During the past few months, it's been easy to understand that there have been a number of surprises, most of which have turned out to be the unpleasant variety. Medical disclosures, revelations, and all those intimacies that one holds throughout the years are exposed by simple questions asked by doctors. I mean, you want to know what's wrong, so secrets become not so secret. And though what's been exposed may not seem to be horrible or intimate or special or meaningful, silence covers the mystery in a patina - shame like beauty is in the eyes of the beholder...for that matter so is most everything else. But everything hasn't been so terrible.
I may have mentioned that my mother and I have been watching a lot of cooking shows. Sometimes one tires of the endless tripe on the soap operas, and sometimes my mom can't stand the bob-style haircuts that so many of the Korean youth sport. How'd she put it again? Ah, yes, onions. They look like onions. So we flip through all the prodigious digital tv stations until we find a cooking show. From this, she's learned of the Cuisinart (she'd like to own one of those, as would I), pasta maker (ditto), and other contraptions that ease the toil of cooking. As with Korean soap operas, we can't control which shows appear and when and on which channel. One day we ended up on a Spanish-language station where they were cooking something or other. A list of ingredients appeared on the side, and I was able to translate what most of the ingredients, except one.
Me: Mantequilla, that's butter. Juevos, eggs. Harina, flour. Oh. I don't know what that one is. Calabaza? It looks like sweet potatoes.
Mother: Pumpkin.
Me: What?
Mother: Calabaza means pumpkin.
Me: ?!?
Me: (Laughing) Did you know what the other ingredients were too?
Mother: Sure. I've even tried that dish too.
Me: Well I never.
Actually, I may have said Zounds or Gadzook. The thing is, you never know.
