The Length of This Post Reflects My Guilt for Not Posting More Often

In lieu of a blow-by-blow account of this week in parenting, a few unconnected thoughts:

1.  We talked about it quite a bit when she died at the age of 97. How my Mom's mom, the pious, sassy, indomitable, huge-hearted, Grandma (Leona) Squires, lost three children--two babies and a daughter Nancy who was a toddler when she died--and managed to retain her giving spirit. We marvelled at how she had managed to not be destroyed. I must say--now that we have Arlo, I'm even more awed by Grandma's strength and resilience. Those children, whose pictures had a place on Grandma's living room wall next to those of my Mom and aunts Dolores and Mary, were always, to me, so vague and distant as to be barely real. But to her and my Grandpa they were of course as real as Arlo is to us now, and they must have remained so ever after.

2. Dr. Oliver Sachs, the renowned neurologist whose work inspired the movie Awakenings, was on the Daily Show the other night talking about the relationship b/w music and the human brain. Among the findings he shared was the news that stroke victims usually lose their facility with language before they lose their facility to remember or play music. And that we never lose our innate sense of/desire for rhythm. "We are a musical species," he said. Now, Arlo's not coordinated enough to clap his hands or air guitar to Raffi, but already I've noticed the following: When my ITunes moved from Woody Guthrie's children's songs to a classical piece by Sibelius, Arlo got this glazed look in his eyes and stopped whining for a good three, four minutes. And he likes it (unless he's really hungry, and then he likes nothing but one thing) when Maggie and I do our bad imitations of our friend Rob's good imitation of Mongolian throat singing. 

3.  Years from now, Arlo will look at all the hundreds of pictures of himself as a baby we've been taking, and smile that he was once so cute and tiny, but he won't remember anything of his life until sometime in 2011 or 2012. Which of course, reminds you that it's your job to do the remembering for him, until then.