My memory is faulty; cocky to arrange a civilized narrative out of bliss, spit, and tape. We were mer-people who bonded under the influence, staggered by each other’s fresh gaze, Maker’s Mark, and John Waters: “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!” We both had books and we both barely fit around my feeble kitchen table where she stared at the magic wand she had just pissed on, terrified. Because how can you really know someone? I mean, how long has it been? Three weeks? A month?
“Wait,” I said, “Is it OK that I’m happy about this?”
We carried on in erratic patterns, reproducing once again, high on the fumes of impunity: We were for sure getting away with something. Our first dinner table was the heaviest thing we owned. 250 pounds of pine and a pool hall lamp displays the aftermath of our fertile prolificacy: Reaching, passing, pouring, sounds of silver on ceramic, a momentary restoration of faith crippled by the glacial grinding of shitty jobs and shittier people. We're laughing now as little C, barely out of her booster seat, lands the punch line to a primo beaver joke: “I gotta go to the dam bathroom!” she says, and takes her exit, bolstered by this scandalous transgression. Our table has eyes and legs and feet yet remains with us due to some architectural fiat embedded in its grain.
Over time, erosion--spills, eraser crumbs, brushed and blown, expose raw blonde wood and dazzling veins of glitter gone by. It bears dinner born in the morning, nursed all afternoon. It abides meals prepared together, thrown together with improvisational abandon, as well as solo shows served by the book, from the box, an additional verse to last night’s fight, still unresolved in D minor. Time lapse: Each minute a season of coffee cups, bills and backpacks. Dull pencils and papers to sign, exhausted bottles of wine--bulldozed every night to make way for the main event.
Plate the corn bread, the pinto beans; mustard greens, mac and cheese, steam rising.
Cue the Pentecostal jazz.
We thank the cook with trembling hands but the humble cook demurs. Don’t thank me, I just applied the heat. So we thank the rain, the farmers, and my son, newly-minted kindergarten grad, asks, “What about the fuckin’ truck drivers?”
I can barely conceal my pride but manage to say, “There are better ways.”
He says, “What about the fuckin’ truck drivers, please?”
I can’t wait for the day he gulps the last thin air on which the tenuous contract between parent and child exists. He’ll never ask my permission then, ever again.
So we invoke the truck driver and her truck, unleashing a litany of every natural phenomena even vaguely connected to the food on our table: Subatomic elemental mechanics of evolution; the reproductive zeal of our horny ancestors; durable seeds and delicious animals so capably domesticated.
