The Spectrum.

The last time I visited the U.S., I called someone "sir" in English for the first time ever.  

He helped me get my bag down from the overhead compartment, and I said, "Thank you, sir."  It just slipped out.  It was weird.  I'm from California: we address groups of elderly ladies as "you guys."  We call our parents "dude."  We don't say "sir." 

It made me realize how much I've acculturated to my adopted country: the effusive politeness, especially when dealing with an elder, has become second nature.  I don't have the entire script down, yet, though: a real, old-school resident of Tlacochahuaya can draw out a simple "thanks" into a ten-minute exchange. 

It's that way with a lot of things: I'm stuck somewhere in the middle, no longer entirely comfortable in my home culture, but nowhere near being Mexican.  Look!  I made you a poorly formatted chart!

	San Jose	My Little World	Tlacochahuaya
Politeness	Person A: Thanks. Person B: Sure.	Person A: Thank you, sir/ma’am.  Very nice of you.  Person B: It was nothing.	Person A: A thousand thanks, sir/ma'am. Person B:  No, it is I who thank you. Person A: You’re too kind. Person B:  Truly, it was a pleasure.  Etc., etc.
Meat	Eats only pre-packaged, pre-cut, de-boned, and de-skinned meat.  (Or, optionally, vegetarian.)	Eats meat that is clearly part of an animal’s body.  Can look at organ meat without puking.	Chews on the chicken foot, orders brain tacos.
Patience	"I want it yesterday."	"I want it tomorrow.  Or the day after."	"I’d prefer to have it by next Wednesday, but I’d be willing to wait six or seven months.  While standing in line.  In the burning sun."
Technology	iPhone, iPad, iPod, iHouse, iBrain, etc.	$20 cell phone with no camera.  5-year-old digital camera (larger than a pack of cards).	Donkey cart.

The Perils of Fluency.

I was sitting across a desk from an immigration officer the other day (because it’s my favorite time of year: Time To Renew My Immigration Document!).  Happily, the trio of women who made me cry during this process (both last year AND the year before) were gone, but now I was faced with the task of explaining various funky aspects of my immigration status to a new person, all of which boil down to the fact that the good folks in Pachuca, Hidalgo, who originally issued my FM2, messed it up. 

I began, “It’s that the people in Pachuca…” and stopped short, because the ONLY Spanish words that I could come up with to complete that sentence were “me chingaron”—they f***ed me over.  Obviously not something you really want to say to someone who has the power to deport you.        

I started again, “It’s that they…” and came up with “hicieron un desmadre”—untranslatable, but call it “they made a f***ed-up mess.” 

I made one more run at it: “The ones in Pachuca, they…”   There was a long pause while the guy looked at me oddly.  Finally I finished, “They didn’t do it right.”

“Ah,” he said, and continued shuffling through my papers. 

I started paying attention, after that, and realized that, damn, Ibis and I have some filthy mouths on us.  The difference, of course, is that he can come up with non-filthy synonyms when the occasion calls for it (just as I can control my English cursing), but my proper, college student, I’m-reading-the-works-of-Sor-Juana-NOT-in-translation Spanish has gone directly down the tubes in the last few years.   

And, well.  We have an almost-two-year-old child.  One day his four-year-old best-amigo-neighbor was watching Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron with him, and called out to me, “Doña Tere!  Este pinche caballo se pone bien chingón!”  Which we could roughly translate as, “This goddamn horse is a real badass!”  I confess that I laughed.  But I’m pretty sure that if that had come from MY child, I would have felt like a terrible mother.    

Something else to work on.  Yesssss!

Choose.

So I came across this mysterious Word file in a mysterious folder-within-a-folder among the mess of random files and photos and folders scattered across my computer desktop. (Sometimes being pathetically disorganized pays off in unexpected ways.)  I don't remember writing it, though I clearly did at some point in the not-so-distant past.  It was the advice I needed to hear today, though.  And it's advice FROM MYSELF!  So I get to congratulate myself on being terribly sage and compassionate and admonish myself for being a materialistic idiot AT THE SAME TIME! 

No, really.  When my fantasy life starts to run along the lines of "wealthy benefactor treats me to a week alone in some random large American city where I know no one and can stay at a fancy hotel and go to day spas and buy myself anything I want as long as it's JUST FOR ME because those are the terms and I'm not allowed to feel guilty"...well.  That's when I need to hear this:

"Decide to be happy.  Just make the decision.  Stop fantasizing yourself out of your life, even at night, even when you’re sick, even when you’re sick and tired of everything being hard.  Live it.  Choose it again every day, all of it, everyone, every inconvenience and every bowl of beans and every scorpion and every class that goes horribly.  Choose the weariness and the backaches and the wanting to talk to someone in English.  Choose the laundry and the dishes.  Choose the traffic and the bloqueos.  Choose Ibis.  Choose his smile and his problems and everything that’s good and everything that could be better.  Choose your Little Bird, even when he doesn't let you sleep, even when he doesn't let you do ANYTHING for yourself, even eat.  Choose it and be happy.  That’s all." 

Because once I'm reminded, how could do I anything else?

This Is the Twenty-First Century Too, or, Shove it Up Your App

"Macs, iPhones, and iPads aren't 'consumer electronics.'  They're lifestyle essentials...

...helping us get more from travel, fitness, home design, and more...

...so you can explore your passions and keep life simple." 

--text from an ad for the magazine MacLife.  Photos from Pachuca, Hidalgo, and Palestina, Chiapas, in the 21st century.   

Ten Things You Wouldn't Guess About Ibis Based On This Photo



My husband, before he was my husband, circa 2005

 1. That shirt he’s wearing? It’s pink.  (It is, in fact, just one of several predominantly pink shirts he owns, including his beloved Lucky Shirt and the legendary Shirt That Doesn't Even Match Itself.) 


2. He is not now, nor has he ever been, in any way involved with gangs or organized crime.

3. He loves baby animals. Fuzzy puppy dogs and tiny widdle baby chicks and so on.

4. He’s been known to cry.

5. He enjoys a nice cold…glass of milk.

6. If you give him a present--anything, a pair of socks, an ugly-ass stuffed animal, an I-heart-San-Francisco mug--he will treasure it forever because you gave it to him.

7. He’s a Michael Jackson fan.

8. He gets genuinely excited about any and all flowers, fruits, vegetables, and herbs that I manage to grow.

9. He can work the night shift, from 9 pm to 7 am, and then come home and play with the baby for hours, or take us out for breakfast.

10. He was once described by a young friend of ours as “just like The Rock , but softer."  And that was just about right.

One About Doña Charo

In my mother-in-law’s wedding photos, she looks scared, and determined, and too young, and beautiful. She was. She was seventeen, and a long way from the isolated village in Chiapas where she grew up. She had only worn shoes for the first time three years earlier.


She’s the oldest of seven. From the time she learned to walk, she was taking care of babies. There was never enough of anything but tortillas and kids and hard work and good hard trancazos for anyone who didn’t obey. Her father grew corn, and most years, sold the harvest in the city and then spent the profits on prostitutes and liquor. Her mother took in washing and scrubbed till her fingers bled.

She had to leave school after third grade, even though she wanted to study. There wasn’t enough money even to buy her pencils, much less clothes. One of her small brothers wore, for an entire year, nothing but a man’s button-down shirt that hung to his ankles. Her own dresses were lengths of cheap fabric chopped into rough dress shape with a machete. They didn’t own a pair of scissors.

She came to Salina Cruz as a teenager to live with a godmother and learn to be a seamstress. When she met her future husband, she had one question for him: “How many children would you expect your wife to have?” He said “One or two,” so she married him. Ten months after the wedding, she had Ibis; five years later, Patricia. Plenty.

She’s still beautiful, with lips any Revlon model would envy, and a smile so dazzling you don’t notice there’s a tooth missing towards the back until you’ve known her for a long time. There are lines on her face, but they’re lines of sadness and worry and laughter and resignation, not bitterness. She loves her parents, despite everything. She loves her husband, even though she didn’t, when she married him; now they go to prayer group together, and they make each other laugh. She loves her children, and her children-in-law and grandchildren, passionately. She cries more frequently than anyone I know.

Lest I appear to idealize her, let me say that she does, on occasion, drive me crazy. Still, she’s come through years of privation and pain and putting herself last, with her heart in working order—and not all her siblings were able to do that. She’s had to be strong every single day of her life.

She’s pretty amazing.

I Am Releasing Clothes.

I’m pretty sure these little boxers are sporting the highest density of mangled English per square inch of any article of clothing ever produced:

In case you can’t make that out, they say the following (all errors are most definitely theirs and not mine):

I am releasing clothes


The infantile madness


My interior clothes aer very enterteining


I am hungry of drivels


We are enterteining certan?

When I can't sleep at night, I sometimes try to imagine the thought process that arrived at these phrases, and then plastered them all over a tiny pair of underwear.  ("The infantile madness" I suppose could have resulted from typing "crazy kid" in Mandarin into one of those free internet translators...but "I'm hungry of drivels"?) 

Little did Isaias's Abuelita imagine she was purchasing an insomnia cure, as well as crazy cuteness for her papachi's skinny little butt.