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There is an expression I grew up hearing in my household in Lima: Dios los hace, y ellos se juntan. It translates basically to: God makes them, and they find each other.
I have always loved that saying. It is beautiful to think that the Universe allows like human beings, souls that are meant to be together, to couple with one another throughout a lifetime. Friendships, mothers and daughters, siblings, the person you adored at a chance meeting in a café, the love of your life...
My husband and I say it all the time now - when we see a senior couple wearing the same exact funny socks with the Snoopy as The Red Baron flying on his little dog house, or when we see a group of Dungeons & Dragons dudes with full getup - a flurry of medieval, brown-hued capes in swirled motion - sparring at César Chávez Park in the Berkeley Marina. Those people were meant to be together!
I have a new neighbor friend that I love. When I sit in front of her, chatting, I look at her lovely brown eyes and think to myself that I feel like I have known her an eternity, and yet I am just getting to know her. There is something so familiar and comforting, as if she was family all along: I find notes of the women on the Argentine side of my father's ancestry in the angles of her face; I relate to her way of listening and observing, her gentle mannerism, which reminds me of the steady and powerful women on my mother's Andean side.
For a BBQ we were attending last summer, she planned this gorgeous guacamole. Being half Mexican, it is no joke or small matter to make this dish: there is pride and love in what she did. I thought of the care with which she asked me beforehand what ingredients, which she was planning to use, I could stomach. These were days in which my newly-diagnosed-with-Achalasia, sad and tentative little belly was just grateful for any food that would be digestible, none taken for granted anymore as being simple enough not to cause the uncomfortable spasms of the illness. "Tomato OK?" At each turn, she would ask, all the while referring to my stomach as ‘tu pancita’ (and you already know how sweetly and strongly we Latinos feel about our diminutives - Week 23).
Just the asking was the essence of it - that someone would care so much about me, only having known me for a brief time.
It was such a good day, laughing and listening to her stories and ideas and those of others that Life has put in front of me - souls that shine forth so greatly. I realize we are constantly searching for light in our days, navigating through the hectic, the messy and the sometimes disappointing in our society, trying to survive this massive game of Frogger without getting whacked off our lily pads by a jarring moment: the freaking discovery of one's belonging stolen and gone; getting fully bulldozered and deflated by the über-toxic, military-stomp, nasty lady at the DMV.
But only 33 feet away from Über-Toxic Scary Lady sits Laverne. Her simple work desk just a cookie-cutter cubicle that you could find in any plastic-laminate-laden office landscape. She has transformed it into a friendly shrine of pinks and fuchsias and rosy tones, dozens of tchotchkes dedicated to all things positive - homages to Cancer research, and awareness for the cause. On her lapel she wears a pink ribbon pin that reads, "Survivor" - not shyly bathed in lots of white and strawberry colored rhinestones for her extra bling wow. What must she have been through in her maybe 50, 60 years? And looking at her adorable makeup with the wide band of shimmery lavender eye shadow on her lids, you start to glimpse the joy with which she must approach her everydays. She is certainly making lemonade with whatever plentiful harvest of lemons Life has given her.
In 5 minutes, Laverne is able to humanly and sweetly help with the nuts-and-bolts DMV issue at hand, but do so much more: she is able to unmuck the barren wasteland of a mess of your psyche left behind by someone else having a rampage-of-rampagiest, gotta-spread-the-misery bad, bad day. Her glow will reset you: Ctrl-Alt-Delete your temporarily frazzled brain and heart.
So just keep looking. Somewhere within your reach is a magnificent soul emanating all the lightness you need to recover, recharge and be more than whole again. That person, those people, already exist. There is solace in knowing that we are one another's light sources.
And who knows? You may be put there one day, just in the perfect time and place to help an 80-year-old as she falls at you local bank. You, the only person extending an embrace and a 'let's get you to a chair' while a frozen teller is still working out in that fraction of a second what her employee manual says to do in that situation. In that moment, your instincts will allow you to be that elderly woman's sole nexus to the comforting and the familiar. This quick-thinking 28-year old from Miami, stepping up with lots of soul to give, will trump any formalized notion of how to proceed in an emergency.
And it is within you. It is within all of us. We can be someone’s Laverne.
We've got each other's backs.
“Cielito Lindo” – performed by Miguel Aceves-Meja
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMfnySHCj28
I have always loved that saying. It is beautiful to think that the Universe allows like human beings, souls that are meant to be together, to couple with one another throughout a lifetime. Friendships, mothers and daughters, siblings, the person you adored at a chance meeting in a café, the love of your life...
My husband and I say it all the time now - when we see a senior couple wearing the same exact funny socks with the Snoopy as The Red Baron flying on his little dog house, or when we see a group of Dungeons & Dragons dudes with full getup - a flurry of medieval, brown-hued capes in swirled motion - sparring at César Chávez Park in the Berkeley Marina. Those people were meant to be together!
I have a new neighbor friend that I love. When I sit in front of her, chatting, I look at her lovely brown eyes and think to myself that I feel like I have known her an eternity, and yet I am just getting to know her. There is something so familiar and comforting, as if she was family all along: I find notes of the women on the Argentine side of my father's ancestry in the angles of her face; I relate to her way of listening and observing, her gentle mannerism, which reminds me of the steady and powerful women on my mother's Andean side.
For a BBQ we were attending last summer, she planned this gorgeous guacamole. Being half Mexican, it is no joke or small matter to make this dish: there is pride and love in what she did. I thought of the care with which she asked me beforehand what ingredients, which she was planning to use, I could stomach. These were days in which my newly-diagnosed-with-Achalasia, sad and tentative little belly was just grateful for any food that would be digestible, none taken for granted anymore as being simple enough not to cause the uncomfortable spasms of the illness. "Tomato OK?" At each turn, she would ask, all the while referring to my stomach as ‘tu pancita’ (and you already know how sweetly and strongly we Latinos feel about our diminutives - Week 23).
Just the asking was the essence of it - that someone would care so much about me, only having known me for a brief time.
It was such a good day, laughing and listening to her stories and ideas and those of others that Life has put in front of me - souls that shine forth so greatly. I realize we are constantly searching for light in our days, navigating through the hectic, the messy and the sometimes disappointing in our society, trying to survive this massive game of Frogger without getting whacked off our lily pads by a jarring moment: the freaking discovery of one's belonging stolen and gone; getting fully bulldozered and deflated by the über-toxic, military-stomp, nasty lady at the DMV.
But only 33 feet away from Über-Toxic Scary Lady sits Laverne. Her simple work desk just a cookie-cutter cubicle that you could find in any plastic-laminate-laden office landscape. She has transformed it into a friendly shrine of pinks and fuchsias and rosy tones, dozens of tchotchkes dedicated to all things positive - homages to Cancer research, and awareness for the cause. On her lapel she wears a pink ribbon pin that reads, "Survivor" - not shyly bathed in lots of white and strawberry colored rhinestones for her extra bling wow. What must she have been through in her maybe 50, 60 years? And looking at her adorable makeup with the wide band of shimmery lavender eye shadow on her lids, you start to glimpse the joy with which she must approach her everydays. She is certainly making lemonade with whatever plentiful harvest of lemons Life has given her.
In 5 minutes, Laverne is able to humanly and sweetly help with the nuts-and-bolts DMV issue at hand, but do so much more: she is able to unmuck the barren wasteland of a mess of your psyche left behind by someone else having a rampage-of-rampagiest, gotta-spread-the-misery bad, bad day. Her glow will reset you: Ctrl-Alt-Delete your temporarily frazzled brain and heart.
So just keep looking. Somewhere within your reach is a magnificent soul emanating all the lightness you need to recover, recharge and be more than whole again. That person, those people, already exist. There is solace in knowing that we are one another's light sources.
And who knows? You may be put there one day, just in the perfect time and place to help an 80-year-old as she falls at you local bank. You, the only person extending an embrace and a 'let's get you to a chair' while a frozen teller is still working out in that fraction of a second what her employee manual says to do in that situation. In that moment, your instincts will allow you to be that elderly woman's sole nexus to the comforting and the familiar. This quick-thinking 28-year old from Miami, stepping up with lots of soul to give, will trump any formalized notion of how to proceed in an emergency.
And it is within you. It is within all of us. We can be someone’s Laverne.
We've got each other's backs.
“Cielito Lindo” – performed by Miguel Aceves-Meja
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMfnySHCj28