In Every Dream Home

We've had some briskish temperatures around here for the last couple of days. I can't complain too much, but still do, as it is (after all) January and I am in New England (where the American History comes from) so to take the chill off, yesterday I popped into the sandwich place that had the guy who lost all the weight by eating them as their spokesman (I'm assuming they gave him money back then, right? He could use it now to buy things at the prison commissary). 

I had a bowl of 'homemade vegetable soup' with my sandwich, which I call 'samwich' inspired by a half-memory of a Soupy Sales routine, I think. I do wish the ghosts of past lives would wear name tags when they wander the corridors of my memory so I'd know how to sort them.

It was, surprisingly very good soup-and I asked the fellow who is always there (which I think means he's the franchise owner), how he knew. He was puzzled by my question and offered his own in return, 'how I did know, what?' "How did you know this was what my homemade vegetable soup was supposed to taste like?" I asked. Maybe he thought I was joking but I didn't think I was joking.

My homemade vegetable soup would taste different from yours I am assuming. It would have to would it not? Unless we're twin sons of different mothers. And what about the people who are adopted or who were raised by relatives other than their own parents. And for Romulus and Remus, raised by wolves? What does their homemade vegetable soup taste like? We bandy words around sometimes like there's a common meaning that everyone knows when there isn't. Sometimes shared references aren't.

Language should create a frame of common reference and enlarge the body of shared knowledge to enhance understanding and further communication, not mask meaning and disguise intentions. Nothing is less clear than synthetic agreement or more harmful than coerced consensus. Honesty is something we claim to always want but rarely welcome and is always in short supply especially on a chilly morning in January. Perhaps we should go to your house and have some soup.
-bill kenny