The quiet aloneness of early morning belongs to me.  I own this time in my day, in my life.  Oh that my entirety could exist in this rarified air, free from the imposition of anyone or anything uninvited.  Awakening, my feet hit the floor and I’m at my very best, metabolic system revved like a Ferrari.  My day doesn’t begin like the comfortable family minivan, methodically loaded and prepared for the onslaught of daily life.  No, not me.  Ferrari all the way.  The clarity of thought and the creative spirit are burning brightly in the earliest of hours, the hush of predawn deafening in its silence.  Solitude gives way to a rush of word pictures and thoughts of the big, green kitchen of my childhood.

As a child I played alone, banished to a far corner of our big kitchen.  I recall a safety there, my territory.  A child’s roll top desk inhabited that far corner of my space. The walls of that kitchen were a pale, dirty green, stained ochre yellow from the tar of unfiltered Camel cigarettes, smoked by parents unaware of the respiratory carnage they were inflicting.  The only telephone in the house hung on the drab wall, surrounded by hastily scribbled phone numbers, from the hand of someone too lazy to reach for a piece of paper, the post it note yet to be invented.  The pencil lead, which was smudged with the oil of human hands, gave the big, green kitchen an unappealing dinginess.  My early culinary aesthetic born in an unappetizing setting.  Then there were the rats.  They became so numerous that I began to think of them as pets.  Perhaps that’s why a young Michael Jackson pouring his heart into a song about a rodent named Ben, his precious voice so filled with emotion, touched me so deeply. The house had a butler’s pantry attached to the kitchen where all provisions were stored.  You could hear the little fellows scampering to and fro through shelves of rice and flour, and frosted flakes. Not every kid on our block lived in a big house with a butler’s pantry; I possessed smugness and the early signs of false elitism that I wore with pride, all the while knowing that the big house had dark, desperate secrets.  Hiding the darkness away at all costs, I feared that no one would want to be my friend if they knew the horrible secrets.

One particular evening around the dinner table, the nightly ritual came with a live show, dinner theatre right there in the big, green kitchen.   The headlining acts were two of the aforementioned rats.  I wish I could recall what we dined on that evening, but the theatrics took center stage.  The family’s canine, a mean spirited Cocker Spaniel named Irky, crouched under the dinner table waiting for a handout.  I know why that dog had an attitude.  He resented not being named Spot or Fido for goodness sake. While his bowl of Alpo sat unattended across the kitchen, the headliners, those stinkin’ rats, casually strolled from behind the butler’s pantry curtain, looked me right in the eye, and proceeded to enjoy a fine meal right there in the dogs dish!  The performance was magical that evening, we all sat with wrapt attention as these two thespians ate, looked back at us, and continued their meal.  The biggest show of all was the total indifference with which my parents handled the production.  Perhaps their approach to the evenings theatrics involving those disgusting rats, was to allow the actors free range to explore the scenery, and explore they did.  The dinner scene involved them sauntering up to the dogs bowl, eating their fill, as if the Corn Flakes weren’t filling enough, and exiting stage right.  Well done, bravo!  Another performance by all, both human and animal, in the big, green kitchen.