boiled down

It’s early afternoon. My old self is playing on the radio and I am standing over a Tupperware container filled with freshly made baby food trying to remember what day it is. I stop. Jaw slack and just stare for a moment at the bright orange liquid. I feel my eyes well up without reason. Maybe it’s the music reminding me of old roads and miles of ambition. All these ideas I have had about what my life will be and has been, about my own importance boiled down, like these over steamed carrots, into a swirl of oarnge. Condensed into this moment. Me, standing in my kitchen with liquefied vegetables to feed my sleeping son. The truth hits in the oddest of unexpected moments. These elusive, evasive understandings that assault and awake us. I want to do so much. I want to do it on some grand and important scale. I want to write songs like these musicians are singing. Songs that can reach out into the kitchens of strangers and make them feel. I want to paint some masterpiece that somehow grapples with the great mysteries. I want to write poems that penetrate the mundane. But all I can do these days is tie the shoes and wipe the nose and zip the coat of my little boy. I am the playground fairy. The living room rock star. Making the wild mommy music and doing the rockin’ domestic dance. I want to cast my net out into the multitude of possibilities but I am here holding this line. Hooked into this one being. I am so singularly focused I often forget to look up from the page. I forget to remember the old campfire promises of youth. Until I find myself 32 years old with tears on my cheeks, standing in a comfortable kitchen wearing the well worn apron of my mother and trying to remember. Trying to remember anything.

noodle tricks

For quite some time we have been having dinner with Lukas in the dining room. We light a candle. We hold hands before we eat and say “Peep peep peep. Wir haben uns alle lieb. Guten Apetit. The basic translation is “Peep peep peep. We all have love. Let’s eat.” Lukas loves it now and he has added his own part where he claps his hands when we are done. He loves that part so much that often gets out one peep and then starts clapping. Yesterday he just clapped and clapped and then sat there beaming. He looked at me and said “Mama” and then at Jorg and said “Papa” and then he just smiled and said “Happy.” “Happy.” (He likes to say things twice. My friend Shana says that he is trying to keep the evil spirits away.) Somehow I know that he understood what he was saying because happiness just seemed to seep out of him in unexplainable ways.

It is so beautiful to communicate with him and to have him communicate with us. We are just starting to explain things to him. Often he really listens and I know that he is taking it in because two days later he will echo it back to me in a totally different situation. Like today when he saw a windmill off in the distance. Last week I pointed one out to him and explained how they go “round and round and round”.
When he saw one today he said “Emu” (which means windmill to him) “round and round and round” It took me several moments to locate the hidden windmill but he saw it and remembered.

Sometimes however he gets confused. Like today at dinner. We had pasta….really yummy spinach pasta in a garlic and butter sauce with parmesan cheese. Yum, I just have to brag. Anyway, Lukas had finished eating and I asked him if he was full. I asked him if his belly was full. He paused. His little garlic and buttery fingers pointed confusedly to his round ball of a tummy. Jorg stepped in to elaborate. (in German) “You eat food Lukas and it goes in your mouth and down your throat and lands in your belly.” Jorg pointed to the route that the food would travel. “All the noodles you ate went in your belly and now it’s full.” He continued. Lukas gave us a big smile of understanding. Then his hand disappeared down under the tray of his high chair. As if to protest his new knowledge he revealed a long buttery noodle and giggled. The affect was that of a magician pulling a hidden rabbit from a hat. And he continued to demonstrate how much of his dinner was hidden in the folds of his clothing as he continued to produce noodle upon noodle from the vortex beneath his tray. I guess his understanding of having a full belly may vary slightly from the explanation we were aiming to communicate. Ah, the subtleties of the English Language.