No trace?

If you're at all like me, you may have caught yourself at some point in the past year mistakenly assuming that virtually all of our actions are somehow recorded, or registered, or filed away on a hard drive somewhere. My alma mater is currently interviewing, in the wake of a hate crime, all of the individuals who used their electronic ID card to swipe themselves into a campus building at a particular time; meanwhile, a lawyer friend of mine recently relied on months of Wal-Mart security camera footage to document the presence of a client at a particular time. Looking for that e-mail that you mistakenly deleted? Gmail can likely retrieve it. And, as you wait in the cafe chair for it to do so, you may well form an unintended background element in a cell phone photo taken one table over.

But I'm here to tell you, friends, that in fact it's not all preserved, in pixelated form. On Tuesday, I took Cleo to Druid Hill park for a nice play session before we headed to the zoo to look for Curious George in the monkey house. (He wasn't, it turned out, in on that particular day). We watched oak leaves drift down from their lofty branches; we made tiny hammers out of sticks and tried them out on the benches. And then Cleo wandered over to the adult swings - swings that have always been, since she learned to talk, for "older children," and thus inspired a deep fear - and asked to get on.

Say no more, daughter. I lifted her up, rooted her tiny body in the center of the depression, and watched as her hands easily found the chains. I pushed her gently, only to learn that she wanted to go higher, and then higher still. And suddenly, there were were, a dad pushing his little girl on the real swings: graduates, with little fanfare, of the bucket swings intended for infants and the fainter of heart.

I felt like whooping - until I realized that the camera was in the car, instead of in my pocket. But didn't this moment deserve to be preserved? I wondered, for a moment, what to do. And then I knew: even if we left the playground without some sort of photographic proof, we would hardly be empty-handed. Lived moments can be indelible, after all, in several ways. They may leave a trace in wandering strings of ones and zeroes, in digital documents or JPG files. Alternatively, they may leave a much simpler mark: call it on the heart, or in the mind.

She swung. I type it, click on Publish Post, and the fact is stored on a server somewhere. But it was already stored, days ago, on a more fragile and more loving vellum.

No smaller interval

In his sprawling, engaging - and very, very French - book The Arabs: Their History and Future, written in 1960, Jacques Berque devotes a few pages to a consideration of the differences between Arab and European musical traditions. He quickly realizes that longstanding Arab musical scales are more subtle than their Western counterparts. Or, as he puts it,

Our scale recognizes no smaller interval than a semitone. It climbs the ladder of sound by degrees which shock the Eastern ear by their crudity.

That is, to a Baghdadi or a Cairene raised on the airy, snaking melodies of an oud, or used to the winding rhythms of the muezzin, even the leap from a fourth to a fifth can seem coarse, or overstated. And yet, Berque insists, this should hardly be read as a criticism of Western music. One adapts to the system at hand, and symphonic composers, he writes, have used rhythmic discoveries to perfect the Western octave, as an instrument. Arab music, he's happy to admit, is wonderfully subtle. But if major and minor scales can support a Mozart, then they are probably also sufficient.

Such an observation's been on my mind of late, as Cleo has started to bloom as an artist. For most of the past year, her drawings and paintings have consisted of roughly controlled and seemingly randomly applied marks. Left hand, right hand: she didn't seem to care, and the joy of applying color seemed to be enough. In the past month, though, she's begun to articulate a style, and then to work representatively, rendering forms that clearly convey intent and even meaning. The painting above, for instance, is one of several in which she left a half of the paper - a diagonal wedge - unpainted, while sparsely filling in a lower corner. Such images suggest, to me at least, an interest in compositional balance - even as the brilliant blue mark upsets any easy symmetry. Just yesterday, though, she stunned me by dragging a magnetic drawing board out of a thrift shop bin, and by drawing a series of motifs clearly identifiable as figures. Here's one of them:

Sure, I couldn't tell if it was Daddy, or Mommy, or Cleo, or Joe: only she seemed to be aware of the figure's particular identity. But look closely, and you'll see, next to the toy car, a dominant head, four limbs, hair, and two eyes.

Berque, of course, could say that such an image shocks us with its crudity. But I think that he would add, again, in a subsequent sentence, that Cleo is learning - slowly, perhaps, but learning - to perfect the coarse magnetic pen as an instrument.

The reasons why

Ah, Cleo: never imagine, please, that the sustained moments of online silence correspond to moments of distance between us. Instead, as I think I've mentioned before, the opposite is often true: it's those days that are full of shared play and exploration that offer the least in terms of time for blogging. One can only tweet about the revolution when one isn't storming the king's barricades, right?

And, happily, the past week has been richly full of family activities. You have a wonderful mom, and a generous set of scattered supporters, and their love for you was manifest, for instance, in your school's Halloween parade on Friday, where you marched into public with your fellow Bluebirds in your handsome black spider outfit. Sure, you broke into tears when you saw me, in a storm of confusion - Is school over now? Why would Daddy be here in the late morning? - but your willingness to keep walking, nonetheless, had us full of pride.

So, too, did the generous, inclusive, and energetic spirit that you brought to our late Saturday afternoon play date with Juni. While we chatted - at length! - with her parents, and made bowls of chili on a snowy night, you shared your paints with your friend, and hugged her, and let her sit with you for a semi-private screening of Blue's Clues. So, no, I wasn't blogging - but the very reason for that is that I was catching up with friends, as you hosted a friend of your own.

Perhaps my favorite memory of the past week, though, is from this morning: you choosing a CD of Billboard hits from 1982, extending it to Mommy - and, then, when the slick melodies wound about our dining room, breaking into your personal dance style. Arms up, like chicken wings, and little torso bending forward and back, you were a vision of happy kinetic energy. I'd have to be a fool to ignore such a scene, and to spend the time blogging, instead.

And in fact, now that you're in school, and my students' essays are almost graded, and I have a little time for blogging, I wish that you were right here next to me, dancing in that crazy mode.

And once more

Baa-baa, black sheep,

Cleo has a new favorite song.

Have you any wool?

She first heard it at the library, when she was tiny, during story time.

Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.

Recently, though it's resurfaced, as it's sung at her nursery school. And on car rides through town, Cleo likes to unleash a version of it, unaccompanied.

One for my master, one for my game.

Does she get the words exactly right? Well, no. But does that really matter?

Baa-baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

Hard to think so. At least, it certainly doesn't diminish her enthusiasm. Another round, perhaps?

Endless melodies

Frequently, in composing a blog devoted to music and fatherhood, I've been forced to seek out rough comparisons between the two subjects: to spin thin parallels, or faintly gesture toward common ground. Certain moments, however, bring full overlaps between the two, and in fact yesterday was characterized by a number of those moments. For some reason, Cleo was simply shot through with music on October 19.

As she often does, she spent some of the drive to school singing her ABCs; over the past month, her version of the song has gone from a plaintive recitation characterized by a droning rhythm that called to mind chants uttered in the slave galleys of Roman warships to a relatively bright and rapid celebration of the letters. Part of the reason, of course, is due to her growing sense of familiarity with the letters; indeed, we spent a few minutes after school noting familiar forms in the text of a historical marker at the Mount Royal train station. But surely the change is also due in part to her evolving realization that there are, in fact, different types of music. On the way home from school, she curtly announced, "I want to hear Motown and then jazz" - in other words, her two favorite CDs.

Happy to oblige, Cleo: and happy to see that Motown can still put you in a good mood. In fact, the good mood lasted the entire evening; after an episode of Blues Clues, we all decamped to the play room, where Cleo, after issuing pretend shots as a pretend doctor and after forming a human wicket through which we could roll balls, decided to issue musical instruments. L. got a washtub and a drumstick; I got the colorful xylophone; Cleo took the little tom tom for herself. And damn if we didn't put on a family concert for the next 10 minutes. Overlapping rhythms, simple melodies, and some big smiles: granted, we weren't as tight as the Jackson Five, but we did have some fun.

And then it was time for bed, which meant a new diaper, a round of pajamas for Cleo and her growing stable of stuffed monkeys, a reading of a Curious George story... and the nighttime CD that's played at bedtime for more than a year now. With the soft, swirling notes of a lullaby in the air, then, I said night, night, and closed her door - just a little bit, as per her instructions, at 8:31.

Degrees of recall

In 1779, Mozart traveled, as a young 20-something, with to Rome. During Holy Week, his father Leopold took him to the Sistine Chapel, to hear Gregorio Allegri's well-known Miserere. A relatively complex choral work for nine voices, the Miserere was considered to be the sacred property of the Vatican, and copying it was strictly forbidden; conventional transcriptions were supposedly punishable with excommunication.

Mozart heard it performed once, and then returned to his room, where he wrote down, from memory, the entire piece.

Instead of provoking the fury of the Church, though, Mozart's feat fanned broad interest in his abilities. In fact, he was allowed to return to the Chapel several days later; after this visit, he corrected a few minor mistakes in his original transcription, and the score of the Miserere was a secret no longer.

We don't spend much time - in fact, I can't remember spending any time - wondering if Cleo is a little Mozart. It seems pretty clear, though, that recalling, in the sense of retelling, any rather complicated event still lies beyond her powers. Often, when I pick her up from nursery school, I ask her what the day had brought. Generally, there's a brief report on any scrapes she may have accrued in the playground - "I got an ow-ee on my knee" - and sometimes there are big, broad summaries: "I played." And yet, when we talk to the teachers, or receive the week-end e-mails from the school, it's clear that she and the other kids are leading relatively rich and varied lives during the day. Just two days ago, in fact, there was apparently a rather emotional farewell to Yertle the Turtle, who had lived in an aquarium in the Bluebirds' room for months, before giving up the ghost over the weekend.

But if Cleo is unable to tell us about such episodes, I'm not convinced that she doesn't - and that all of the kids in her room - don't, in fact, remember them. The memory of a toddler is clearly dynamic, and weirdly selective. But it's clearly potent, as well: a fact that's made clear as she and I move through Baltimore on a daily basis. Yesterday, she pointed to the apartment in which her friend Quentin used to live - until June, when he moved to Texas - and announced that it was his. And as we waited for L., on the steps of her building, Cleo suggested that we play a game that we'd last tried, on the same steps, a few weeks ago.

So: so far, no transcribed Miserere. But, still: signs that the past is always with us, in forms that are almost as beautiful as divine music.

Vicarious travel

On Saturday I spent much of the day in the Hopkins library, while L. took Cleo, a friend, and the friend's toddler to a sprawling orchard, where they went on a couple of hay rides, raced toy boats, and picked out Halloween pumpkins. When we met up at 4, they were clearly buoyed by a day in the fall sun, and L. spoke happily of live music and a petting zoo. Having spent my own time simply reading, I struggled slightly to imagine the scene - until L. revealed a camera full of autumnal pictures, and until I saw the back seat, littered with the small stickers with which the girls had played. The back seat was the tonal opposite of a stock crime scene: instead of a grim consequence of violence, it was the aftermath of an enjoyable ride in the car, and I felt almost as though I could live vicariously through the residues of little girls' decisions.

For some reason - or perhaps for an obvious reason: I haven't been very far afield of late - all sorts of vicarious travel have appealed to me over the past week. Last night, I finished Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, and enjoyed picturing the small Cairene cafe around which the novel swirls. On Saturday evening, I made a big batch of foul, a common Middle Eastern bean soup, in an attempt to evoke the aura of an Aleppo restaurant where I first tried it. Yesterday, while a colleague described his upcoming trip to Buenos Aires and Rio, I imagined the drama of flying into seaside Brazil. And the Sunday Times travel section, with pictures of a Patagonian ice bar? Sure: let's go.

But perhaps the simplest example, in this vein, involves our morning commute. These days, the routine is rather simple: drive the lovely, tree-lined avenues of Roland Park, glide along the park-like University Drive, and drop L. at Hopkins; then merge with the sclerotic rush-hour traffic, and drive southwest, through gritty Remington, to Cleo's nursery school; walk to my own campus. It's an interesting, varied drive, and we certainly can't complain about its length: at around 20 minutes total, it's a fraction of many local commutes. Still, though, it can use the occasional augmentation. And so, when I recently bought a batch of classic recordings of the Muslim call to prayer and pushed them into the car's CD drive at 8:05 on a recent morning, the result was surprisingly stirring. Suddenly we were not merely waiting for a green light; it was as though we were also in Fez, or Medina, or Mosul. The muezzin's voice wrapped around us, suggesting a pace very different from the staccato motion of the traffic, and even as we drove to our familiar workplaces and schools, we seemed to already have arrived somewhere else quite different.