Cool Down, Little Pot

What will it be like when we can limit outrage time?

On weekends, I made João sit with me and have breakfast. We ate fruit, homemade bread. I made him describe the membranes of the grapefruit. If it was warm, we sat outside. As bees backstroked by, he attempted a sketch of some element in the garden: a gloxinia petal, a wet rock. 

But I couldn’t fend him off forever. When he took his device, he became a different boy. Soon he was swearing about leaders in distant lands or the government tearing down buildings that were FULLY OCCUPIED or the brand of toilet paper we got at the supermarket. 

Whatever he learned, no matter how big or small, no matter if it concerned our town or New South Wales, he emitted it at the same volume. And then whatever the man coming up the street that morning was announcing, even if he was just letting us know that his pet chicken’s eggs were for sale, that news entered the same arena and was greeted with the same fury. 

Yet he had no interest in our neighbor, Grandmother Tabitha, who blamed me for João’s night terrors. They woke her up, she said. As retribution, she routinely tossed her cigarettes into our yard, along with other bits of garbage: newspaper, soda cans, tissues. The night terrors weren’t really night terrors, though. They were the result of my failure to impose limits on João. In other words, they were what happened when I didn’t use a timer.

An hour passed. The timer went off. Gradually, João lost interest in his device and began to notice me. “When you were born,” I told him, “I decided to turn my outrage time to zero. I was tired of feeling angry. As soon as the technology became available, I used it.” However, João wasn’t quite calm enough to hear me. A neighborhood boy burst through our yard in search of an errant ball, his father shouting at him and at the TV simultaneously. João’s heart went racing again. 

So I waited. 

There was still grapefruit on the table. I had saved some for him. Not for the first time in my life, I wondered if the sour taste was bound up in the fruit’s geometry. Lemons had an equally fleshy interior and were also sour. Limes too. Even oranges and clementines, one could argue, fell into this basket. Plums were different: sweeter, fleshier. And nectarines were like plums.

João was still breathing hard. So I waited. I looked at the bread I had baked that morning. Pan casero, we called it back home. When I said those words to João, he looked at me funny, since it had nothing to do with Australia, the country he knew, and it was a Spanish phrase, not Portuguese, not like his name. But he loved to hear me say it; he loved how crispy I made the bread.

His ears were still red with fury! Those little ears, ten-year-old ears, covered in downy hair, the hair of youth, one day to be replaced by grouchy bristles. I thought of my grandfather’s ears, which had been as large as gramophones. A long time ago, an ocean away.

I waited. 

I looked at João. I loved to look at João. I didn’t mind if that was my only activity that morning. 

What time was it? Hardly nine.

I waited. 

We needed milk. Not today, tomorrow would be fine. 

I waited.

I waited, I waited, I waited. 

I waited, while he, like a pot of rice on a stovetop, slowly cooled. Then, when he was calm, we went to clean up the trash in our backyard.