There's a Life in My Soup: Observation #1 (Panera Bread)

“We’re having fun now, huh!?”

A man asks this rhetorical, enthusiastic question to his mother, or mother-in-law. He’s older, in his early 60s; the woman might be 90 if not more. He speaks to her as if to a child. Before ordering, another woman, this one younger, possibly the man’s wife and the old woman’s daughter, told her not to go anywhere, pointing out the window and suggesting that she look through the glass and admire, presumably, all the parked cars. She obliged, staring at the distant, recently snow-dusted roof ornaments aligned in orderly rows.

The question in question was in response to their food. More specifically, to the old woman’s soup, which she apparently loves. “She can’t stop saying how good it is,” the wife tells her husband. This repetition, I imagine, is not due to her dementia, of an appearing and reappearing of the soup, each new mirage necessitating another proclamation of goodness. She says how good the soup is because it is good. She can taste the broth, feel the giving crunch of the barley, absorb the warmth of its vapors. Even if her sensory faculties have long since past, I believe her words would be warranted by her past experience with the soup, and not merely a learned knowledge of what to say when given a spoon in front of a bowl of liquid.

Looking at this woman, I could not fathom her having the physical capacity to lift the .2 ounces of Chicken Noodle to her mouth. But she had life enough not only to do this, but to judge it, effusively, as something worthwhile. This soup was not just lunch. It was an affirmation of life.

Her own existence, this grey-haired, stooped-over, breathing carcass of a woman, was nearing its last, china-scraping spoonful. But this soup—Oh, this was tasty. And observing her gives me hope that even the frailest of us can digest sensation.