Let's look at the Food Section...

...Says you-know-who, last Wednesday while we were looking at The New York Times over breakfast, per our usual.

And while listening to NPR on the radio, he says, "She said President Obama, Mommy!"

And, "Mommy do you have power?"

(I think he meant superpowers. No.)

He also said, just once, but still, it was dazzling, "Mommy I want to hear what you have to say."

And, "Which one are you going to have?"

And sometimes when we look at magazines, he'll say, "That's art. And that's art," pointing to pictures of art.

"Look, Mommy, it's the Mona Lisa!"

Down here in Atlanta, there's a saying you'll hear sometimes.

"It ain't braggin' if you done it."

Well, okay, I didn't do anything but I'll brag a little that when Leo and I went to the Atlanta airport last week, he spotted the advertisement in this photo and yelled out, "Look, Mommy, it's the Mona Lisa!"

Unprompted, and while riding the airport train.

Of course, his name is Leonardo.

And while he, in fact, is Leonardo da Atlanta, he is aware of that other Leonardo.

Whose most famous painting, he'll tell you, is in Paris.

Pushy commands you grow to love

Here's one:

"Read it, Mommy," as my son Leo pushes a book in my hand.

Sometimes it's even a book in Italian.

Puglia in Tavola, prose poem in mind

Earlier this week, I took down from the book shelf in the kitchen where we keep the cook books a small volume we bought in Puglia: Puglia in Tavola.

And I opened it up this morning, flipping away from the recipe I had bookmarked to see what else is hidden inside there, and I find names of recipes that read like the seeds of prose poems in Italian.

Words so foreign to me, that they beggar the imagination that they could be Italian (and yet I see they are).

Words like: quagghjariedde and ghiemeridde.

I don't cook. But a recipe book in Italian? A little piece of heaven. Almost as good as a ciambellina.