Oatmeal, carnation milk, cream of coconut, a few drops of vanilla, sugar — a recipe enough to send a child bouncing off the walls and back again. She poured each ingredient into a saucepan and stirred them together. She stirred and stirred and, just when you thought she had stirred them all into milky oblivion, she stirred some more. There wasn’t a moment I can remember when she broke her stirring psychosis in order to refer to my incessant beckoning at heavenly avenita. The smell. It was one that put me at that place where things of dire concern laid down their arms and sat, legs folded, singing songs of a better, happier, more fulfilling time. That was her motive — fulfillment. But you wouldn’t know it unless you spoke her language. I didn’t. I still don’t, and I’ll never get another chance to learn to speak to her. Regardless, I knew and she knew where her avenita took me. She stirred us both right to that place, and we never looked back.

It was a simple gesture that got the process started. I’d walk to the kitchen where she was, where she always was — only leaving to peer around the corner into the T.V. room to check on my childhood shenanigans — and I’d stand in the doorway checking in on her senior citizen shenanigans. If she wasn’t cooking I couldn’t tell you what she ever did otherwise. All I knew was that she was there and she’d always be there to utter those couple of words to me.

My Spanish language repertoire consisted of fewer words than I had meals in a day. Had I been dropped off in the middle of a Spanish speaking country I may have been able to inquire about the closest bathroom, but end up asking whether or not the sun was raining on my pants today. Even still, I would have inquired my poorly formed, nonsensical, and incomprehensible questions stumblingly. I never could hold a conversation with my grandmother. She came to the United States from Puerto Rico when my mother was young and she never bothered to learn the native language here. Her concerns were in her kitchen — away from a world that had little to do with her, and her even less to do with it. I always knew there I’d find her in moments of happiness and sadness, when a simple embrace was all that was necessary to sufficiently quell whatever juvenile crisis befell me. Then the words came; they rolled off her tongue in a moment when I needed them to come. And they always came: “¿Tienes hambre?”

In all of my ignorance she could have said anything to me. She very well may have been inquiring about the precipitation of our solar system’s star on my garments, but I knew she wasn’t. That particular combination of words meant something else, something different. What it meant was that she was about to stand from her spot at the table and shuffle merrily to the stove, where the stirring commenced. All I needed to do was utter my own combination of words — a linear string of sounds that meant at once absolutely nothing to me and everything in the world I could have ever hoped for: “Avenita, por favor.”

This was our language. This was what the entirety of our conversations consisted of. There was no moving speech about the vicissitudes of childhood, or serious discussion of the dilemmas of a boy growing older by the moment in a world that is all but forgiving. What there was was avenita and its magical ability to transport all of my problems away. And who else to concoct such a remedy but mi abuela, with her wooden spoon silently stirring until the pot’s contents were fit enough for world peace? She did things in that way. Silently, quietly moving from here to there with little if not nothing to say. I never knew what she did in her times before the stirring. I wasn’t sure of her hobbies outside of the kitchen. I think she liked music, or maybe she didn’t; I don’t know. What I do know is that she was there endlessly stirring that pot for me. She did it all for no one else but me, and when she was finally through stirring she’d pour the contents into the bowl previously set aside in anticipation of my coming. She knew her afternoon would consist of stirring and pouring and catering to me so she put that bowl there, and there it rested ready to house her gift to me.

I sat at the table waiting impatiently for my avenita. Her stirring was only matched by my own stirring in the seat at the table — a nervous and hyperactive stirring that did little to hurry the process of the concoction and more to aggravate every vein in my body with needy avenita cravings. She would pour into the bowl slowly, fixating my eyes’ attention on the movement of every drop from the pot to the bowl at a maddening pace. I’m sure she did this on purpose. There is no reasonable explanation for defying gravity in the form of a sweet, milky substance. Newton had no room in there, in her kitchen of magic. What was left there, in her kitchen, was not reason or logic but an understanding of laws defied, adolescent whims painstakingly withdrawn, and barriers of an impassable language gap broken and traversed and residing sentimentally in a bowl of avenita. She would shuffle with the bowl even slower than her pour over to the table and place it in front of me, all the while smiling as warmly and affectionately as a grandmother could to the only person that could ever matter to her in that moment of moments and in that place of places.

To me and to that bowl and to that kitchen, there stood a woman with years and histories in her own language behind her. What little we knew of her floated unwittingly in the air about us, yet what existed were generations of “avenita” being spoken to her, by her, with her, around her. It was a word spoken that meant “we are going to sit here together and eat and all will be well because this particular recipe has been passed along to me by men and woman and friends and family and now to you in the form of what I call avenita. This particular bowl is for you and I hope that you will enjoy this bowl as much as I have enjoyed being here with you, cooking for you, and loving you just the same. I can and will cook this bowl for you despite the fact that I cannot speak to you because you don’t understand me. I don’t need you to understand me because I know what it means when you look up from that bowl and smile at me as if to say ‘¡mmmm abuela! Me gusto mucho.’”

To me and to that bowl and to that kitchen, there stood a woman I could not speak to with many words, but I surley did speak to her, and I surely did say everything that she ever wanted to hear when I told her, “Avenita, por favor.”

Thank you for all you have done for me.