I'm Italy Mom and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things I love about gathering with friends and family is the reconnection with

our common language, our shared phrases, our shared stories.

It's such a gift to be with people who you don't need to explain anything to.

My friends Trish and Heather have something we say to each other all the time, and it's simple.

We say, I already know that. And sometimes we mean, yes, we already know that. And sometimes

we mean, I don't know that actual thing, but I know you. And so I sort of already knew that.

It makes us laugh. I already know that.

My grandmother always called my mom my little chicken liver lover. And just yesterday,

I was calling to my dog and said, come hear you little chicken liver lover.

My father and his wife Linda tell this story where they were so tired. He said, I love you

honey. And now they say it all the time to indicate how exhausted they are.

I also love it when the secret intimate languages we make start to evolve and turn into something

much larger or different than how they began. The way language changes and shifts into something

that only two people can fully understand has always moved me.

In today's poem by Yaeli Sawida Camara, we see how a misheard phrase becomes an eternal saying

between a mother and a daughter. Here we see how the magic of language is not always in the right

pronunciation, but in the right feeling behind the words. Be se do by Yaeli Sawida Camara.

While sipping coffee in my mother's Toyota, we hear the bird call of two teenage boys in the

parking lot. I, one says, be se do the other returns as they reach for each other.

Their cupped handshake pops like the first fat firecrackers of summer.

Their fingers shimmy as if they're solving a rubik's cube just beyond our sight.

...