Huevos

One of Steve's students provides us with beautiful eggs and we had some pre-packaged polenta and a bag of cilantro we needed to use up, so we made huevos rancheros for dinner tonight.

While I was mixing up the saucy bit, Steve was wandering around the kitchen singing a song about huevos.  Some of the song lyrics he was inventing were making me wonder if he knew his Spanish basics.  "You know huevos are eggs, right?" I asked.

Yes, he does know.  And this is how he learned about huevos:

Several years ago Steve won a travel grant to do research for his PhD in Cuba.  One day in Cuba, he was standing on his balcony and saw a little girl with a basket over her arm.  Every now and then she would call out, "Heuvos!" and look around as if she expected to find something.  When she spotted Steve, she called up to him, "Heuvos?"and gestured toward her basket.

Steve didn't speak any Spanish, but he gathered from her body language that the girl must be looking for something.  And he gathered from the basket that she must be looking for something that would fit in her basket and he determined that this was a child looking for her lost cat.

So he sadly shook his head and called down, "No Heuvos."  Because no, he hadn't seen her cat.