very start as sandy exceptions in a realm of concrete, the playgrounds are a great, unusual gift to the tiniest citizens of the city, and their caretakers.

Can any theory of capitalism really fully explain their ubiquity? Urban designers, public health advocates, and developmental psychologists may all have played a role - but it still seems simply improbable that plastic slides and bucket swings would ever triumph against, say, a skyscraper, or a block of row homes. And yet they do: gentle concessions to play dot the city like the network of Abbasid wells that punctuated the path from Baghdad to Mecca.

Middle Eastern desert oases offer one parallel, then, but so too does the public musical landscape of contemporary America. What I mean is this: as one moves through Baltimore - or, really, any American city or village - one's bound to hear, as one moves, snippets of music, here and there. Today a band performed a sound check in the Pier Six pavilion. A speaker in the infant room at the Maryland Science Center oozed calming electronica. Angry rap declared itself, from a nearby car window, at the intersection of Northern and Falls. And the P.A. system at Whole Foods was tuned to a pop soundtrack.

But that's not all, of course. One may stumble onto local pools of music - but simply by turning on the radio, one can immerse oneself in an entire sea. Yesterday, as I drove Cleo home from a walk and, yes, another spell at a playground, I happened to hear a part of Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 30. A wonderful piece: but even more wonderful, perhaps, that it should be playing, for any ears near a radio, on a Monday in 2010. It was, in a sense, everywhere.

"Oh, all is music! All has been turned to music!" wrote John Hall Wheelock in his poem 'Night Thoughts in Age.' Such a line reminds me, in turn, that, from Cleo's perspective, playgrounds never mark the limits of play. Sure, it's terrific that there are swings in every neighborhood. But, just as the blanket of radio-borne music knows no boundaries, the world of play for a one-year-old is unbounded. One can rock on a rocking chair, or play with a bottle top, with a delight equal to that offered by a slide. All is music. And all, for some, is a playground.

Order in chaos

Today when Cleo - pictured above, right, with her colleague Quentin - awoke from her nap, she promptly unleashed a storm of consonants, vocalizations, and seemingly urgent gibberish that sounded much more like the oratory of an impassioned Ewok than our normal one-year-old roommate.

As I listened, though, and tried to respond, I kept hearing sequences of sounds that seemed, suddenly, meaningful, in a way in which Cleo's sounds have not generally been yet. Cleo does do a nice version of a mild-mannered dog, when asked to, and she's been delighting strangers with a reasonable Hi for a week now. But those are single syllables. So could she really have said, while indicating her desire to be placed in the rocking chair, a mealy mouthed version of Up there? Did I really hear her say something like Aye pat de dat when she petted the cat? Or was I simply in need of a nap, as well?

I'm still not sure. But I am sure - primarily because I've read Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion, one of the greatest books of the 20th century - that we tend to seek order in chaos, and to find the familiar in the unfamiliar. Confronted with an enigmatic shape, we think of analogies with more common objects (It looks like an anchor, or a battle axe...). Facing a beached whale for the first time, Baroque draftsmen carefully gave the animal ears, turning lateral fins into forms that we expect on the animals that we see all the time.

I had a roughly comparable experience, in fact, today, when WBJC played, of all things, the Love Theme from Alex North's score to the 1960 film Spartacus. It's been years since I saw that film, and I certainly didn't remember this 3-minute piece - which, it turns out, is part of a celebrated score that marries Hollywood's lush mood to rough period instrumentation and to a surprisingly modernist approach. Played on piano - rather than on strings, as with the florid rerecording that is available on ITunes - it is a spare, touching composition that's well worth a listen. And yet, as I enjoyed it, I found myself comparing it to other works that I did know. The spare sense recalled George Winston. And the main motif certainly brought Bill Conti's effective First Date, from the soundtrack of Rocky, to mind.

But there I go again, right? Faced with something new, we understand it by forcing it into well-worn categories. And confronted with baby talk, perhaps we - or at least that hypercaffeinated minority of us who are relatively new parents - try hard to uncover words, and phrases, and sentences, in the noise. Did Cleo say what I thought she did? She may not have meant to. But flippers can sure look like ears, if you've never seen a whale before.

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.