Every night since I returned from Congo on August 1 my dreams have been set there. I do not remember most of them. It seems like my psyche has been caught there and is still going over stuff. There are no messages, few remaining images, only a kind of churning over experiences. But the result is—or maybe it is the cause—that I have not felt like I am really back home.
One thing I have discovered over a lifetime is that I am able to feel “home” in many different places. A tiny two-room, tatami-matted house in Tokyo. A duplex in Bukavu, Congo, that came with a cat. A Moscow apartment with tall, dusty windows and a portrait of Leo Tolstoy above my couch-bed. The open front of the Mukendi home in Kinshasa where visitors come and chat or wait. These places, where I may have lived for a year or a week, carve a deeper place in my soul than some of the houses I have inhabited in the USA—present home, with porch and woods, excepted.
I don’t know what this has to do with visiting my granddaughter except that I needed to do it in order to feel like I was really back home. I think it has to do in some way with story. The homes of my psyche are part of a story, not my story only but stories in which I am participating. In addition to my grandma-infatuation with cutiepie-ness, Hazel’s story is my chance to observe all over again what it means to be a human being. We are doing the human story together, Hazel and I.
In the month since I last saw her, Hazel, who is two and a month, has learned the miracle of human language. It’s not that she wasn’t talking before, saying words and some sentences. But it was more like a toy for her, an experiment. Now it is her most important tool and she is building her life and personality around it.
Her imitative chatter has been replaced by words and sentences, every one of them carrying meaning, whether we can decipher it or not. She is patient with us and assumes she will have to repeat things many times so that we can understand. Eventually we do. She repeats after us and expects us to repeat after her: communication involves mirroring, making sure we understand each other. I am taken back to language school, both learning and teaching. I pull out my gift for understanding strange accents and imperfect structures and we are having a ball.
“I” is a new word for her in the last month and nearly every sentence includes it, with a slight twist to indicate “I want” or “I like.” A two-year-old’s strong will is partly a reflection, a reveling in, this new power of communication. The right to say no, the clarity of being able to indicate exact preferences. I want to see a dance video but not this ballet; that one. And not this scene of the Nutcracker, and not that, not that, not that, but yes this one.
And then there is the joy of following the story, narrating as it goes along, how the people are saying bye-bye and hugging each other and then Clara goes up the stairs and says night-night. So, too, with the story of the chicken who goes on a walk, chased by a hungry fox who is thwarted at every turn. Fock hiding. Coming, coming! Oh no! Not. Coming! Catch! Not. Wet! Chicken walk. No Fock. Chicken night-night. She gets the jokes and laughs but looks at me every time to make sure she is laughing at the right places, that we are laughing together.
This sense of being part of the human family, able to hold her own and join in, must be terribly exciting. I share her excitement. This is typical human development but each little person must experience it for herself. It is really a great adventure.
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