Words Between Us

For Nat, 2 years old

I love watching my little boy Nat learning to speak. It started when he was only a few months old and realised that if he cried out at a certain pitch he could make the stairwell to our apartment echo. I used to walk up and down the stair with him trying it out. We took turns. We learned different sounds: how to make your mouth pop with your lips. He would burble and I’d imitate him, and he would watch keenly. And then more and more the words began to pour out of him. Great long sentences of ecstatic utterance. No recognisable words but arms gesticulating, face intent. Pausing, waiting for reply. I would nod very seriously and hazard a guess from the context and as much ostensive definition as he could provide. And now, real words. New words every day. Granted, he has a funny accent but yesterday we walked through Eastwood on our way to eat dumplings and he learned ‘Lanterns’.

This morning he came into our bedroom, I was still groggily trying to shake off the night, and he breezed on in saying, ‘Hi’.
‘Hi’, I said, ‘…how are you?’
“Good” He said, turning on the ‘Li-light’.
I don’t remember him doing that before. He’s learned a basic conversational pattern. It’s beyond words.

There are moments when we still look blankly at each other, then squint, head on one side. Pondering the phonemes, stretching them into possibilities. He does it to me, like I’m the one struggling to express myself comprehensibly, like I’m the linguistic novice. It happens less often now though, but, nevertheless, we are still capable of sentences that perplexify the other. I treasure them up.

I think it likely, proper even, that as he grows and becomes more the self he will be, we will grow apart and become more obscure to each other. That seems to be the way of things. I can suffer that thought because I hope in a day when all hearts are opened, when what we mean will become clear to each other — the way it has always been clear to God. The eschaton of language: the day when the hairs of our heads, our eyebrows, flashing eyes, flaring nostrils, arms, feet, lips, t-shirts, all will spill out blessings, understanding finally.

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Originally published at andersonpost.org on March 1, 2014.