Enough Spoons

Abundance is everywhere.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

What is, "The name of a foodie blog"?

This ("Enough Spoons," that is) is the perfect title for a food-lover's blog. Here's a foodie post o' mine:
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/319063

I have been thinking about what I'd like to be known for in a very non-morbid way, honest. I've just been thinking things like, "She saw the world in loving detail." or "She loved food and felt it needed to be done right if done at all." Or "She loved music: it could cheer her up faster than anything. Announce a Gomez concert in the next four months and all was well with the world for a while."

Today my mother bade me farewell by saying, "You just go back to stalking Gomez now," and it was totally jokey and funny and great, because we had just agreed that we knew that stalking was almost never about the stalkee but entirely in the deranged mind of the stalker.

Unfortunately this came up in the context of that creepy guy whose name I won't even deign to repeat arrested on charges of committing a ten-year-old sensational murder across town. I can hardly breathe when I think of that murder. My own child is six and so amazing and alive and has the cutest little voice on the planet. And one day when I was out gardening, a year or so after this terrible murder of a young child, a beat-up old Pinto or some seventies wreck of a car, tan paint with silver trim on the outside and the same shade of tan vinyl inside. And a guy slowed down and asked me where he could find JonBenet's house (he might have even said "The JonBenet house"). And I told him he was at the wrong end of town and to look somewhere else because he wasn't anywhere near it, which was absolutely true. So today I even have a question in my mind: Could that have been this guy that they are shipping back from Thailand to California and then here? Who the heck knows anything? I wasn't there, but I wouldn't trust this guy or the one who asked me for directions with a three-foot child. Not in a million.

So the world turns on its weird wobbling axis and people drift through, projecting their innermost fears or realities onto the symbol represented by another's. Music fans do it with their songsmiths just as those abused as children sometimes find excuses to obsess or even abuse as adults.

I hope I'm breaking the familial cycles of violence and early sexuality in my own child's life. I'm giving my own daughter her innocence by giving her guidelines about privacy but not restrictions on what she should and shouldn't do, although I suppose I'd better get on that pretty darned quick. I'm sheltering her so much more than my parents did me. It may be in part that I am happy now with my own innocence despite early and extensive knowledge. But I've never been thrilled about being made to see so much so early and sometimes feel the need to push back a bit, keep a little mystery in it.

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