“If you please, Lord,” he beckons, “I have never been eloquent, neither in the past, nor recently, nor now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow in speech and tongue.”
But the Lord said to him, “Who gives one man speech and makes another deaf and dumb? . . . Is it not I, the Lord? Go, then! It is I who will assist you in speaking and will teach you what you are to say.”
Yet Moses still insists that someone else be chosen, that he has not the power to carry the word to his people. In anger, Yahweh replies:
“Have you not your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know that he is an eloquent speaker…. You are to speak to him, then, and put the words in his mouth. I will assist both you and him in speaking and will teach the two of you what you are to do.”
Perhaps, in those early years, my desire to reflect upon this story is not surprising. After all, I had begun to grieve for a lost son, a child I had seen in my mind’s eye but had not embraced in life. In my private storytelling, the imaginings that prefaced Jacob’s birth repeatedly called forth the image of the eloquent one, the progeny who could take a lost people across their own Jordan River to some better place. With both my daughter and son, in fact, I had done as many parents do: I had pictured the embodiment of the best of who I was or the best of what I could nurture in my future children’s lives. In these prophetic hopes and reveries, it was my love that shaped their eloquent leadership. Then came these irrational questions: Was this the arrogance that left me unprepared? Was it this turning to earthly desires that initiated the hard years? How easy it was to slip into these superstitious doubts to give order to what I did not understand.
But I can say now what I was just coming to know then in a house resounding with the Jabberwock of Jacob-speak: that to be chosen is to be sacrificed and that to be sacrificed is to come to a new way of knowing. Something unsustainable had to be given up; something new had to be discovered. And it was the story of Moses and Aaron that crystallized this understanding. What a bitter lesson to find oneself delivered into a wilderness, to set up camp there, to tend the fire and suffer the endless covering of coal and ash, to feel the grind of sand in the unleavened bread, to embrace the initial certainty of false gods, to see the distant shadow that starts as Jordan and ends in a bitter stream of cursing. The most holy of mysteries is this very human place, this shoreline defining the tenuous threshold between sacrifice and deliverance, confusion and faith.
Near the time of looking back to this story, this reflection upon forsaken names, I unexpectedly wandered into a lesser, unsolved mystery: Jacob’s puzzling, “Oh, l-ook. Oh, l-ook. A nice dinna.” The unearthing of the phrase’s origin came from entering another story plotted near the shores of the Nile, another tale that ended in the struggle to escape: Tomie de Paola’s children’s story, Bill and Pete.
After a day of cleaning, I sat down with Mary, Sarah, and Jacob (then eight and six) to watch a videotape of our family taken a number of years before. The television lit up with the image of my daughter and son, each four years younger, sitting on the living room floor. Their eyes were fixed upon an animated version of Bill and Pete. Bill is William Everett Crocodile, who lives on the banks of the River Nile. Pete is his toothbrush, that is, a bird that picks at Bill’s molars beneath the canopy of the reptile’s yawning jaws. When William is young, he gets confused by all the letters required to spell his name. Pete unburdens him with the simple appellation, “Bill.”
That night, I decided to read de Paola’s story, and, after a period of searching, I caught a glimpse of the pink paperback with the moon and stars calm and steady on the back cover. As Jacob lined up dominoes on the floor next to his bed, I narrated the tale in the face of his seeming inattention until I came to the part I liked best. For my own amusement, I renamed Bill and Pete, Jacob and Dad. It was always fun to enter the stories destined to end in sleep or discovery. And I read:
One Saturday, when there was no school, Jacob and Dad went down to the River Nile and sat on the bank in the sun. A man on a bicycle went riding by.
Behind the bicycle were cages filled with crocodiles.
“I wonder what that’s all about?” said Jacob.
“That’s the Bad Guy, and those crocodiles are on their way to Cairo—to become suitcases,” said an old crocodile swimming by. “Watch out he doesn’t catch you!”
But he did. The very next Saturday.
Jacob and Dad were fishing and they didn’t hear the Bad Guy creep up behind them.
For a moment, I saw my son pause and so I eased myself into the space of his play. On the rug, he had arranged dominoes in parallel lines. Squinting or with a quick or sidewise glance, I began to see the lines as credits scrolling upwards on a television or movie screen. I laid the book at the right edge of the dominoes and looked at the lines. In their configuration, I could almost see the words imprinted in his mind: the list of characters and voice credits, of executive producers, art directors, production assistants, gophers, hair stylists. From the black dots and black lines between the dots emerged the symbols of his world, a world of repetition, of rituals fulfilling needs that I had yet to understand. I quietly nudged the book against his elbow and, to draw his eyes to it, ran my finger along the golden shore that formed the border between palm trees and the blue water of the Nile. I began to read with more feeling.
The Bad Guy lassoed Jacob and put him in a cage. He didn’t pay any attention to Dad.
Dad tried to peck the Bad Guy, but Dad was just too small.
Poor Jacob!
He was on his way to Cairo.
All he could think about was suitcases.
Brave Dad!
He stayed close to his son.
The Bad Guy put Jacob in his garden and went into the house.
“Run me a nice hot tub, Jeeves,” the Bad Guy said to his butler. “I will take a bath before dinner. I got me another crocodile today and I need a nap. Call me when the bath is ready.”
“Tomorrow that crocodile becomes a suitcase,” he added.
I narrated Dad’s courage, how he picked the lock with his beak and urged Jacob to escape quickly from the dangers of this cruel man. But Jacob would not leave. He wanted to prevent the Bad Guy from catching more crocodiles and creating more suitcases. So, the crocodile slipped into the bathtub, his head barely visible near the rubber ducky, and chased the villain out into the night.
I squeaked like the rubber ducky on Sesame Street and, following this train of thought, squeezed the airy laugh of Ernie through my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Jacob swung his hand at my face, trying to stop my imitation by hitting me. I rolled away from the arch of his swinging hand, letting the pages crest in the air before flattening on the floor. For a moment, I rubbed Jacob’s back; I said, “Dad stop” to reassure him. And then, after my son attended again to the dominoes, I opened the book, turning from the backside of the Bad Guy to the next page, to the image of Jacob and Dad (that is, Bill and Pete) standing beside a dinner table. In the silence, I heard these words escape from my tongue:
“Oh, look, a nice dinner,” said Dad.
“And am I hungry,” said Jacob.
It took a moment to awaken to the resonance of these lines, to overlay Jacob’s past utterances upon the original text. “Oh, l-ook, oh, l-ook,” I heard, “Oh, l-ook, a nice dinna.”
Later, after I tucked Jacob in and promised to come back to sleep with him, I sat at the top of the stairs and wept. For years, I had not done so, had not let myself slip into this kind of grief. I wept because I had glimpsed what might have been Jacob’s distant loneliness, his wanting to know that another person in the intimate world of our home knew where his imagination had gone. I cried for the urgency of my son’s articulate yearning and for my own unknowing.
I still continue to read the moment like a sacred text. Were his words about hunger, not the kind that marks the emptiness in the stomach but that