Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 2 Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
I took them for granted. That is the grief and regret I carry now.
That is the sentence I have been sitting with all week and could not write until right now.
I took them for granted. The recipes. The way she moved in a kitchen. The fish sauce poured by feel. The lemongrass by handful. The taste and the adjustment and the taste again. I watched her do it my whole life and I thought it would always be there. I thought she would always be there.
She wasn’t.
And now I am sitting with the grief and regret of someone who had everything she needed right in front of her and did not know it until it was gone.
The Window
There was a window.
A few hours each day when our time zones lined up and I could hear her voice. Her morning was my night. My morning was her night. We found each other in that narrow window across twelve time zones and we talked about everything and nothing and I never once asked her to walk me through a single recipe.
Not one.
Maybe I thought it was too small to mention. Maybe I thought there would be more time. Maybe I just took it for granted the same way I took everything for granted. That she would always be on the other end of that window. That her hands would always know what to do. That the recipes would always be there waiting for me when I was ready.
I was not ready in time.
And then the window closed.
The grief and regret I feel about that window is something I was not prepared for. It is specific. It is not the general ache of missing her. It is the exact feeling of knowing I had years of her voice and I never asked the one thing I needed to ask.
That is a particular kind of grief and regret. The kind that sits in your chest and does not move.
“They lived in her hands. The way she poured without counting, tasted without stopping, adjusted without thinking.”
The Urgency
When she passed I felt something I did not expect.
Panic.
Not just grief. Panic. Because suddenly I understood that everything she carried in her hands for fifty years was gone with her. The recipes that lived in her body. The flavors she rebuilt from memory in every American kitchen she ever had. All of it. Gone.
And I felt this urgency I cannot fully describe. Like something was slipping away and I had to catch it before it disappeared completely. Like I owed it to her. Like I owed it to Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte.
I went to my kitchen.
I stood at my stove with the ingredients in front of me and I started cooking from memory. From fifty years of watching without knowing I was watching. I measured as I went. A teaspoon of this. Two tablespoons of that. It felt wrong. Putting a number to something that had never had a number.
It felt like grief and regret standing at a stove trying to do something useful.
I made it twice. Three times. Adjusted. Made it again.
And then I tasted it.
And I was not in Florida anymore.
I was at my mother’s table. The last meal she ever cooked for me. Larb Gai. The dish that had somehow become my birthday meal without either of us ever deciding that. It just became that. The way things become things in families without anyone choosing them.
I was not prepared for that. For a spoonful of something I made myself to send me straight back to her kitchen. Her hands. The smell of it. The sound of her moving around behind me. The feeling of being someone’s child at a table where everything was exactly as it should be.
I stood at my Florida stove and I cried.
Not from sadness exactly. From something closer to relief. She was in there. I had found her. Imperfectly. Approximately. But enough.
I wrote it down.
“No number captures what her hands knew. But close enough matters.”
What I Know Now
I took the recipes for granted.
I took her for granted. The window. The hours we found each other. The way she cooked like breathing. I took all of it for granted the way you take breathing for granted until the air is gone.
I cannot fix that. The grief and regret of it is mine to carry.
But I can stand at my stove. I can measure what was never measured. I can make it again and again until I get it close enough. I can write every single thing down so that Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte never have to stand in their kitchens one day feeling what I feel right now.
That is what this book is.
That is what all of this is.
She never wrote a single recipe down.
I am writing them all down now.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 2 of Her Hands His Eyes , a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
In Entry 3 the scan that stopped me cold. My American grandfather. The man who made room for a little girl from Korat the moment she arrived.
