Oh, my g/God! I’m all grown up!

Self Editor’s Note: Oh, my (expletive) god! You have no idea what just happened to Our Man in America tonight!

I WAS  taking the last sip of my bloody (literary) cocktail when I realized that the brim of the mug hits the top of my nose. Weird because I remember yesterday when the same brim hit my forehead.

I remember Mama giving me a mug of white maize meal porridge that young and greedy me insisted — usually by crying — that Ma fill it up to the brim. Gawd, I’ve used the word brim three times already. Or is it four times? My math sucks, Dad, despite all the belts and whips you spent on me.

Anyways!

I drank all the porridge until no more of that suspension would flow freely from the mug. In such as case, American kid would reach into one of the kitchen drawers and fetch a spoon to summon the reluctant drop of the porridge.

Maybe not.

What American child you know would be excited over something that doesn’t have excess amounts of sugar and tasty saturated fat in it? But for the sake of this nonsense let’s just say he would.

Me?

I had no spoon. Neither did my parents. I don’t even think they spooned. They are African, you know, and, as my brother from a Vietnamese mother would say, “Spooning is for White People.”

COMMERCIAL BREAK for a word from our sponsors: As Our Man in America sits here, composing this crap on his Kenyan cousin Black President Barry’s BlackBerry — and occasionally sipping on his bloody (literary) Ha, ha, ha, funny, Our Man. You used that one already — cocktail, these American women (He is trying to separate the weakling, sorry, cute Thompson Gazelle from the pack.) are whispering — they think — about how much this Lion loves the Lioness he’s been texting all night.

Anyways.

I couldn’t find a spoon for the dregs of my sugar-less delicacy. My fingers were too dirty to dig into the mug. And Ma always told me not to touch food after digging into my buttocks. Kids do that, you know.

I take that back; she said I could if I washed my hands after the vulgar mining expedition. But how could I when the reason I was drinking the damn  porridge was because the rains often failed to come? We had gone up to the mountain and worshiped for ribina, praying for rain, all to little avail.

Okong’o “Reasonable” Daud, my great-grandfather, lamented that the rains failed to come because some sellouts had angered our god of the mountains by abandoning him for some egomaniacal creator guy who insists that a capital G be placed at the beginning of his appellation to distinguish him from the chaff that is the evil spirit my great-grandfather worshiped. <== has to be the longest sentences I have ever written. But who can blame him? You give two different creators the same name someone is gonna have to give up their identity.

But Aunt Magdalene (that’s the name God gave her at baptism although — to her chagrin — “Reasonable” Daud, called her Kemunto Nyamacharara Agacharara Egetumo) thought the rains failed because her grandfather’s outright detestation of God. “You and your bloodletting tribal people are going to HELL,” oh, how those words still haunt me.

Me?

I think it is funny that Americans dread the same rainy days we Africans pray for. SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING: Invest in Bernard Maddoff’s rainy day fund!!!! He way outperforms Nigerian and  Kenyan fund managers.

(How the (expletive) would anyone trust a man whose name sounds like he has already made off — get it? with someone’s money?).

Today, “Reasonable” Daud is no more. Neither is Aunt Magdalene. “Bless her sole,” Ma often says. I guess Ma’s sister got frustrated and left early for the long walk to everlasting life and her sole held on. She wore Akala sandals, I think.

I think it is funny that Aunt Magdalene who knew it all didn’t live half as long as the grandfather she thought was dumb.

It is even funnier that none of them was right. We are still praying for the rains. But who cares if the rains don’t come? Bill — Hillary’s and Melinda’s husband — plans to give all his Microsoft Clinton money to charity, and by “charity” everyone knows he means Africa, right?

Anyways.

It seems like yesterday when I stuck my tongue out like a chameleon, took that mug, tilted it like a frat boy at a bloody cocktail-chugging competition and spanked its base (oh yeah, baby) as hard as my 5-year-old, malnutritioned, kwashiorkoric self could.

The top of the brim left n my black forehead a white arch, about ¼ the size of the circumference of the circle (I know math). With neither a mirror nor clear, stagnant water to look at myself, (doesn’t it looking into stagnant like you are going to fall down into the abyss that is the sky in the pool?) I ran around the playground, unaware that the kids that had a meal every other day thought my middle-class ass was bragging about having had breakfast that day.

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