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Precious Things
When I arrived at my brother’s apartment in New York, on my way to the Ricochet Meetup, we exchanged hellos, he asked how I was.”Exhausted,” I said. I hadn’t slept the night before because I rarely get sleep if I have to wake up early for a flight. His response, “Welcome to the club.” He had been kept up the night before by his son, who’s a mere 11 months old. I gather being kept up by his 11-month-old boy is common.
I raced out for the event a few moments later and was thankfully rejuvenated by the stimulant of enjoyable company.
But, alas, I wasn’t able to see the baby when I returned because apparently babies don’t stay up til 11:30 – not even to visit with uncles. And double-alas, I couldn’t sleep that night either! Baby was innocent, Sandman just didn’t show. By my count, it was something like a 62-hour Zzzz-less weekend.
On Sunday, I was watching the baby. My brother and his girlfriend were running a tent at a food festival called Smorgasberg. (I recommend if you find yourself in the city on Sunday afternoon.) Momma is a chef, Pops ran the register, and my nephew’s maternal grandmother – “Mermaid,” she’s called – was on the line, she’s quite a cook herself. My job was to entertain the boy.
We spent most of the afternoon enjoying Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the event was being held, before heading back to the apartment. He wouldn’t cooperate with my plans for a long nap, so we stayed up and watched his favorite show, Classical Baby; surely the best series HBO has, or will likely ever, produce. For a taste, I’ll attach the opening sequence:
The show is splendid. So much so that even intense weariness didn’t subtract from it. My brother was wrong to welcome me to the club, but I got a sense of what membership is like. Complicated as it is, I can see the appeal.
Wikipedia tells me Classical Baby originally aired in 2005 and then returned to release a few other episodes in 2017. It includes famous segments of compositions by Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Debussy; American songbook favorites by Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Count Basie, Duke Ellington; along with poetry segments using the work of Shakespeare, Frost, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams; and is beautifully illustrated with motive imitations of the likes of Clement Hurd, H.A. Rey, P.D. Eastman, and Maurice Sendak, and in at least one portion of the show, bring the best of Van Gogh, Degas, Monet and Mondrain to life — to movement to be more precise. (Consider this a thorough surface scratch.)
If you, or anyone you know, has little ones, trust me when I say it’s worth attention! I’ve always found most children’s programming offensive (I swear I distrusted Disney before it was cool!) so to discover something that might grant young parents a well-deserved break, without the suspicion that I’m looking at the work of creeps offering children candy, is a lovely thing. I hope it refines the tastes of now-usual unorthodox parents like the ones who left me to look after their infant.
Here’s the part that interests me. The poetry segments, delightfully interspersed with precocious children (aged roughly from five to eight) attempting to describe poetic mysteries, are narrated by a few of Hollywood’s finest. Susan Sarandon, John Lithgow, Gwyneth Paltrow, Andy Garcia, and Jeffery Wright; Paul McCartney is another living star whose “Sleeping Willow” appears in the show. That’s fine, each has a nice voice and I’m glad they’ve participated in this for the same reason I’m glad they were a part of the productions that made them famous in the first place. But I don’t exactly wonder what their responses might be if an American journalist gave pause to their participation in this passion project they’d signed on for, and asked their opinions on the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
I certainly wouldn’t put money on them arguing that new life is a precious thing. That defense offense would require a modicum of courage and conviction. I know they know it, clearly they do. But they won’t say it.
There’s a slew of rhetorical questions I could ask. I’ll spare you the bulk of them, except one set: Why should the baby be classical? Why not Rock-n-Roll Baby? Or to be more inclusive, why not Jazz Baby, Funk Baby, or Hip Hop Baby? I see some value in all of the genres above, but it’s only the one HBO Max settled on that ought to have made the cut. I’d pay top dollar to see the supposed winners of the cosmological lottery pay their due to that which is more than precious, but sacred.
I’ll leave you with one clip that stood out to me: A Cuban lullaby, “Drume Negrita,” performed by Bola de Nieve.
As far as the moral debate of abortion goes, I’ve found it a curious thing that there’s a bipartisan consensus that excludes the fathers as people whose rights are worth consideration. I guess that’s one more Q worth thinking over… I’m probably not in a position to do it, but I suppose it’s my brother and his precious little son who ought to be welcomed to the club.
Published in General
A lovely post! Also I can relate.
I could very well be misunderstanding the Texas law, but making civilians the enforcement mechanism before a court seemed like the right approach to taking fathers, grandparents, and other family members into account and giving them a tool to seek justice for or prevent their loss.
I should read up on the Texas law. I was more referring to the debate that goes on. I get it, defending the rights of the unborn is probably more pressing and more effective. It’s just an interesting missing piece.
Lovely post.
Last week, I was delighted to be invited to Miss Peachy’s (AKA “Science Girl”)–she’s 14, for Pete’s sake–induction into the National Junior Honor Society. It was a lovely evening in small-town west-central Pennsylvania, an area not woke enough to consider that honoring its children for things like academic achievement, good citizenship, and behaving, might be coloring outside the lines. Nice kids. Worthy parents.
But your post reminded me of a moment twelve or more years ago. A moment when I was standing in my stepdaughter’s kitchen having gladly been gifted with the “babysitter” position for a few hours. Jenny had one of those ‘nanny’ monitors in the baby’s room, so I could hear what was going on.
And what was going on, was this:
Eighteen-month-or-so old Miss Peachy woke up. And decided to sing a tune she knew with–as most babies have–perfect pitch, and without words. Because she was too young to know them.
I knew exactly what it was. And here’s the original she learned from:
Excellent work, as always!
Thanks for this, SB.
Kind of left us hanging here. For all we know you still haven’t slept.
You’ve upped the ante, She! My expectations are growing for the little mister.
Ah, yes! I’m reasonably well rested. I’m back in New Orleans, but not quite out of Ricochet meetup mode. I’ve been enjoying the company of a mutual friend.
I’m sending this to my youngest daughter. She’ll appreciate it!
You need to bestow a print of this on Vicryl Contessa and Mustangman, who just had their first.
Hey @vicrylcontessa and @1967mustangman: this one’s for you!
That’s funny! Nino and Mustang are actually sleeping pretty well. Nino’s been sleeping like 8.5 hours a night. I’m the one that doesn’t sleep because I have to pump in the middle of the night.
That’s the idea! The sky’s the limit.
And yes, I agree with you that the baby shouldn’t have to be “classical.”
Jenny recorded all sorts of music on an iPod (yes, it was that long ago), basically creating her own “channel” for entertainment. Jazz, blues, classical, pop, it was all on there, and played for Peachy’s early years, pre-natal and beyond. As a result, Peachy’s musical tastes are wide-ranging and eclectic, and although I can’t follow some of her more current enthusiasms, we have–musically–plenty to talk about and commune over.
I can’t quite get over the fact that my little Peachy, who–it seems–just last week was insisting on listening to her Tales of Beatrix Potter CDs on the car radio is a young woman of kindness, intelligence, and grace, one who seems to thrive in this dysfunctional 21st century world, but who is smart enough to know what’s really important in life, and recognizes that not everything that happens in it is centered around her.
I suspect that Little Mister will learn the same lessons over time, and turn out to be an equally excellent specimen.
Did we converse? It was so loud I couldn’t catch names. My son and his wife have two, count ‘em two, 10 month old boys that I watch two days a week trying to sleep has been an adventure foe them.
We did! I had a lot of fun chatting with you. I was the short youngster with brown hair.