My nine year old son makes the noisiest smacking sounds when he eats. Normally I would immediately ask him to mind his manners and close his mouth. But with him, I just can’t. I love the sounds he makes smacking his food. He does it with such zeal and flair. It’s as though with every smack his mouth is savoring the food right down to the cell level…as though he has discovered some sort of process for extracting the vitamins before swallowing. His eyes sparkle like stars and his face is aglow with every pert echo that drums through the air.
I leave all sense of what the culture has taught me about making sounds at the table and dive into the divine sound of his little intermittent smacks…so crisp, so delightful…as though he is trying to suck every ounce of life out of his day. I find myself culled by the noise…it’s like the sound of a quick kiss when you kiss a baby on the belly, or when you hold a child’s face in your hands and peck it with endless kisses. I think of the sound of a first kiss on a cold night walking in the park…soft and warm but quick and fleeting.
My mind drifts even deeper yet into the intimate sounds made by my husband and me in our bedroom. There’s something innate and raw about the sounds our bodies make when they’re engaged. Once brought out and witnessed by two lovers when they penetrate the thick silence of a softly lit bedroom, there’s no denying that we are connected at the very root of our being, held together by the threads of the subtle sounds of skin touching skin, lips on skin, slaps, slurps, kisses, and short breaths. There is something carnal, base, and at the origin of our existence - - letting sounds be the music of a sexual union. It’s a frame, a setting, a back-drop to the beginnings of life.
All these feelings are summed-up in Christian smacking his food, and it makes me smile. I pray thanks to God for such a blessing, and I think of the nights he and his little brother were conceived, and I am pulled into my humanness and into the union I have been blessed with in being married to Bryan, and how our union as One has made these two amazing young men.
But then I prove myself to be a hypocrite when I hear other people smacking their food. When my mom came for a visit, she too made smacking noises in eating her food… Hers were disgusting. It wasn’t rooted in joy of the food she was eating at all. She was attempting to hold in her dentures with her tongue as she ate, and there was this kind of hollow click associated with each bite she took. And it made me sick to think of the sounds she and my dad may have once made in their love-making. They have been split for about 40 years now. But there was a time when they were One together, and they conceived six children in all. It sickens me to picture it now because they are both so old. And my mom is merely attempting to eat a dinner I made for her without losing her teeth onto the plate in front of her hunched body. After one particularly loud, hollow click-smack combination, she slowly puts down her fork with a wobbly hand of an 81 year old, then reaches up to her mouth. To my horror, she then pulls out her teeth and licks off chunks of food stuck in her bridge. “This dinner is just delicious,” she says. The she puts her teeth back in and proceeds to slowly pick up her fork again. Ethan looks sideways, and Christian doesn’t even notice in his smacking zeal.
I leave all sense of what the culture has taught me about making sounds at the table and dive into the divine sound of his little intermittent smacks…so crisp, so delightful…as though he is trying to suck every ounce of life out of his day. I find myself culled by the noise…it’s like the sound of a quick kiss when you kiss a baby on the belly, or when you hold a child’s face in your hands and peck it with endless kisses. I think of the sound of a first kiss on a cold night walking in the park…soft and warm but quick and fleeting.
My mind drifts even deeper yet into the intimate sounds made by my husband and me in our bedroom. There’s something innate and raw about the sounds our bodies make when they’re engaged. Once brought out and witnessed by two lovers when they penetrate the thick silence of a softly lit bedroom, there’s no denying that we are connected at the very root of our being, held together by the threads of the subtle sounds of skin touching skin, lips on skin, slaps, slurps, kisses, and short breaths. There is something carnal, base, and at the origin of our existence - - letting sounds be the music of a sexual union. It’s a frame, a setting, a back-drop to the beginnings of life.
All these feelings are summed-up in Christian smacking his food, and it makes me smile. I pray thanks to God for such a blessing, and I think of the nights he and his little brother were conceived, and I am pulled into my humanness and into the union I have been blessed with in being married to Bryan, and how our union as One has made these two amazing young men.
But then I prove myself to be a hypocrite when I hear other people smacking their food. When my mom came for a visit, she too made smacking noises in eating her food… Hers were disgusting. It wasn’t rooted in joy of the food she was eating at all. She was attempting to hold in her dentures with her tongue as she ate, and there was this kind of hollow click associated with each bite she took. And it made me sick to think of the sounds she and my dad may have once made in their love-making. They have been split for about 40 years now. But there was a time when they were One together, and they conceived six children in all. It sickens me to picture it now because they are both so old. And my mom is merely attempting to eat a dinner I made for her without losing her teeth onto the plate in front of her hunched body. After one particularly loud, hollow click-smack combination, she slowly puts down her fork with a wobbly hand of an 81 year old, then reaches up to her mouth. To my horror, she then pulls out her teeth and licks off chunks of food stuck in her bridge. “This dinner is just delicious,” she says. The she puts her teeth back in and proceeds to slowly pick up her fork again. Ethan looks sideways, and Christian doesn’t even notice in his smacking zeal.
1 comment:
Very Cool
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