Poco a Poco

Wide aisles of organic food. Slick ribbons of nighttime freeway streaked with lights of fast, silent vehicles. Tooth-brushing right from the faucet. Cold erased by the flip of a switch. Toilets that welcome paper.

Re-entry is jarring. It ties my sharpened awareness of the hard life I don’t have, to a reminder of the things I take for granted.

At SFO, I nearly greeted the buzz-topped blonde dude at migración [Customs] with a buenas noches but, like a lion freed from its cage, I leapt into entire sentences, flawless in their construction and crystalline in meaning.

Turn back the clock 16 hours. This morning I walked to the taller cerí¡mica at the end of my street. On two small, wobbly tables are rows of clay angels and animals and crí¨ches (nacimientos) and purple-robed penitents (cucuruchos). Let me know if there’s something you want, the proprietor said yesterday. I was compelled to point out his deficiency of pigs. A millisecond later, he was crafting a tiny snout. Come back tomorrow morning at 8:00. So I was back. I beheld a dozen new pairs of pig earrings in as many colors. (They’re ten quetzales—$1.20—per pair.) He’d worked on them until 1:00 a.m., and was still finishing up a pig drummer and a dog bassist (20 quetzales each). Come back in half an hour and they’ll be ready.

I hosted a small gathering to say farewell to Maria and the doí±as, serving pan especiale I got at the bakery yesterday: banana bread and chocolate-orange bread.

I departed Guate with enough loot to stock a small tienda. They shouldn’t give passports to people like me.

I also left with $300 in quetzales, insurance that I’ll return someday. There’s still much to be seen. Next time, I want to get at least a level more competent in Spanish. Poco a poco, they all say: learn it little by little. I’m well beyond my prime language-learning years, and who knows how many years I have left to put any new knowledge to use. That’s okay. I’m sure they speak Spanish in Heaven.

Thus closes this chapter.

Adios.