Living in the past

In August of 1990, Jane's Addiction - Perry Farrell's alternative band and pet project - released their second album, which was perhaps most notable for the massive frat party hit 'Been Caught Stealing,' and for an extended track called 'Three Days' that features the guitar work of Dave Navarro (who went on to play for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose work is possibly known to even the most culturally isolationist of this blog's readers).

At some point in the mid-1990s, I sent my dad a mixed tape that featured a number of rather recent rock tunes, including 'Three Days.' Such gifts, as I remember it, necessitated at least a bit of contextualization, for a similar mixed tape sent by my brother, a year or two earlier, had been interpreted as a sampler of my brother's band's recent output. Given that that tape had included 'Been Caught Stealing,' the misinterpretation was a fun one: working on the assumption that my brother had co-written and played on the song, but not realizing that it was one of the decade's biggest hits, Dad seemed only mildly impressed. But dads can surprise, and months after I'd sent him my (clearly labeled and attributed) tape, he mentioned that he'd enjoyed cranking 'Three Days' in the old Reliant K wagon.

And, just this week, during a longish spell of Cleo-watching, I was looking for some background music, and found that same Jane's Addiction CD on our shelves. Hadn't listened to it in years, but popped it in, and turned it up. And Cleo and I played a chaotic, no-holds-barred, rules-waived version of backgammon while the bass quietly established a floor, and Farrell shrieked in his inimitable way, and Navarro's guitar soared, and soared.

Sure, context matters in the interpretation of art. (Unless you're the staunchest of New Critics, and in that event you're not new anymore: you're a half century behind the times). In fact, I still remember hearing about Kurt Cobain's suicide on MTV news while at a beach house with my parents - and, upon telling them, realizing that they'd never heard of Cobain. But, all of that said, context only matters to a degree. To a grad student making a mixed tape, to a dad driving in a Reliant K, to a dad on dad duty on a cold December day... something about the song works. And now, as it works, and as Cleo hears it for the first time, it carries me back, as well as forward.

Current hobbies

What's Cleo up to, you ask? Well, beyond fighting off the rather grim stomach flu that's making the rounds, a few things, on a daily basis. Pointing out, as soon as one of us enters her bedroom in the morning, that we should turn off the heater and the vaporizer. The advent calendar, made by a generous friend. A book called Where Does it Park? Shoes, still. Puzzles, as long as they don't have interlocking pieces. And, perhaps above all, a vigorous recording of Old MacDonald that we were given a few months ago and that has been in heavy rotation ever since.

You can see, and hear, two of those interests overlap in this video, which records a more or less daily ritual.

The view from a distance

As far as I know, there's no word in English for the combination of loneliness, liberation, and disorienting sense of an adjusted perspective that one can feel when stepping away and looking back, from a distance, at a group to which one nominally belongs. Presumably some existentially fraught Eastern European tongue - Slovak, perhaps, after the rather sad 1993 attainment of countryhood? - has coined a word for the condition. But in this blog post I'll have to do without a convenient, economical summary of my topic.

Here's what I have in mind. Today, at the little Roland Park library nursery rhyme group that Cleo and I been attending for more than a year now, Cleo suddenly grew a little tired of the song that I and the other 8 adults were singing: ironically, enough, The More We Get Together. So she simply stood up and walked off to another section of the large room - a section that featured a large rocking chair that was clearly more exciting than our plodding, methodical incantation. But, after a few moments of exploring the chair, she looked back towards us, with a sense of both curiosity and mild transgression on her face.

I knew, I think, what she was feeling. In my file of essays-to-be-written, I have one set of notes dedicated to moments in art and literature that detail a sudden cut away, to a distant view of the subject at hand. The best example I know of occurs in James Cameron's Titanic, during the long, cold sequence in which the ship breaks apart and sinks. For most of a half hour, we closely follow the actions of dozens of individuals, in tight, swamped settings. And then, suddenly, we're offered a distant view, from about a half mile off, of what seems to be a tiny, illuminated boat lost in the vast night. It is a remarkable moment: an intense tragedy becomes a momentary incident on the huge plane of the sea.

There are other examples of the tendency, as well. In Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube," and important piece of modernist criticism, he opens with an imagined, distant view of the modernist tradition, as though seen from space. And, more playfully, at the 10-minute mark of The Flying Guillotine, a martial arts movie, a long fight sequence is punctuated, at one point, by a middle-distance view from inside a rock wall: the efforts of the combatants reduced to mere abstract motion.

Is that, more or less, what Cleo saw, as she watched and listened from, as it were, offstage? Did we simply look small, and insignificant, to her, as we chanted our children's songs? Or did she feel some of the sense of adventure that I feel when I step away from the utterly familiar, and see it as anew?

To the airport

What is it that they say? Time flies when you're... in North arolina for Thanksgiving, and then juggling parenting, teaching, painting walls in West Virginia, and making revisions on a book? Yes, yes: those old folk sayings sure have a truth to them.

So my apologies for the hiatus - but, fortified by homemade pumpkin pie, visits with all four grandparents, and a shiny new first-place trophy in my fantasy football league, I'm back, and full of ideas. My first idea, though, isn't quite wholly new, since, as some of you may remember, I've written on airports before. That was long before, however, I had a cute little one-year-old in my charge, and so on a recent, raw Tuesday Cleo and I drove out to BWI to see what we could see.

As adults, we often think of airports as purely functional spaces. Signs direct us to the checkpoint and then to the gate. Maybe we dart into a newsroom and buy a paper; restrooms are always generously spaced. Got a laptop? There's an outlet. From the point of view of a toddler, though, airports are ridiculously sick playgrounds. Elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks: BWI has that holy trifecta, in spades. The large window in the observation deck peers out towards a number of planes that look just like the ones in the board books, and no one seems to mind if you just purse your lips and do your best, slobbering imitation of a plane in the air.

So you can imagine. Cleo rolled her stroller about, being careful to avoid the huge jet engine in the children's hall, and I tried to slide as far as I could on the highly polished marble steps. We squeaked, and she squealed, and we chatted, in a manner of speaking, and then Cleo made that great airplane noise again. And then we split a granola bar.

But even as I tried to give myself over, over and over, to being one, there was another sort of soundtrack in the back of my mind. Something much more deliberate, more meditative, more restrained. More abtract, and more adult. Something comforting, in an entirely different way. Perhaps you know which airport music I mean.

It's grand to be 18 months old, in an airport. And it's great to be 40, as well.

Babies

Some of you probably know that we live right near a Whole Foods; in fact, it's a pleasant 12-minute walk from our house, and right now that walk takes you past three constantly humming refrigeration trucks, full of organic turkeys that are gradually finding their way into Baltimore hums in preparation for Thanksgiving. It's a walk that Cleo and I have made, using various modes of transportation (Baby Bjorn; car seat stroller; jogging stroller) many, many times, and it's hardly surprising, then, that we've become pretty familiar with the store, and its generous employees, who always seem willing to coo over a baby. Cleo points to the muffins, arranged in a window, when we near the bakery; often, she'll ask for one. Over the months, we've learned, in a geography that loosely maps her development, the location of rice flour, whole milk yogurt, and cheese animal crackers. And, as we've walked about the store, we've also seen hints of what she might become, in the guise of other tiny shoppers.

Watching other children has become both sharply relevant and truly interesting to me, as they often suggest roughly comparable but also distinct trajectories of development. Infants, nestled and asleep in their car seats, recall the full, simpler early days of parenthood. Children who pull at their parents' shirt hems while pointing to the sushi suggest upcoming complexities and real delights. But, for some reason, it's often been the one-year-olds who point to Cleo and say, in an improperly loud and direct manner, 'Bay-Bee,' who have usually melted my heart.

And now Cleo, I'm happy to say, is one of those. She's been saying Mommy (or, more recently, Mama) and Dada for several months now. As I've mentioned, she has a relatively wide range of animal sounds that she can whip out when she hears a dog or (more rarely) sees a horse. But it's really only in the last month that she's begun to add nouns to her roster of words. One of those is mirror, which she's only used a few times. Another, in heavier rotation, is Papa, which she used to greet one of her grandfathers (as well as, somewhat confusingly, her grandmother). She asks, in any given day, about six or seven times to hear Old MacDonald by abruptly announcing, Eee-Eye-Eee-Eye-O. And a final emerging word, now, is Baby, which she has used in relation to a few other small children and, yesterday, in looking at a mammoth billboard picturing a baby on the way to Whole Foods. Yes, indeed: that's a baby. And, in pointing it out, you are, I suppose, now something more than a baby.

But that's not to say that all of her evolving words make total sense to us. One of her favorite terms is koo-kah, which has caused the two interpreters on hand - that's L. and I - some real confusion. On the one hand, it clearly means clock: when our grandfather clock rings, Cleo will often toddle over to it, and point, announcing koo-kah. She's also been using the same word to happily point out, over the last couple of weeks, all face clocks in the immediate environment. At first, then, I assumed it was perhaps a derivation of cuckoo clock - a term that we used, once, in a group nursery rhyme. But just yesterday she used it to refer to a round sign and, this morning, to a circular light fixture. And so our interpretations change: perhaps it's a rendition of circle, and is simply applied most frequently to clocks?

Much of parenthood, I'm realizing, is simply trying to find the order in the apparent chaos: is the child trying to articulate a distinct need, in her wails, or a known tune, in the apparent chaos of a violently played violin? And the frequent difficulty of answering such questions helps to explain the simple delight that comes from watching a one-year-old point to a baby and say, distinctly, Baby. Yes. Yes.

Before and since

Often I feel - often, I suspect, every parent feels - that one's life is essentially divided, once one becomes a parent, into Before and Since. Before, I sometimes had to use an alarm clock to wake up; I lived in a house that was relatively tidy, and dotted with guitar stands and novels; I went to places called movie theaters, and ate at locales called restaurants. Since, I wake in the dark to the sounds of my daughter; I carry her through a bracken of scattered toys and changing tables to the kitchen, for a morning bottle of milk; I read condensed reviews of films, and gobble down peanut-butter coated granola bars during nap time. It's not worse, but it's certainly different, and it's hard to avoid a sense of strict and absolute division.

Which is why I'm delighted to report that I've found a musical object that brashly bridges, with no apparent trace of self-consciousness, my two lives. Behold, folks, Rockabye Babies' Lullaby Renditions of Metallica. With free samples for all. And dozens of other CDs to choose from!

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.