Making Salad

The 2 year old enters the kitchen
“Daddy, daddy, what choo doin’?”

The father
freezes

breathing
living
existing
standing with his center of mass over his area of support
trying to remember the melody of Ellington’s “Cottontail”
daydreaming about different inversions of an Ab major 9th chord
secretly following the conversation in the front room between mother and the neighbor
using a knife to apply a small force over an even smaller surface area generating enough pressure to sever
a carrot into conveniently small salad pieces

a father needs to explain things to his child
so he unfreezes and replies,
“cutting carrots”