dropped out of business school,

and apprenticed myself to a cabinetmaker.

Now I have work I love,

and the woman I love,

and the daughter I love.”

(He always puts in the part about me.)

“So you could say that I’m pretty much

the luckiest guy in the world.”

Givers and Takers

Lizard says that

givers always marry takers.

Takers can’t marry takers

because they’d both want to do the taking.

Givers could marry givers

except the takers are so good at taking

they get there first.

Lizard’s mother is a giver,

according to Lizard,

and her father is a taker.

My father is a giver,

according to Lizard,

and my mother is a taker.

It’s true my father is a giver,

but it’s not exactly true

my mother is a taker.

Or at least I don’t think she means to be.

It’s more that she has to give

all the time to everyone else:

her students who take the exams she has to grade

and then come to her to complain if they get a B,

and the other professors in her department,

who pressure her to be on

all the time-consuming committees

they don’t want to be on.

But mostly she tries to give to the people

whose languages are dying so fast

that even if she worked every minute of every day,

which she practically does already,

she couldn’t learn about them in time.

So she doesn’t have a lot

of giving left over

for my father

and me.

I’m Going to Say a Terrible Thing

I sort of like it best when my mother travels

to a faraway part of the world

and spends a whole month sometimes

learning other people’s languages all day long.

My mother is usually the one who does the cooking,

which is strange because she’s also the one who is crazy-busy,

but she says cooking keeps her sane.

She makes elegant meals

we eat by candlelight,

because elegant meals by candlelight

make her feel calmer and less stressed.

When she’s away, my father and I find recipes

in a cookbook that tells you how to make the food

the characters eat in famous children’s books.

Afterward we don’t clean up the kitchen

because there is no one here but us and maybe Lizard,

who doesn’t mind sticky counters

or burnt sauce on the stove.

I can practice piano as much or as little

as I want, and it’s strange,

but I actually end up practicing more.

We don’t have to think about

whether my mother had a bad day at the university

because George Bixler said that linguistic fieldwork

(which is what my mother does)

isn’t as intellectually rigorous as theoretical linguistics

(which is what he does).

We don’t have to see how pale and drawn she looks

after staying up till three o’clock