Inside out

We’re in the Zocalo, having a beer and botanas with some friends at one of the outdoor restaurants.  I’m dressed (at the insistence of my school’s principal, and to Ibis’s great amusement) as a China Oaxaqueña, in a flouncy red skirt, soft white blouse, green shawl, braided hair with ribbons—we’ve just come from the Calenda, the parade-cum-dress-rehearsal, for the traditional dance festival some of my students will participate in the next day.  Isaias is dancing up a storm alongside the table, admiring the balloons, and eating spicy peanuts.   

I see the girls—I always see them—the ones in shorts and sport sandals, carrying woven bags stuffed with water bottle, journal, camera.  I was one of them.  And there’s one—there’s always one—in the company of a local boy.  I know they’ve just met, because of the way she watches his lips when he talks, and nods even when I can see in her eyebrows that she hasn’t understood.  Because she’s so obviously exhilarated.  Because I can see her pride when she orders an esquite in Spanish.  I was her.   

There were two local boys.  One became my husband.  One was a bad guy.  I look at this girl, and wonder what’s beginning for her.  I wonder what she would give to be on the inside, to be wearing a flouncy skirt and beribboned braids, to be Nena  to her husband, and Mamita to her child, and Doña Somebody to her neighbors.  I wonder what I would’ve given.  I wonder if I gave it.

As we’re heading back to the car, we run into Rosy, on her way to the late shift at the pharmacy.  She double-takes at my outfit and cries “Qué guapa!  Qué guapa!” as we hug and kiss quickly.  An older woman I don’t know stops me to ask what time the dance festival will be held the next day, and I tell her.  Being on the inside feels good, but not as transcendent as I imagined it would when I was that girl.  Less transcendent, in a way, than being on the outside, and longing. 

And the things I never imagined: running up a perfectly, boringly, familiar street, long skirts swishing, holding my husband’s hand, chasing after our son, and suddenly catching a whiff of the Mexico Smell, whatever it is, or was when I first defined it: Fabuloso cleanser and tacos and exhaust and old buildings and boiled corn.  And instead of exhilarating, it’s comforting: it reminds me that I was onto something, when I was that girl. 

Eight Moments with Guadalupe

1. I first see Oaxaca under a full moon. Ibis, who I’ve known for six hours, is asleep next to me as the bus labors up and over El Cerro del Fortín with an orange moon floating up from behind it.


2. I pull the orange roll of Marías cookies out of my backpack and bite them into halves and crescents, and imagine I’m eating that moon, making it a part of me.

3. I sit in a hot and empty church and pray without thought to the Virgin of Guadalupe, breathing in and out, “You are good, eres buena, you are good.” I know that I will leave. I don’t think I will return. Guadalupe stands on her crescent moon and says nothing.

4. I stand in my empty bedroom in Montana. I’ve just packed my car; in the morning I will drive south. I’m going back to Mexico to marry Ibis; going back to stay. And in the middle of that empty room, something gleams: The Virgin of Guadalupe pendant I wore through all the months of staying away. I haven’t worn it since I traded it for an engagement ring. How can it be there? There it is.

5. One morning on the radio they say that “Mexico” means “in the bellybutton of the moon.” I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes me smile all day. Makes me remember how grateful I am to live in this ridiculous and beautiful and troubled and blessed place.

6. It’s been a hard year. Sometimes I’ve wanted to give up, I’m not going to lie. But when my son and I return to Oaxaca from Christmas in the U.S., it feels like the first time: that sweet. And it doesn’t surprise me at all, as we walk across the tarmac towards the airport and Ibis, to see a perfect Guadalupe moon in the sky: the slenderest of crescents, resting on its curved back.

7. I believe and I don’t believe. Not first one and then the other; I fully believe and fully disbelieve both at the same time. I believe and I don’t believe that coming home on that crescent moon meant that this will be a year of coming into fullness, that this will be the year that Guadalupe’s intentions for our family, in this place, begin to be revealed. And if that’s true because it’s destiny, or true because I’m determined to make it so, I don’t even care.

8. Driving through our pueblo one night after buying a Three Kings cake, my son points to a silver half-moon and says with certainty, “Cayó moon! Cayó moon!” The moon fell, the moon fell. I can’t understand what he means, but maybe? It looks touchable, it looks attainable, that moon. It’s closer to us than it used to be.

Verbs are hard.

“Mamá, wheel broken. Pongo?”


“Quieres que lo* ponga?”

“Ponga. Sí.”

(I put the wheel back on).

“Okay, Birdy, ya lo puse.”

“Puse. Gra-sas.”

(Ten minutes pass.)

“Mamá, wheel broken. Pongo?”

“Ahora ponlo tú.”

“Ponlo?”

“Sí, tú ponlo, Isaias.”

(He puts the wheel back on.)

“Mira, Mamá! Wheel!”

“Ya lo pusiste?”

“Pusiste?”

“Sí, lo pusiste. You put the wheel on!”

. . . . “Poot?”

*Sticklers for Spanish grammer: yes, "wheel" in Spanish is "rueda" or possibly "llanta," both feminine, and thus "la."  All English nouns in Spanglish, however--at least in Alonso-Ponikvarian Spanglish--are masculine: "el wheel," thus "lo".  You're welcome. 

What It Looks Like Here.

In the fall, I miss Missoula. How could I not miss this?

That’s what fall is supposed to look like, isn’t it? Never mind that in well over half of the habited world, it doesn’t.

It doesn’t in Oaxaca. It’s November, and the lime tree in our yard is in full bloom. Here, you could comfortably wear sandals about 350 days a year.

The first year we lived here, I kid you not, I sometimes completely forgot what month it was: no outside indicators of the seasons. It drove me a little crazy. But like most things, it’s really just a matter of paying attention.

I’m trying to plug myself in to what the seasons mean here.

Fall in Oaxaca is the mountains green fading to brown, because the rainy season has ended but not so very long ago.

It's butterflies, orange and black and yellow and white and blue, small and large, floating through an amber afternoon light that makes you sad. 

It’s strong winds, without fail, on October 31, when the departed return for Día de los Muertos.

It's a tiny beige frog crouched on a leaf of the avocado tree I grew from a pit, right outside the office window.  It's tiny beige frogs smushed into the dirt of the road, or hopping across it, invisible until they move. 

It’s cool mornings and warm afternoons with perfectly clear blue skies.

And it’s yellow: marigolds for the dead, and all the yellow wildflowers blooming in fallow fields and vacant lots and along the roadsides.

All that yellow against the green-brown mountains against all that blue, blue sky. It almost reminds me of something. Sometime. Some place.

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?