Full of beans

 It's not a secret. 

 My daughter hopes to live in Boston next year. A city she's been to six times in her life, not counting parts of holidays spent on its outskirts.

As she plans for this monumental move to Beantown (mainly by putting dorm-room "essentials" into her Amazon shopping basket and taking them out again) she had the idea that what we really needed - as a family - was an immersive experience in the neighborhood to which she'd soon belong.

Midweek. During a rainstorm. Dragging us around like wet teabags, our thrifty brains thinking we could have at least one more use.

I'm not judging the wisdom of this trip if that's what you're asking.

She managed our limited time with a fair amount of decisiveness and good humor; even when we all seemed so out of place.

Especially when the four of us duck-walked our way down Huntington, and she realized being a college student with parents in tow wasn't exactly the vibe she was going for.

Her father missed the forest for the trees, too, as she whisked us off to the remarkable landscape she had discovered inside ... the Prudential Center … Where she pointed this way and that … to chain stores with which we thought we were all too familiar.

"We're going to a mall? Oh, wait! This is the 'crappy coffee' part of the date, right?"

I laughed a little too loudly, which I immediately regret.

The last thing I wanted to do was rain on her parade. I whisper, reminding him – and myself – that we are tourists in her city now. 

The Boston I remembered was ancient and romanticized. Quincey Market lived in my mind as a place my parents would take us after visiting the penguins. There we could buy cut flowers, or fish with the heads still on, or an armload of crusty baguettes. Not that we ever purchased any of those provisions. Our hotel didn't have a kitchenette in the 1970s either.

Even back in the olden days, we bought our food pre-made, too. 

It was just a long weekend in a nearby city where we'd perused toy shops and kitchenware boutiques along a wheel of quaint cobblestone streets. 

I remembered the harbor seal who did tricks behind glass near the Aquarium ticket counter. I did not remember how dark and dank his small tank seemed. 

But for all the things I had misremembered, this trip I saw the city anew. 

The way the houses curve, rows and rows of them undulating along the streets like ribbons on a breeze. The way low stone buildings with manicured lawns anchored to sparkling glass towers. 

I can't imagine any of us will soon forget standing inside a globe of the world, our whispers echoing around its familiar curves. We four made up two-thirds of the 10:20 tour.

Hope springs anew under the other celestial and terrestrial curiosities in the lobby. It feels like the city told us a secret.

Word

Green, yellow, and gray curved-edged boxes stacked in rows five wide and six high, started to appear on social media feeds about a month ago. That's when I took notice of them, anyway.

It looked like Tetris got tetanus. 

I had no idea what any of it meant, but I tried to ignore it anyway.

The world around me is so full of noise. The clamoring of all that's wrong within it and still, no hero galloping up from the horizon to save it.

Who needs another fad to figure out? Who has time for another thing to download, perhaps; to fiddle with, maybe even to fret over? It's just another distraction we don't have time to address.

But the silence around this puzzle eventually sucked me in. 

It brought me back to the 90s' and the last time I'd experienced the watercooler set trapped in silence. Back then it was the HBO series Sopranos that kept us all quiet. Owing to the fact that so few people subscribed we had to wait for that week's recorded episode to circulate through the office. It could be weeks before we could have any sort of post mortem.

This time, it didn't take long to figure out what no one was talking about.

Just a website that posts one game per day. Everyone who visits gets the same challenge. That's it.

The premise is simple enough: You enter a word and see how many letters are correctly placed, incorrectly placed, or not found in the word at all.

And what many people have found as they play along is that there is usually only four or five degrees of separation between the wrong answer and the right one.

Nobody's talking about it, because no one wants to burst the bubble that has formed around the word of the day. A word that has literally no connection to our larger predicament. A word that is so ordinary it shouldn't make us feel so magical when we solve it. But it does.

But we do. When the six squares turn green our hearts celebrate and we bask in a glistening, rainbow-colored soap bubble of happiness.

No one wants it to burst.

I don't understand how it works. I really know how I went from RANCH to MOURN to find WRUNG ... but it feels like it has to be prophetic. A miracle no more apparent than from DOLES to LAUGH to RURAL and finally ULTRA.

Which wasn't even a word that can stand on its own.

I don't want to quibble about it though. I'm afraid that the shine would tarnish in the harsh light of understanding. I don't want to see the truth behind the magic trick. I don't even want to tempt the fates with overexposure.

Perhaps this I why I never send my non-specific picture denoting my score to my friends and family on the World Wide Web, yet I seek out those who do to congratulate them.

It's the nod between us that acknowledges the shadowy particular we both recognize.

It is a simple, wholesome pleasure we all have in common.

I'll Fly, You Fry

The chef frowned.

She took the paper bags from my arms and carried them into the kitchen.

"Forgot the totes again. Huh?"

It wasn't a question so much as an indictment.

The reusable bags were right where I had left them: folded neatly and packed in another reusable tote, a nesting set that was waiting near the door to be brought to the car, where they would have stayed – stuffed in the trunk -- even as I tooled around the store with the one wonky-wheeled cart I'd managed to select from a line of perfectly functioning options.

I could tell her that a human being who has swum around in my gene pool it is more than likely she would rather pitch in five cents per bag than run out to the car to get them once she's in the store. …But that would have been cruel.

And risky.

Especially after she had so graciously volunteered to make dinner - a two-entree feast fit for a Super Bowl - and I had fumbled the ball. Again.

One by one, as she extracted the goods, she found enough evidence to convict.

"What's this nonsense? Chicken? From a can?"

She could not believe her eyes.

Her mother had taken the list she'd written by hand to the grocery store - and replaced each carefully curated ingredient with an imposter.

Canned chicken wasn't even the worst offender. Store brand hot sauce? Generic corn chips? What's next? Elbow macaroni in place of the twirly, whirly cavatappi? Gouda instead of Gruyère? 

Gru-where? Oh, rats! I knew I forgot something. 

She pulled out the box of elbows. “I even spelled C-A-V-A-T-A-P-P-I for you.”

“Honestly, I thought you had just mistakenly named some imaginary Franken-Pasta.” 

She had caught me. 

For a moment, I thought about pulling out the old supply-chain excuse. The pandemic-induced store-shelf gaps have made the old “They ran out” totally believable in almost all circumstances.

But I couldn't bring myself to lie.

The cat food aisle may have been sparse, but the pasta products were totally tubular.

"I'll be right back," I said with a sigh as I jammed my arms into my coat sleeves and search the pockets for car keys. "It's only the third time I've been to that store today, but I'm sure no one else is counting."

She tells me not to bother. She's already improvised her recipe from recollection and a cookbook framework once. She can improvise again.

But it's not really a bother.

I'd rather circle the globe in search of fancy cheese for an eternity than spend one more minute soaking up the silence brought forth by the nightly question: what do folks want for dinner?

"One of these days, I swear to dog, I will feed you crickets."

“Well if you're going back anyway, could you get real chicken this time? The kind I can cook myself? I feel like this canned stuff we should maybe feed to the cat.”

It really tied the room together

We had just pulled into a parking space at the big bullseye box store when her phone started to jangle.

We were on a mission (that my daughter had chosen to accept): I was redecorating my office and needed her help in finding a rug that really tied the room together. We were happy. Mother and daughter, out at the store, doing mother and daughter things.

But something wasn't right.

Her face, illuminated by the blue glow of the screen, twisted in an expression somewhere between agony and excitement.

"Duuuuuuuude."

“Duuuuuuuuuuuuude.”

“Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.”

I turned off the car and asked quite bluntly what was going on. She just flapped her hands and started to say words that mostly sounded aloft on a jet stream of hyperventilation and escalating screams.

“The! College! Decision! IsInMy INNNNNNNNNNNNBOX!”

And though she had applied to eleventy-billion institutions of higher education, I didn't have to ask her which decision had been finalized.

ONLY one mattered.

The only application she fussed over, wrung her hands over, and rewrote until the words sang to her in four-party harmony. The only application she paid for with her own money. The only one that's acceptance rate made her feel as if her chances were worse than a camel's trying to thread itself through the eye of a needle.

There we sat, wordlessly staring at each other, as the winter chill started to creep into the car.

“Well?”

“I'm not going to look at it now,” she said turning off the phone and opening her seatbelt with simultaneous clicks. “Let's you that rug!”

We almost made it … 

We had gone past the spring-coming Fashion; taken a right and Lingerie and a left at Bedding, and found ourselves smack in the middle of … Frames? 

Honestly, I'm not sure how we found floor coverings but we did, finally, and we had two whole aisles to choose from. Of course, I didn't know what I was doing, but I expected this trip would not only tie the room together it would join us more closely in her expertise in retail therapy.

I started the opening salvo: “Do we want natural fibers or manmade? Should I go with neutral colors? What about pulling in a color that contrasts with the couch? Would it be too loud? What do you think?”

She didn't answer.

When I looked, she was wistfully staring down into her phone.

“I have to know.”

And then I knew: This was a make-or-break moment-of-truth time. And no matter what happened – whether she broke down in tears in (I'm suddenly realizing) a painfully-well-lit department store aisle teeming with shoppers, or started jumping up and down for joy – my chances were dwindling for leaving the store with a rug. Or, it turns out, my dignity.

Because suddenly expletives were flying over the carpets into curtains. Happy, excited, celebratory curse words. She even called her dad so she could curse with him on speaker. 

Eventually, we found a rug and loaded it into the cart. We wheeled it to the checkout thinking of all the people in our lives that we couldn't tell even with full-sized words. But when we unloaded that rug from the car and unrolled it in the room it will live in, it became abundantly clear. 

This rug really tied the room together.