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Lately, I have been obsessing about the concept of being up at the front of the line. What is that movie that talks about wanting the job with the least responsibility possible? I don’t know. My life some days seems like a long chain of movie-to-TV-to-movie quotes. When I am 70, I wonder if the few originals I coined in my lifetime, that amused me and made me proud, will get lost among the works of other writers, jumbled up in the salad spinner of my mind.
I am still so immature at 45 and feeling the inexorable, forced duty of being up at the front of the line.
It’s your turn. You’re up.
Two weeks ago my daughter got really sick. Lots of coughing and sneezing were followed by a long drawn out bout of bronchitis. Four days after the first onset of her illness, I – the noble, stoic caregiver – came down with the same symptoms, and all I could do was drag myself to the nearest soft surface and engulf myself amid a comforter. This time, the illness hit me hard, but surprisingly, as much emotionally as physically. There were still pots of water to be boiled for tea, dinners to be coordinated, bare minimum cleaning (to just keep from needing FEMA to declare us a disaster zone) to be done. Sure, Jimmy did a lot of work although he was also sick, but some nights he would sleep through her incessant coughing and I would lie in bed thinking: “ok. If she coughs again in the next minute, I will go steep some Throat Coat and get the menthol for her chest.” It reminded me of the months after she was born, when she would wake up crying for a feeding in the middle of the night. Maybe if I lay here really still for just a couple of seconds longer, Jimmy will hear her and wake up to prepare her bottle. Maybe just tonight, I won’t have to be up. Turns out, Jimmy is well meaning, but also a heck of a sound sleeper.
Lying around feeling sick last week, all I could think about was lack of responsibility. The luscious luxury of not being accountable or responsible and having someone take care of me – having someone coordinating everything around me, despite my presence.
When I get really sick, I immediately revert to those memories of being taken care of so well. This care was embodied in one person: Hila. She was the woman whose role throughout my life I have had a hard time describing. I say the extended “she was the woman who helped my mom raise us” (us, being my three siblings and me) or sometimes I say, “She was like my second mom.” The truth is, she was my mother and equal to my mom in every way. On days like those, in my dreamlike childhood in Lima, I would stay home from school and I would hear Hila’s cleaning busy work echoing from different parts of the household. Metal clanking on metal. Must be the pot-scrubbing in the kitchen downstairs. Wood on wood: whack! A broomstick just slipped and hit the parquet flooring. The smell of Johnson’s Wax that I remember came in these great, clear plastic pillow-shaped packages. Just cut a corner off and dispense. And the ubiquitous Pine Sol smell. That whole country was fueled by Pine Sol. From restaurants to houses to school bathrooms, it was everywhere. Maybe some places have soundtracks or unforgettable visual and tactile memories. Well, in my youth, Perú’s signature fragrance was Pine Sol.
The sounds of cleaning and activity wafting through the house helped soothe me on those days. Even today, when I get sick, I like to sit in the tidiest room available or even get the strength to pick myself up and clean a room, if needed. Even at times when something traumatic has taken place – when our little house was ransacked for money and small electronics for example – my first instinct was to clean, wipe, organize. There is a lot to be said about that. The care of spraying furniture and rubbing the dust rag through surfaces where the police department had left the telltale black smudges of dusting for fingerprints is a bit of a spiritual cleansing: Simple Green acting as the antimicrobial version of sage.
But Hila did a lot more than cleaning to make me feel whole. Her name, appropriately, was only a nickname for her formal name, Eladia. Her name was Eladia Espíritu. It is so beautiful to even write it, type it now. Espíritu. Perfection. She was sweet and Andean, truly Andean. With her motherhood of us came the quiet and lovely feeling of the mountain lands and of Perú’s past - stories of natural disasters, ghosts, hexes and obligatory confrontations with the devil. Until the time I came to the U.S. as a young girl, I thought everybody’s grandparents had, at one point or another, had a showdown in their cellar late one night when the devil had asked them to go away with him, but they had remained strong and won the battle of wills against him. It seemed that any honest and good person would have to do this in their lifetimes, because of the mere fact that they were honest and good - a sort of hazing provided by the Universe. Hila said this had happened to my grandfather. I believed it so strongly (past tense?) that I feel like I was there. I have crafted the room and the amount of darkness in it, down to the feel of the rough wood handrail leading down the stairs.
Her stories of hexes that people placed upon others in the mountain town of Huaraz were just as vivid. It seemed that any dispute or dislike between neighbors was solved by crafting a hex bulto (a bundle). Hila said that one of the most obvious ingredients was a bit of the enemy’s hair. So, when we were little she always warned us to be careful and burn our hair after cleaning it off the hairbrush, and not just throw it away. Even to this day, I am a little queasy when I ball up the unwanted hair and discard it in the little trash bin.
But now there is no Hila and there is no Mamá Virginia to see me through when I fall. Maybe I have to conjure them up in spirit and maybe, if I am good and quiet of mind chatter enough, I will feel their strength, richer and closer than ever. I miss those women though, my beautiful Hila and my beautiful mom. I miss their arms around me and the cool, soft caresses on my forehead.
Since my mom passed away, I have that feeling of being up next at the front of the line. There is a difficult, unwelcome learning process in realizing that there is no older generation to rely upon. We are it. We are the parents. We are the generation. And I wonder... did my grandma, my mom, and aunts and uncles ever feel like that? From my young perspective, they moved with ease in all their grand adulthood - teaching us, telling family folklore, nurturing us, cooking treasured recipes, and being perfectly strict when needed. Who experienced growing pains? Who was catapulted to the front of the line before their ripeness was reached?
Six months after my mom had been gone, it was Christmastime. And regardless of the turmoil and rudderlessness, I…my brother Julio…the surviving generation…did what we had to: we made the traditional Peruvian Christmas Tamales. Laborious and wonderful and, without discussing it out loud, knowingly necessary to our family’s continuation. We have been making them every year – ever since.
I shake my head and then a little shudder: maybe someone feels that way about me. Maybe I am someone’s comfort, someone’s order, someone’s hearth.
And here I am, at the front of the line.
edited from the original written on October 1, 2009
I am still so immature at 45 and feeling the inexorable, forced duty of being up at the front of the line.
It’s your turn. You’re up.
Two weeks ago my daughter got really sick. Lots of coughing and sneezing were followed by a long drawn out bout of bronchitis. Four days after the first onset of her illness, I – the noble, stoic caregiver – came down with the same symptoms, and all I could do was drag myself to the nearest soft surface and engulf myself amid a comforter. This time, the illness hit me hard, but surprisingly, as much emotionally as physically. There were still pots of water to be boiled for tea, dinners to be coordinated, bare minimum cleaning (to just keep from needing FEMA to declare us a disaster zone) to be done. Sure, Jimmy did a lot of work although he was also sick, but some nights he would sleep through her incessant coughing and I would lie in bed thinking: “ok. If she coughs again in the next minute, I will go steep some Throat Coat and get the menthol for her chest.” It reminded me of the months after she was born, when she would wake up crying for a feeding in the middle of the night. Maybe if I lay here really still for just a couple of seconds longer, Jimmy will hear her and wake up to prepare her bottle. Maybe just tonight, I won’t have to be up. Turns out, Jimmy is well meaning, but also a heck of a sound sleeper.
Lying around feeling sick last week, all I could think about was lack of responsibility. The luscious luxury of not being accountable or responsible and having someone take care of me – having someone coordinating everything around me, despite my presence.
When I get really sick, I immediately revert to those memories of being taken care of so well. This care was embodied in one person: Hila. She was the woman whose role throughout my life I have had a hard time describing. I say the extended “she was the woman who helped my mom raise us” (us, being my three siblings and me) or sometimes I say, “She was like my second mom.” The truth is, she was my mother and equal to my mom in every way. On days like those, in my dreamlike childhood in Lima, I would stay home from school and I would hear Hila’s cleaning busy work echoing from different parts of the household. Metal clanking on metal. Must be the pot-scrubbing in the kitchen downstairs. Wood on wood: whack! A broomstick just slipped and hit the parquet flooring. The smell of Johnson’s Wax that I remember came in these great, clear plastic pillow-shaped packages. Just cut a corner off and dispense. And the ubiquitous Pine Sol smell. That whole country was fueled by Pine Sol. From restaurants to houses to school bathrooms, it was everywhere. Maybe some places have soundtracks or unforgettable visual and tactile memories. Well, in my youth, Perú’s signature fragrance was Pine Sol.
The sounds of cleaning and activity wafting through the house helped soothe me on those days. Even today, when I get sick, I like to sit in the tidiest room available or even get the strength to pick myself up and clean a room, if needed. Even at times when something traumatic has taken place – when our little house was ransacked for money and small electronics for example – my first instinct was to clean, wipe, organize. There is a lot to be said about that. The care of spraying furniture and rubbing the dust rag through surfaces where the police department had left the telltale black smudges of dusting for fingerprints is a bit of a spiritual cleansing: Simple Green acting as the antimicrobial version of sage.
But Hila did a lot more than cleaning to make me feel whole. Her name, appropriately, was only a nickname for her formal name, Eladia. Her name was Eladia Espíritu. It is so beautiful to even write it, type it now. Espíritu. Perfection. She was sweet and Andean, truly Andean. With her motherhood of us came the quiet and lovely feeling of the mountain lands and of Perú’s past - stories of natural disasters, ghosts, hexes and obligatory confrontations with the devil. Until the time I came to the U.S. as a young girl, I thought everybody’s grandparents had, at one point or another, had a showdown in their cellar late one night when the devil had asked them to go away with him, but they had remained strong and won the battle of wills against him. It seemed that any honest and good person would have to do this in their lifetimes, because of the mere fact that they were honest and good - a sort of hazing provided by the Universe. Hila said this had happened to my grandfather. I believed it so strongly (past tense?) that I feel like I was there. I have crafted the room and the amount of darkness in it, down to the feel of the rough wood handrail leading down the stairs.
Her stories of hexes that people placed upon others in the mountain town of Huaraz were just as vivid. It seemed that any dispute or dislike between neighbors was solved by crafting a hex bulto (a bundle). Hila said that one of the most obvious ingredients was a bit of the enemy’s hair. So, when we were little she always warned us to be careful and burn our hair after cleaning it off the hairbrush, and not just throw it away. Even to this day, I am a little queasy when I ball up the unwanted hair and discard it in the little trash bin.
But now there is no Hila and there is no Mamá Virginia to see me through when I fall. Maybe I have to conjure them up in spirit and maybe, if I am good and quiet of mind chatter enough, I will feel their strength, richer and closer than ever. I miss those women though, my beautiful Hila and my beautiful mom. I miss their arms around me and the cool, soft caresses on my forehead.
Since my mom passed away, I have that feeling of being up next at the front of the line. There is a difficult, unwelcome learning process in realizing that there is no older generation to rely upon. We are it. We are the parents. We are the generation. And I wonder... did my grandma, my mom, and aunts and uncles ever feel like that? From my young perspective, they moved with ease in all their grand adulthood - teaching us, telling family folklore, nurturing us, cooking treasured recipes, and being perfectly strict when needed. Who experienced growing pains? Who was catapulted to the front of the line before their ripeness was reached?
Six months after my mom had been gone, it was Christmastime. And regardless of the turmoil and rudderlessness, I…my brother Julio…the surviving generation…did what we had to: we made the traditional Peruvian Christmas Tamales. Laborious and wonderful and, without discussing it out loud, knowingly necessary to our family’s continuation. We have been making them every year – ever since.
I shake my head and then a little shudder: maybe someone feels that way about me. Maybe I am someone’s comfort, someone’s order, someone’s hearth.
And here I am, at the front of the line.
edited from the original written on October 1, 2009
Song dedication: A Peruvian Classic
"La Flor De La Canela" by Chabuca Granda
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KisngEru6sQ
"La Flor De La Canela" by Chabuca Granda
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KisngEru6sQ