In a trendy Italian restaurant this past Saturday, my friend, Richard, and I waited for our orders to be taken. It was almost visible, the way we didn’t speak of out there. He’s clever and fun and engaging so we spoke of traffic and travel, writing and Le Rendez-Vous where we once worked, our children and the Sicilian wine he’d ordered. Not the unspeakable.
As has been occurring with frightening frequency lately, I hit a word wall. I feel like a tree who has reached the end of her season because words are falling like leaves out of my head. In the middle of a sentence, I had to turn away and duck as though searching in my bag to try to find the word for the word I don’t remember now. Something like envelope or statue or innocuous. I didn’t find it but Richard was kind. He didn’t appear to have leaves falling out of his head.
Why is this happening to me, I keep wondering. Too much screen time? Too many words stuffed in there that they can no longer breathe? Just now, I had to wait several painful seconds to summon the word frequency (see above) as I rolled through words such as speed and momentum in search of that simple word. I skip over the one answer the moment it suggests itself. Early onset.
We carried on, skirting the massacring monsters outside while I kicked at the words I couldn’t find piling at my feet.
For a few moments, the pizza saved me.
I’ll explain: the listed ingredients included gorgonzola, but I could barely taste that heady cheese. Richard flagged the server and I requested a small side dish.
However. The chef knows how it’s done in Italy. Not in his region but some region. The region of perfection. Where nothing can be altered. It’s a thousand years old, this recipe. No, you may not have more gorgonzola. You have no taste. You don’t know what you want. Or like. Porco dio.
The server was apologetic, of course she was. Her tip depended on it, but it was out of her hands.
Once we stopped laughing about the absurdity, we resumed lapping up our Sicilian wine and eating a thirty-dollar pizza with its precise weight of gorgonzola and a rainbow salad overflowing with incomparable black olives. Richard shuffled the pile of olives to the side of his plate. (“I like olives,” he said. “But an entire jar?”)
And then, in that gold-lit room filled with responsible citizens, the inevitable out there encroached. Things, attitudes, and events we cannot change entered our conversation.
We’ve learned that it’s futile. It’s out of our hands.
It’s October 2023. It’s been a rough year. Two years. Three. The last time I had Covid… We ordered another glass of wine served solely in six-ounce portions. At least the rains will douse the fire. I sawed off another corner of my perfect pizza. People are stupid. Why are people so stupid? It was all I could manage, given the carnage, devastation, and madness, and given that any accurate words had buried themselves in the rubble of my mind.
I didn’t speak of my friend, Bernard, rushing to shelter with his daughter and her children whenever they hear sirens. Even through the restaurant’s reclaimed doors reality leaked in, and the sound of a distant siren pulled him close.
But to claim I’m suffering on account of the out there or a friend’s peril in Tel Aviv makes me feel fraudulent and disrespectful.
I asked the server to box up my thirty-dollar pizza and left a thread of red in my glass.
Perhaps it isn’t age that has rid my poor little brain of words. And no, it isn’t the privileged disappointment of not being allowed more cheese on my pizza, i.e.: not getting what I want. It could actually be that it’s all a bit too much to hold—the devastation, my own responsibilities, the world.
On my way out of the city, I chugged through the sticky streets, a little disgruntled at the traffic. I passed a yellow brick building surrounded by police in flak jackets. Above the entrance, a menorah. A tactical unit parked in front.
Oh, I thought. Oh.
What is the word for speechless?
What a wonderful essay that swooped in and out of topics. An essay salad. I too stumble for the word these days, a word that used to spring to the tip of my tongue. The name of my daughter's dog, Lincoln. The name of a street that begins with C...Caledonia. At night, my friend goes through the alaphabet, listing street names for every letter. Just one name for each letter? I asked. Oh no, she said. Sometimes fifteen names! I tried it the other night. Restricted myself to the city I lived in, and the goal of just one name for each letter. A-Arbutus, B-???? It did not put me to sleep, but I enjoyed the challenge. I have no Z yet, or Y or U. But I'll just keep looking.
Beautifully and powerfully subtle.