Down in the Kitchen

“Can you make huevos?” asked the little one.  She means huevos rancheros.  “Do you want huevos?” I ask the older one.   “Yeah.”  “What are ‘huevos’? asked my wife from the bedroom.  I explain both literally and figuratively and soon I’m down in the kitchen, tossing cilantro and diced onions into a pot of pinto beans.

Today is important for my younger daughter.  BTS have released a new song.  She’s been waiting for it.  I serve up a pile of beans on a tortilla with a friend egg on top for her and her sister and she asks me if I’d like to hear it.  “Both RM and Suga are rapping.”  To my ears it's soft.  Softer than they usually are.  I’d actually like the last RM release she played me.  I ask her if she’s seen the translation yet and knows what they’re singing about.  But she hasn’t. 

Today is an even more important day for my older daughter.  She found out late last night that she’d been admitted, off the wait list to Reed College.  She’d applied to many great schools, and a number of safety schools and when it all shook out she hadn’t gotten into many of the schools she’d been hoping for.   She’d made her mind up on where she was going, a fine institution and it would have her down in L.A. and up until yesterday I’d been imagining myself routing trips through Los Angeles to see her. 

I’d loved Reed when we toured it last summer.  So had she.  That northwest woodlands area always seems so remarkably fertile and verdant.  They have an elevated walkway there on campus that allows you walk through the woods.  I have a few smart friends who went there which always made it seem like the west-coast version of my alma mater Wesleyan.  And I can recall when we toured that they have first year Humanities requirement of everyone that goes there, Humanities 110, that demands every student read the Greek classics.  I wished we’d been forced to do that at Wes.  What a civilizing feature.

She was so happy last night.  I was so happy.  It was infectious.  Wonderful.  I swore aloud with joy, multiple times.  And I was proud of that girl, who had so many difficult days in high school.  She really pulled her weight in her senior year, and powered through the turbulence and got her grades where they always should have been and her life in balance.  But quietly, it had seemed like the colleges she was talking to didn’t notice.  In spite of this, she drove through to an exceptionally strong finish.  And it seems that those guys at Reed were watching and they made their call after they confirmed this. 

We all went out to our local Italian joint this evening and though I was feeling good on the second day of my fast I decided to break it on the forty-eight-hour mark and celebrate with that young lady, toasting her and toasting her again.  A proud daddy.  A proud mommy.  Great job little girl. 

Sunday, 6/23/19