Since they were old enough to listen, C&D have been learning the music of language, with all its rhythms and pitches and meanings and double meanings.  Some oranges are yellow.  Oranges yellow.  Yellow oranges.  What is difficult?  How long is twenty minutes?  What is late?

David, dallying past his bedtime sometime in April:  What is late?

Mommy:  Um, late is when the sky is very black.

David:  It’s not black, it’s brown!

And so it is most nights, as the city’s lights reflect on the clouds and haze above.

They need these words.  Words give C&D to power to ask questions, and even better, the power to form and define their own conclusions.

David:  The rain is the cloud’s peepee.

Carmen:  And the thunder is the cloud’s froggies.

Yeah, something like that.  “Froggies” are their word for um, flatulence.  They were three, I think, when they said that about the rain.  Maybe two.

Until very recently David had decided that after he is old, he will be a baby again.  Very Shakespeare.  Or Shirley MacLaine.  You were a beautiful baby, David.  And you are a beautiful boy.

But back to words.  I have in my black book a scrap of paper from Christmas. 

Carmen:  Hi, I’m Mary.  This is Baby Jesus.  Were you digging for gold?

Mommy, cleaning or something:  I was.  I am a wise man, and I’ll give you some later when I ride by on my camel.

Carmen:  He needs something special.  Like raisin cookies.

Mommy:  I don’t have any.

David:  How about ice cream?

Carmen:  Yes!

Mommy:  I’m sorry, I don’t have any.

David:  How about some peppermint?

Mommy:  I do have some peppermint.

Carmen:  Yes!

And then they went on with their evacuation to Egypt, or whatever it was they were doing. 

Last summer Carmen reported her leg hurt. It looked fine, and I wondered to Matt if she was already experiencing the kind of “growing pains” I felt as a kid.  One Saturday a couple of weeks later, at Maxine’s house, Carmen said her stomach hurt. Because she’s three I of course asked her if she needed to use the potty. “No,” she said, “it’s just rolling pins.”

Words are good for setting facts straight.  Carmen, to a little girl last summer:  “David is three, I am three, and Daddy,” she inserted a big sigh here, “is a LOT of years.”  Carmen couldn’t sleep in the bed one afternoon because “the bed was for Jesus.”  David, right before my birthday:  “. . . thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five.”  And then he laughs.  “What’s after thirty-five?  That’s a BIG number!”

Thanks, kid.  I’ll make sure to not let you know when that happens.

Words have rhythm and pitch, like music.  Mo-o-o-meeeeeeee!  Cho-co-late.  Co-co-nut.  Bun-ny.  David especially will beat out the rhythm of his speech on the table, wall, floor, trash can. Mom-my.  Mom-my, two eighth notes.  Mom-my can-I have-a fork?  Three pairs of eighth notes, and a quarter at the end.

Words, their words, are full of movement and meaning and proof that they are thinking, learning, wondering people.  Full of wonder.  And after I thought about this in my bed while rising, after I had in my early-morning dreams laughing conversations with many of my friends, after I saw in my mirror David’s question about lateness written in a red marker above the sink, it only made sense that in looking for a Langston Hughes poem (Theme for English B), I find this, instead: