On this day, as all others, she was mixing various vegetables into a potpourri of soup that required as little culinary sense as an undomesticated female needed to have. With vegetables being dumped in a crock-pot with a bit of water and pepper, it seemed to her that it was impossible for much to go awry. The lunch might have been monotonous but having little else from which to make a negative judgment, her son didn't complain about this point. His only experience was soup, pasta, and scrambled eggs that usually came out all right and pancakes and French toast that had a 50 percent chance of being burnt beyond recognition or going awry in the most unforeseen ways. Outside of giving objections about burnt comestibles, he was a truly ignorant savage; and concerning matters of culinary taste that was how she cared to keep him. When she asked him to wash his hands he went over to the sink and exclaimed, "Oh wow, chocolate." "Get your hands out of that water! That's nasty looking stuff. Diarrhea looking, it seems to me." "What's that?" "The runs, my dear, the runs." "The sink has the runs? It's sick?" She chuckled at his animistic thinking. Everything was alive in his judgment and, apart from some wild untoward behavior, he was a creature who was sensitive to the feelings of the whole world. She wished that she could keep him like this forever. The water pressure became inconsistent and unevenly went on and off in thrusts. "Diarrhea and constipation at the same time-- hard life for the poor sink. Well, until they solve the problem here-- whoever the they are--use bottled water. Scrub with soap." As she stirred the soup she saw a yellow school bus drive into the trailer park and a kindergartner leaving it. Her half-day was over. "Do you know that girl?" she asked. He looked out of the window. "No, she's new; but anyway, I don't play with them girls. They don't know how to play catch. They don't know what to do with balls of all sorts." "How would you know that?" "Chuck told me."