Boy! Can I talk nineteen to the dozen! Wherever I have
gone I have been blessed with enough and more topics on which to have a very
vocal opinion on and an equal number of friends with whom endless discussions
on just about everything are the norm. Our vocal abilities have been legendary.
One of my friends can sit and talk to just about anything, a door, a dead phone
and even a deaf relative. We used to joke that she wouldn’t even notice if the
person she was talking to died, she would just assume that he/she agreed with
every word of what she was saying! Another friend went with her gang of college
friends for a movie and yakked non-stop until people around them actually got
up and left the movie hall in disgust! Yet another of my friends would sit and
talk and talk and talk while her boyfriend would just gaze into her eyes. Oh yeah,
they were very much in love because he loved to hear her talk and she loved him for
letting her talk!!
I would come home from college everyday by about 3:30
in the afternoon and by 5:00 I would be on the phone with whichever of my
friends was free at the same time. When my mom asked me what I had to say to
someone I had last seen barely two hours ago all I could do was roll my eyes….duh!!
Did she really think I would wait for over twelve hours to tell her about the
cute guy I saw on the bus back home??? Even today, decades later, after
something earth shattering has happened in my world, my husband takes one look
at the constipated look at my face and asks me “What happened? No one is free
to chat now?” That happens when my bestie is busy nursing her father and
father-in-law, my sister with her kids’ exams, my mom with her latest
grandchild and my neighbor with visiting relatives, all at the very same time.
And the questions…perhaps it’s my OCD at its outspoken
best, but I cannot get myself to do anything unless I’m convinced about the
reason for it. There was this guy I knew at my first job, who used to go red in
the face whenever I asked him or anyone near him a question beginning with “Why”.
One day, totally exasperated, he asked me, “Is it because your name starts with
‘Y’ that you feel bound to begin every question and answer with ‘Why’?” God
bless his sweet heart!!
My husband, in the days when he knew me before
marriage, used to hate two things about me, so he and his friends tell me: one,
that I would always have my nose stuck in a book, and two, when my nose was out
of a book I was either eating or talking!! He once asked me, extremely
hopefully, “When you are an old hag and your teeth all fall out, will you keep
shut at least then??” “No way,” I shot back, “I’ll find something to make some
noise with!!” When our son was born everyone expected him to start talking
early because he had a jabbermouth like me for a mother. He said his first word at
eight months – “ma” – and then never said anything for the next couple of months. By one and
a half he would use only a few monosyllables that I understood: “aaa” was ‘car’,
“baa” was ‘bus’ and “boo” was both ‘book’ and ‘balloon’. That was the extent of
his vocabulary and, time and again, I would be accosted by well-meaning people
who wondered whether my son had a hearing or speech disability. I would shut
them all up with the words, “He’s my son. Once he starts talking he’s not gonna
shut up. Wait and see.”
All too soon I realized the true meaning of a word
that was much bandied about in the course of the many years I spent doing my
graduation, post-graduation and doctoral studies in English literature – ‘irony’.
My son’s vocabulary soon progressed to bi- and polysyllables. By three he was
talking nineteen to the dozen and by three and a half the much dreaded
questions began. Every sentence that today comes out of my four year old’s
mouth is a question, all of them beginning with “Amma, why dem are …?”, “Amma,
where dem are …?” and “Amma, what dem are …?”
Today I understand the agony of being bombarded with
countless whys and wheres and whats, at the most awkward of places and in the
highest possible volume a child can attain. This past Sunday, while at mass, my
son was busy examining closely a statue of the crucified Christ. The questions
ranged from the innocent “Where are the nails?” and “Why is Jesus black” (the
entire statue is painted black, heaven knows why) to the embarrassing “Why is
Jesus’s underwear chewed up?” (on noticing Jesus’s loincloth). And now I remember
reading a definition of ‘puberty’ in Readers’ Digest decades ago: “Puberty is
that stage when the kids stop asking questions and start questioning the answers”.
What am I gonna do then, with dem questions and answers??
