Today I watched a baker baking. Or rather making dough. A bin full of a
creamy almond buttery mix with thousands of chocolate chips folded and embedded
within it like jewels. It had a pinkish ivory color; it’s texture was soft,
gooey; pliant yet resistant; I could smell the vanilla, and chocolate, and
butter. The young baker with the chef’s hat and muscles clearly defined in his
forearms kneaded and pulled and turned and pressed the bin of dough with his
fists and I sipped on my cappuccino, and bit into my flaky lemon currant scone,
and watched, mesmerized, through the bakery window.
smart.audacious
I’ve been thinking about writing a blog. I mean, I’m a writer, so I should write, right? But there is already so much stuff: smart stuff, and funny stuff, and useful, wise, astounding stuff out there. Stuff I wish I’d been smart enough, funny enough, astounding enough to write first. Stuff that is useful, and wise, and smacks you straight in your cerebrum with its acuity and substance. This is not that stuff, alas. But it’s something, hopefully, worth writing about...
Friday, April 6, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
To touch a star
So my daughter, who is three, tells me she wants to touch a star. I
start to tell her no, that it’s not possible. Then I look at her face, her
finger pointed with supreme confidence and absolute clarity in the direction of
the star she wants to touch, and I rethink my answer.
Really? I ask myself. Why can’t she
touch that star?
I imagine her ancestors, the women who came before her, standing in
their little magenta shoes, with their tiaras on their little heads, telling
their mothers the exact same thing. My daughter’s great grandmother, my
grandmother, telling her mother she wanted to touch a star. Did her mother say.
“yes, sure you can sweetie, if you give it your best shot?” Or did she say, “no
you can’t, it’s just too far away?”
And what did this little girl, my grandmother, tell her own daughter,
my mother? “Go ahead darling, give it a try?” Or, “maybe when you’re older,
after you and your sisters have married suitable boys?”
And what did my mother tell me?
Actually, I know the answer to that one. She named me after a star.
She told me I could be anything I wanted to be. A journalist, an IAS
officer, a doctor, an engineer, an astronaut, a Nobel prize winner, a Prime
Minister.
Just not a wife, a mother, or a toucher of stars.
I imagine it would take a special combination of skill and
foolhardiness, of belief and suspension of belief, of audacity and simplicity,
to touch a star.
I imagine my daughter may have that combination. Or maybe she doesn’t.
What do I know, she’s just three. But I do know that she’s a happy, healthy,
regular young little girl born in the twenty first century, who likes tiaras
and kittens and trains and cars, who likes to cook and clean and build towers
and castles… she can do anything she wants to do.
Even the stars are not the limit.
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