The Rice, the Bat, the Baby

By Garrison Keillor

This morning I removed a bloodthirsty bat clinging to the curtain in the family room and saved my wife and daughter from an eternity of undeath. And this evening I am making risotto, which my wife loves and says is superior to any found in restaurants, the Van Gogh Sunflowers of risotto. This is the life of a man who knows grandeur. I simmer the chopped onions and fennel in a pool of butter and shave Parmesan into a bowl while my clients sit on the front steps, enjoying the last of summer in St. Paul, watching people stroll past, waiting for a dog.

My daughter is 19 months old and is thrilled to the tips of her toes by dogs, any dog, but particularly the neighbors' golden Lab, Tula. She toddles toward her and reaches out to touch, jabbering endearments, trembling for joy. What you or I would feel if an angel appeared, my daughter feels upon meeting a dog.

She is the one in the family who lives most in the moment, as we are told in poems to do--to gather rosebuds while we may and treasure the hour of splendor in the grass and prove the pleasures that this brief summer yields. Hers is the age of sheer delight, and among her dog pals and wading pools and her books and my risotto, she is gathering rosebuds left and right.

I don't say that mine is all that great a risotto, but of all the bat catchers in St. Paul, I probably make as good a risotto as any of them. The secret, besides lavish administration of butter and cheese, is to rush the rice toward the finish line at high speed and then turn off the heat and coast across. My little girl thinks my risotto is more than good enough, but she is glad for everything we set before her. The chapter in the child manual on finicky eaters does not apply to her: she licks her chops the moment the bib is tied; she digs into her risotto with profound gusto, a spoon in her left hand, grabbing fistfuls of food with her right.

Her delight delights me, and I am down with the summertime blues. Winter lifts me up, and summer drags me down, and always has. A good thunderstorm helps, but then the sun comes out. I used to enjoy playing golf in the summer, but golf is a game that brings out the worst in people, and fishing is a very poor use of time, and basketball is perilous for the older guy. He fights for a rebound and snaps an Achilles tendon and spends six months in a walking cast--I wouldn't even want to be in the cast of The King and I for six months. Risotto is the sport for me. It's easy, it takes an hour, you get a feeling of accomplishment; then you get to sit down and eat.

Last night my daughter woke up at 4 a.m. in high spirits and yelled at us until we took her downstairs to the kitchen. She dug into her toy basket and got out her favorite doll, which laughs when you whack it, a perverse invention indeed. My daughter walked the floor with this doll, as if trying to put it to sleep, and my wife and I sat like a couple of refugees and thought blank thoughts and longed for our bed. And then my wife went upstairs and discovered the bat.

The bat hung from the curtain. I approached it slowly, a plastic bucket in my right hand and an LP record jacket in my left, and scooped it up, toted it outside and released it. My brother-in-law does this with only a pair of gloves, but he is a park ranger and I am an English major and there are metaphors involved. The bat flapped away into the night, looking for a sleepy maiden in a diaphanous nightgown, and when I returned to the house, the other two were upstairs asleep in the big bed. I crawled in alongside and clung to my edge and slept for a few hours and got up and had coffee. My wife thanked me for removing the Evil One. I shrugged. All in a day's work. "I sure wish you'd make risotto again tonight," she said. "You make the best risotto."