The misunderstandings started on a Wednesday, a not-so-unusual, early-February Wednesday when I was supposed to make dinner, but time had gotten away from me, somehow, again, even though I had so much of it—even so, it was already six o’clock and I hadn’t yet introduced the pot to the burner, and the kids were staggering around and moaning theatrically about their big hunger. Katherine, our eight-year-old, was doing her best to distend her stomach, because at school her class had just finished a unit on People-Less-Fortunate-Than-Us, and so she knew all about the poor Somalian children and their highly preventable famine, and she also had learned the Somalian word for “please,” and so she was lurching around with her little stomach as far out as it could go, saying, “Please, please,” in the manner of a Somalian kid who was starving to death—which is to say, pathetically, in a way that could either break your heart or step on your last nerve, depending on how many times your heart had already been broken and how hardened it had become—and as I turned around to ask Katherine if she knew the Somalian words for “Shut up,” I accidentally struck my six-year-old son, Sam, in the head with the pot I was holding, and since the pot was filled with water, it had more heft than an empty pot, and I’ll admit that it might have hurt some if it struck you, unexpectedly, in the side of the head and if you were a six-year-old boy with a low threshold for pain in the first place. Sam dropped immediately to the floor and started wailing—incomprehensibly at first, then making a little bit more sense with each wail, until I finally understood that he wanted to go to hospital for stitches (there was a bump on the side of his head, a good-sized one, but no cut or blood: I checked), and Katherine was still moaning, “Please, please” in Somalian, and into the middle of this depraved scene, after a long day at work, walked Sharon, my wife, and she took one look at us and said, “Jesus, let’s just go out to eat.”
We went. We went to a Mexican place, Tegucigalpa’s, that had just opened up in the old train depot. We hadn’t been there before, so we assumed it was in the main part of the depot—the lobby or concourse—and was large. It wasn’t; it was in the old barbershop and was much smaller than we’d imagined. I mean, it was really small: three booths along the east and west walls, and then two small tables at the north and south poles, and then a bigger table in the middle. We sat at the bigger, middle table (it was the only one empty), and logistically speaking, we were at the very center of the room, at the center of attention, if you will, as if we were on a stage in the round, which might explain the first misunderstanding, which then led to all the subsequent misunderstandings.