Dem questions!!

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??