My Small, Warm, Delightful World

 

            Light. It is a yellow light reflecting off a cool linoleum floor, but I am warm and happy on the floor, looking up at my mom and grandma Mimi sitting at the kitchen table, talking and laughing. The familiar banter of my mother and grandmother over the radio announcer’s serious voice seems almost disrespectful. I think it is fun.  Meanwhile, my grandmother’s cigarette is drooping lazily in her left hand, and I am wondering if it will fall and start a fire, but no one seems worried. The serious announcer goes on, not the least bit offended that his audience couldn’t care less about the importance of the Iron Curtain. Such a magnificent sight, I imagine: a curtain of iron.

All the smells of burnt toast, bacon, and my grandmother’s cigarette mix with the faint aroma of my father’s recent hurried leaving in a cloud of Old Spice aftershave. The laughter, the smells of adult food I want but can’t have, and my father’s happy kiss on the top of my head seem to merge in a lightness of spirit I enjoy as a morning routine almost every day.

My earliest memories are not of ideas, or even of conversations, but of sensations and undeciphered codes of the adult world that, although unknown, are benign and full of a sense of place, and a sense of being cared for. These are the times before language became my primary gatekeeper of experience, and whatever washed over me in the moment became lived without concept.

              Somehow, all my adults seemed to know the good without having to explain it, and simply let me live there amidst the early morning aromas of Old Spice, burnt toast, and bacon in this warm, small, delightful world.