The interior of my little hermit’s hut on wheels…

  French toast and a small jug of piping hot coffee. A modest truckstop breakfast in Ontario California, where I’ve been holed up since last night waiting for my delivery appointment later today. Red meat to feed Los Angeles’s appetite for protein. After that there’s a load of bananas poised for the sixteen hundred mile return journey.

Bananas.

Or “Ba-nana,” as my year old son put it one day when we were picking up a few items at the grocery store some twelve years ago now. He was still largely at the “at” and other formative gibberish stage, working his way through Dr. Zeus. I had chosen a healthy bunch from the display and before I could deposit it in the cart he clearly enunciated the three syllables of “Ba…nana.”

I laughed out loud and he smiled jubilantly, having grasped a truly fundamental life tool.

Language. Communication.

So seemingly long ago now.

Three syllables.

What I wouldn’t give for those three syllables twelve years later.