Cornier Than You Might Expect

Posted September 07, 2007

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^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

We're eating the first corn of the season, and it seems to be inspiring a kind of Lunatic Revival feeling in my dining companions. If corn is local and fresh, I boil it for exactly 3 minutes, then let the children spin each ear over a stick of butter until it gleams and drips. This corn is so sweet -- each kernel bursting in your mouth like a tiny, buttery grape -- that I can't help wondering if the kids are actually getting some kind of sugar buzz. Kernels are flying. The children are chomping and chewing and talking a mile a minute, laying their cobs down only to gesticulate wildly with open hands.

"Why did that flood flood everything? I mean, weren't there drains to pull it all away?"

This is Ben, in the middle of a thought, but I know what he's talking about. A year or two ago, Snapple tried to make the world's largest ice pop in the middle of Union Square, only something went wrong; it melted, and waves of kiwi-strawberry crested out into the streets. Ben has been intermittently, happily obsessed with the idea of a tidal soft-drink mishap. I try to explain about drains and liquid and time, and remind him that it's not like the whole city was submerged. I can't help thinking he pictures New York like a sunken pirate ship under a sea of sticky pink.

Birdy is watching us wide-eyed the whole time, crunching around and around her cob like her whole face is a pair of gag chattering teeth. She uses the inside of her elbow to wipe butter off of her cheek and into her hair, then says, "If there were a flood and it was an infinity flood, would it flood a building infinity tall?"

"Whew!" Ben says, goggle-eyed. "Whenever someone introduces infinity to a conversation, it really kind of -- Plccchh! -- turns your brain around!"

"When I imagine infinity, I imagine a poodle wearing a fancy dress." Birdy says this in her loud, announcing voice, and Michael and I avoid eye contact to keep from laughing. "What do you mean?" I say, and she says, "You know, like with velvet ribbon on it or lace." Aha.

"The beginning of the universe," Ben says. "Now that gives me a brain ache!" I'm trying not to remember how early existential leanings are a classic symptom of insanity. Granted, this is less an empirically observed phenomenon than just a hunch I have. "Can we pretend there's a blackout?" he says now, staring into the candles. "Could we have a camping contest where we award prizes to whoever brings the most stuff?" "Is that really the spirit of camping?" I ask, and Ben shrugs. "We could toast our toast over a thousand tea lights!"

"I know!" Birdy says. "I imagine a napkin on the table and a apple on the napkin!" She still pronounces it "nacken."

"When?" Ben asks.

"What?" Birdy says.

"When?"

"What?"

Ben sighs. "When do you picture that? I mean, what are you picturing?"

"I'm picturing a nacken on the table and a apple on the nacken."

Ben grimaces at me and grabs another ear of corn out of the bowl.

"I'm almost a grown-up!" Birdy announces next. "Except for how I don't have all my moles yet." She points to the ones on my face and neck and leans over to give me an oily, consoling kiss on the cheek.

"What if there were a kind of fan?" Birdy muses finally, holding her hands far apart. "A giant kind of fan? And it could blow dead people? And it could make them move! It could blow their hand and their hand could open and scrabble after something!" She pantomimes this fan-blown, dead-handed scrabbling with a kind of zombie "I'm a dead person blown by a fan!" expression on her face. Ben and Michael and I stare at her. All the corn is gone now; there's just a teetering pyramid of cobs as evidence of our gorging. "Wouldn't that be an amazing fan?" Birdy says and we all say, at the exact same time, "It really would."

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Cornier Than You Might Expect

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Cornier Than You Might Expect

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