Table Talk
LAST WEEK my son fell in love with a Yield sign. We emerged from the marsh path behind his grandparents’ house, and he walked up to it, looked, and pointed.
Ooooo, he said, in his sweet, astonished voice. Ooooo.
My husband had kept going; now he watched, testy, from the sidewalk, as I followed my son into the grass.
He touched the metal post the Yield sign was mounted on. I’ve never paid much attention to the posts, the bolts, the trench that runs down their centers. This one looked good—no rust. He staggered around, considering the back of the sign. From that vantage, it was a bare triangle. Back to the front. He was rapt. The red-reflective brilliance, the white border, the letters: a trio of vowels and a pair of soft consonants.
Ooooo, he said, pointing.
Yield, I said, stretching the syllables like taffy. It’s a triangle. One, two, three: three sides.
We did this for five minutes.
Please stop fetishizing the Yield sign, my husband called.
It is not just the Yield sign my son wants again. And again. He asks me to read to him on repeat. This isn’t a surprise. It’s commonly known that toddlers like things repeated over and over—it’s how they learn. What is surprising is how much I love my part in it. He’s in my lap or he’s in his crib, and we get to page 53, the end of , and he’s saying “please,” which comes out as “pluh,” and I hear myself saying “thank you for asking so nicely” and starting over at the title page: “A tale told long ago by the Grimm Brothers—retold by Edith Tarcov, pictures by Edward Gorey.”
