Today would have been my friend Ellen’s birthday. She would have been 79 years old. Had she been alive, had I died instead, I would be almost 34 years old and somehow it would have seemed less of a practical joke the universe played on both of us. I welcome it, this dance with death she left me to grapple with for the rest of my life, every year as I think on how fleeting life is when we love the people we love and when they love us back. I leave you with a poem from her partner, Rosemary Hyde, who I love as dearly as Ellen:
Birthday Thought to Ellen Jan 26 2011
Tomorrow would have been your birthday.
Web reminders say that I should send a card;
I wonder how to do that from this earth to where you are.
So here’s my birthday card to you, my Love –
An imagined nosegay:
I’m picturing it fresh and pure and white,
With smell so sweet;
Each flower is a precious moment
That we spent together;
Reminder of our songs, our laughter, even tears we shed —
All more special in the love we shared.
I tell you now, again,
How very glad I am that you were born.
I run to stand still. I pray the bus will be late, but knowing the driver, I lock up the house fast, head on into the sun and unabashed blue sky – my only witness to my lateness. I speed up and run when the hand lights up red. The sun is beaming and suddenly I feel fully in my body, but there is no time to waste and so heel to toe I arrive at the underpass before my bus stop and see the pink wreath of flowers, candles and pictures at the foot of the Martin Luther King, Jr. mural under 580. I stop and think of these words:
“Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”
I stood there and felt it in every pore.
I want to be at this end holding fast to the present and welcoming each passing moment, facing that music and dancing with the fleeting moment, instead of ignoring it, repressing it, or letting it go unnoticed.
On the first day of the year, I had enough of waiting and “No”. It was coming from within and it just was’t working for me. I also knew the hardest thing about saying yes to the universe meant accepting everything life puts in front of me. “Most of us have a habit of going through our days saying no to the things we don’t like and yes to the things we do, and yet, everything we encounter is our life. We may be afraid that if we say yes to the things we don’t like, we will be stuck with them forever, but really, it is only through acknowledging the existence of what’s not working for us that we can begin the process of change. So saying yes doesn’t mean indiscriminately accepting things that don’t work for us. It means conversing with the universe, and starting the conversation with a very powerful word — yes.” – DailyOm
It’s the conversation I longed for and it just needed me to welcome it now and not tomorrow or the next day. Time is relentless and the sunsets remind us so with that painful beauty of passing.
If you saw it coming, then why did you do it? Why did you wait? The four boxes of pizza fell from heaven, slipped right through your fingers while you pecked on your phone, it, too, tumbling to the ground along with your slice half-eaten, the grease making a profile against the brown bag crumpled at the top from your clutching. The whole thing just rolled into a corner and it was the first thing you reached for as the phone and the boxes flew in different directions. Things slid in their place, except for one slice that fell unprotected out of the box and onto the dirty, cracked pavement by the bus stop where everyone walks and no one notices. You looked around and quickly tucked the piece back into its place before the fall broke its perfection.
“I knew that would happen!” you said when you noticed I rushed to help you up. We had five-seconds to pick up the pieces. I didn’t want anyone to see your shame and the confusion of how things so quickly just fall apart.
It’s this contact state of balancing moment for moment, atoms crashing into each other, colliding, colluding, bouncing and returning to freer states. Perhaps they are the molecular angels of grace and gentle encouragement that things cannot perfect. They can just be as they are, in their true and present state.
Is it possible that a dream can slip and fade away? Like fortune and the winged ankles of Hermes is it something that needs to be grasped on its way in and not on its way out?
The sun and blue skies of the San Francisco Bay welcomed us to the New Year where we still find ourselves in a “holding pattern,” waiting for our next step. “Recuerdate, mija, que Dios dice, “ayudate que te ayudare”. Help yourself and I will help you. It’s good we kept our home in Oakland for incremental weathering of storms and transitional periods. It’s been our life raft, our vessel of sanity, that unlike planes in the air, has provided us a harbor where we can still have some will over our destiny. Planes in the air, hover, run dry and eventually must land regardless of the terrain.
Can a dream drift and float away? Can you watch it fade away with the passing of each day and then suddenly one waking moment notice its distance like the spec of dust on the outside of that bus — the same bus you take to work each day and look out into the now gray horizon of winter where sea meets land and sky? At what point did you go from “holding pattern” into “passing pattern”? How can you tell the difference when you’re in between? Fear and anxiety grip your insides and your next breath is like the shutting of a door. I think of “The Great Gatsby” and America rising from the ocean to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and that mysterious green light. Lucecitas.
We power the dimming of our lights, illuminating our own paths. Just sometimes the mire of obstacles makes the dock look much longer than I imagine it is. One foot in front of the other, one breath after the next.
I have this paranoia of missing the bus. It’s more a fear of being left behind to be honest. It’s not something I experience when I’m driving anywhere, late and harried, and somehow my fear of missing something at the other end kicks in. Of course, the show can’t start without me, so that mitigates any anxiety. As a result I’m always early for the bus, super early, like half and hour early sometimes.
I bask in the sun of the bus stop eating my lunch early and show up at work much earlier than required. It’s a small thing really, a tiny crevice of a thing that leads me head first into that first feeling of being left behind as a child. The first feeling of my mother leaving Guatemala, leaving her mother, her country, her home and leaving me. Leaving to find another life for herself, for perhaps us, somewhere so far way past the horizon and the silohuette of the shacks lined up against the steep hills of Zone Three’s grime, bracken, a place we called La Limonada where you make lemonade out of limes. It’s hard for a child to imagine deserts, endless blue of sky, terrains that linger in the back of that dream as you waken in the morning. I take a breath and am transported back, to easing into waiting, into trusting.
“The same laws that govern the growth of plants oversee our own internal and external changes. We observe, consider, work, and wonder, tilling the soil of our lives, planting seeds, and tending them. Sometimes the hard part is knowing when to stop and let go, handing it over to the universe. Usually this happens by way of distraction or disruption, our attention being called away to other more pressing concerns. And it is often at these times, when we are not looking, in the silence of nature’s embrace, that the miracle of change happens.” –DailyOM
I see the NL bus which takes me across the Bay and this time, just once, I decide to wait for the next one.
The irony isn’t lost on me. I now do temporary work for a company that makes bridges. “Good afternoon, T.Y. Lin. One moment, I’ll connect you.”
T.Y. Lin is a civil and structural engineering firm that did the engineering behind the Rio Dulce bridge, overseen by Chuck Simon who personally flew down to Guatemala when a crack was reported in the bridge. He was met with helicopters and flown out to Rio Dulce. The bridge still stands and it’s the landmark of the Department of Izabal where I was born and where my grandmother’s mother lived, near Gualán. I couldn’t have chosen better, except I trusted the world to do it for me. Here, put me where you will.
I now connect people all day. Phones rings, the elevator door slides open, someones laughs at their desk, the small fan hums and in each office an engineer pores over formulas, blueprints and simulations on computer screens. Heels click on the cement floors and walk past me, and I sit in the middle of this orchestra of activity. It’s comforting, it reminds me of an old place I know well.
In the great symphony of life, we all have important parts to play. While some people are best suited to be conductors or soloists, their contributions would be diminished considerably without the individual musicians that lend their artistry to the fullness of an orchestra… When we can be fully present in every job that we do, we bring the fullness of our bodies, minds and spirits to the moment. Our contribution is enhanced by the infusion of our talents and abilities, and when we give them willingly, they attract the right people and circumstances into our experience. –Daily Om
To connect people you have to come from a place of peace, to not only have it between the moments, but to be in the moment of that peace that is the underlying fabric. We know it’s there when the quiet sinks in, when we listen. In the quite lobby where my desk sits I learn to listen again, to experience time at a pace more granular and tangible than anything I’m used to or a context I’ve created around myself.
I remind myself I am temporary here and just smile at everyone that passes. But they stop and they make a point of learning my name, get to know me, ask me questions about my background. “Oh, you graduated from our alma mater!” “I have a good friend going to Guatemala for the first time, what do you recommend?” “How did we find YOU?” “Get out, you’re a journalist?!”
Engineers are quiet and pensive and waiting for social moments to reduce the awkwardness. I am “here to help with the transition” because their chief office manager, the Peruvian Carmen, is retiring after 50 years with the firm. On her last day, I help her clean her desk because she can’t bare to do it alone. I tell her I will be her hands and she can guide me. I am mindful, I am respectful. 50 years is a long time, it shows loyalty I’m not sure I have for anything. At least not yet. El tiempo lo dirá.
While delivering the mail Carmen introduces to the head Jefe in an office that sits right below the SF Bay Bridge. “Sit young lady, sit.” He is from Prague, tall, steel-gray features and lively eyes. He asks me:”What is the single biggest problem we have today?”
I answer immediately: “We don’t know how to tell stories, sir.”
He smiles, it is what he wanted to hear. He tells me about his stint in engineering school in Prague and how they didn’t have the option to learn writing. It was all numbers, courses like hard walls. He stares out beyond the bridge. Then turns back.
“All these kids typing on their cellphones, adults using Facebook who can’t even talk to each other, people and their emails. We can’t tell stories anymore, we’re always making these grocery lists of our lives to others!” He turns to me.
“Young lady, do you know how to edit? Can you write a good letter?”
“The best, sir.” Perhaps I should have been humbler. But I feel proud of myself because yesterday I wrote the best letter contesting my $100 parking ticket for parking in my own driveway.
“We’re not talking creative fiction, we’re talking using facts to tell a story.”
“Yes sir, I’m a journalist, that’s my job.”
He listens, his face somewhere between curiosity and suspicion. He comes from Eastern Europe, I need to give him a reason to trust me.
“I met a Guatemalan engineer when I first moved to Philadelphia. He was a very good engineer. He talked about his country all the time, not always good, but he told me this: ‘love your country, it is your root.'”
In two weeks, he told me, he would be back from vacation, and he would see how my letter writing fared. Will you be here in two weeks, he asked. I said, “I don’t know, does anyone?” He smiled and shook my hand.
I think of a song I grew up with that my mom would play on our beaten up boombox. “Yo No Olvido El Año Viejo” I don’t forget the old year, because it has left me many good things. It has not left me, it has carried me to a place of peace I had all along. I am grateful for all the people who have been that bridge for me, bending their backs to provide love, support and inspiration.
Today I hit the pavements of San Francisco as the sun refused to turn up from the gray blankets. I wound my multi-colored cotton Guatemalan scarf that really doesn’t do much to fend off the cold around my neck and braced for the four temp and staffing agencies where I would be dropping off my resume. “Looking for work should never shame you,” my mother’s internalized voice reminded me. “You should always be grateful for work, no matter what it is.”
I put on the poker face of over-politeness and do it the Guatemalan way: I drop in. I wanted to give a face to a name and to be honest, to make it past the all-purpose inbox of death where all resumes go during the horror of economic downturns that we have in California. Worse comes to worse they ask me where I lived and worked last year, I tell them Guatemala and they have no idea where Guatemala is; it happens, at least once a day.
I enter nameless impressive buildings where the building numbers could kill you if they fell off the entrance during an earthquake. My neck creaks when I try to separate the sky from the glass and steel and I feel like La India Maria when I get freaked out by how quickly the glass doors rotate. I have a backpack, I don’t wear make-up and my bangs are in that awkward faze where it looks like I haven’t used a brush in weeks. The manila folder in my hand isn’t even labeled. Floor 8, take a breath.
“Hi, Mrs. Sculley, I was in the neighborhood and just wanted to introduce myself, drop off my resume and inquire about meeting with a recruiter. Will that be possible?” Not even a smile. “Didn’t you submit via email? That’s how everyone does it.” I tell her I wanted to meet them all because they had such glowing reviews on Yelp. She’s not impressed. She goes back to typing on her MacBook Pro, but I’m not going away. “Mrs. Sculley, I promise to stop bothering you and email you my resume if you provide me with your direct email.” I raise my hand and cross my heart and stand with perfect posture. Her face softens. She gives me her card. I thank her. Score. Another four to go.
Back on the street as I swim with the rest of the Montgomery Street fish I wonder why no one will hire fine young entrepreneurs like myself with resumes that are four pages long because they are full of white space to make us look important and over-qualified. We fit great ideas in all that white space. Glowing I tell you. Bah, who wants an entrepreneur, it’s trouble I tell you. I have one month to go before I start another fellowship or maybe not. Money in the hand is never money until it’s in your hand. Another Silvia saying. I am warmed up now and ready for 345 California, 14th Floor, eh, the whole floor is Innovations PSI. The glass doors are wide open and just beyond I can see the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s no receptionist and they have perfectly round mints and the latest Consumer Reports “Top Ten Mobile Tricks” issue. I have to find a way to stay in the lobby and wait for five minutes, if only to enjoy the mint while flipping through the magazine. I sit on the plush lavender-colored designer couch.
The receptionist smiles as she enters, she is being nice for some reason, when she asks me to wait while she finds a recruiter. Mr. Kurt comes out. He tells me he has to go to a meeting in ten minutes. I hand over my resume, he goes through all the pages. “All this is your resume?” I tell him I’m a creative writer. He hands it back like I just gave him a fake dollar bill. “I don’t want it,” he says bluntly. “Is it because I’m killing trees?” I retort. “No, it’s not searchable.” I can solve that, I tell him, I can send him a PDF and Word doc ASAP once he gives me his direct email. He smiles, “Please.” He informs me they only have “Admin work”. I tell him I know how to use a typewriter and that I even typed 70 words per minute on one manual typewriter with no whiteout or return button in a bunker finance building in Guatemala City two months ago. He puts his hands in his pockets and pulls out his business card. He looks at his watch. Time to go. I think I’ve tied on this one.
The going down is always easier. The elevator drops me back to earth and the cold breeze suddenly hits my chest when I open the door. Why can’t journalists have their own recruiting agencies? Maybe I should make coffee instead? I’m sick of writing grants. Yes, I will use a typewriter for money. Maybe I can dance for the next month? Sell lemonade? Better start finding the lemons before someone else does.
There were two things I quickly learned not to do in my first year living in the United States: not go around telling people how much you loved them and, even worse, telling their secrets to other people. For both you gained a reputation that preceded you as someone “loose” with things that should be held close and away from prying eyes and deaf ears. I remember both moments well because both involved learning discretion and being able to discriminate what information should be revealed in what context. I also remembered the feeling when the nuns of St.Mary’s Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania pulled me to a corner, dragged along by my skinny arm and into the dark area right behind the confession booth.
“The Lord teaches us to be humble with all things,” she whispered it close to my ear and then wagged their finger slowly in my face, “and to not do or say unto others as you would not have done or said unto you.” Even if it’s true? I asked. “It doesn’t matter, it’s none of your business child.”
In journalism school I learned truth is not a defense for libel, in fact, it can actually create more grounds for emotional damage and distress and cost you quite a bit in cases where the person is not a public figure. I visualize how an onion thickens and how we only focus on the peeling back. I think of the 300-year -old Sequoias in King’s Canyon and the jaggedness of some rings inside their trunks sometimes signaling periods of great distress and then harmony. The layers form, protect, harden, become foundation and protect the vitality from within by keeping a relationship outside of itself.
I didn’t know it then, but when the nun whispered it in my ear, I lost something. I became self-conscious of everything, the conversations, the constant filtering, “Christ Freeze Tag” became a lie. I listened more and talked less. The context was always changing and I struggled to grasp it. I was less witty for it and people blamed it on the fact that I was an immigrant and didn’t know English well. “She’s slow, she’s just like that.” Perhaps I had become shy or introverted or I rolled backward into myself. It wasn’t an overnight change, but when Sister Mary Catherine whispered it in my ear it wasn’t her words I heard, but this: it’s time to let go of child-like ways.
It was the end of a certain openness and faith I had in the world as a playground of emotion and thought. Information could be dangerous, it could “do unto others” if I was heedless, if I stopped paying attention or was too much with the world. It could do unto others what I had never expected it do unto them because the world, as my mother later informed me, was a constant negotiation for information and for your own truth.
When Joan Kiley and I had a heated discussion this afternoon, I realized that I felt the same sadness around Wikileaks that I had felt that day when I stopped trusting something and then felt the responsibility of creating my own meaning at every moment.
The message remains the same, regardless of the messenger. Whether it’s Wikileaks or anything that involves openness and honesty, it’s about a broader context and about the worlds we want to live in, fight and take responsibility for. It’s about equality and respect and it’s the reason I work in Central America. And so I thank Joan for that discussion and for her poem which I share with you:
Advent 2010: What are we waiting for?
Will we get new light this time around?
Will the sun really return?
Or has it, too, been co-opted by corporate interests
and the wealthiest two percent?
I don’t want to give up
on Nature’s cyclic rhythm.
It is archetypal after all.
But in this dark night
of our nation’s soul
there are moments when the idea of hoarding
matches and candles in a remote cave
seems like a reasonable notion.
Seeds.
Remember the seeds
waiting in the cold
resting in the dark.
Their time will come.
It’s a matter of trust.
Given that the survival rate of the genetically modified
and manipulated is likely far greater
than those bare-naked “natural” little gems,
where do I send my energy of hope
my prayers for new world creative collaboration?
Truth. I shall trust in truth.
Truth may be covered in slime,
living at the bottom of all the moving boxes
the last to be unpacked when the transition
has been made. But truth weathers well,
doesn’t rot or succumb to mildew.
Like an acorn on the dank forest floor
there is an unseen mightiness
about truth, a warmth like fire.
I shall go there and stand with it.
We’re on the road again and it makes me want to write. It’s the expanse of fruitless trees with their dried branches adding cracks to the blue sky, the wind hissing through the windows, the tall bales of hay and then the entrance into the walls of pine at the base of Mt. Shasta. Time becomes so much more complete, filling every pore of itself in nature.
Five hours to Weed, California seems like a blink of the eye for us, a small price to pay to be away from the madding crowd and to see snow again. I tell mi abuelita y mi mama: “We’re going to a cabin somewhere in the woods.”
“By yourself? UY! Be careful, people get killed in el monte.” Eh maybe during periods of genocide when the military goes into the rural villages in Guatemala. Maybe then, abuelita. “But you’re driving alone? You’re not going en caravana o con amigos?” Why, I ask her, so we move at someone else’s pace? I don’t think so. “¡Ques’eso!” She laughs, half in disapproval at my American ways and the rest dismissing the ludicrous nature of our behavior. “Make sure you take something to cover your nose from the cold.”
It’s a good time to reflect since we’ve been back for more than a month now and time has passed, water through our fingers, ungraspable. In the distance the snow-capped Cortina Ridge and the sky lighting up the fire of an imminent sunset. “Feliz Día de Gracias.” I tell abuela. I no longer say, “Happy Thanksgiving.” I’m more Guatemalan now and while Thanksgiving Day doesn’t directly tie back to our history, it does hold a symbolic element of being grateful for leaving deprivation and entering a place of plenty. I say entering because many times it’s a mental shift – re-framing a concept of deprivation from not having access or owning materials things to having support, love and freedom. Support from those we love and who love us and to feel free to do things that matter both for us and the world.
I am grateful for this and also for ten years ago when Brad and I wandered into the snow-laden forests of Shasta County and Lassen Volcanic Park in search of hot springs and adventure. We found each other.
We’re getting closer to darkness. El Día de Los Muertos reminds us how close we are to that needlehead thinness between living and passing; the passed and the still yet suffering. Two years ago my friend Ellen died in her sleep, bled into herself after many struggles with cancer. I can’t imagine her struggling because she smiled through anything. Even pain was a gift to be appreciated because it could be felt while living and she taught me that there is always something to be made of pain, if only sometimes to remind us of the present that needs to be lived. It’s taken me this long to realize that she’s perished, gone so far away. Yet tonight we summon each other.
I enter the portal, lift up the thin black-laced veil, surrounded by dancing stilt-walking skeletons, and candles to guide me down this crowded San Francisco street where the vessels have been prepared and carried. I move slowly with the crowd and find my way to the park where the aperture has been tended. There by that tree in Garfield Park, I find her and she finds me. As if time had not passed at all. Out of my red bag, I take out the large candle, the pomegranate, the apple, the two keys, the many small candles for all the people she touched with her compassion and love. I pause and light each one with my friend Tal. For once we have no words. I pause and then pull out our her steel-framed picture waving back at me from the beach with her one arm and other shrunken arm tucked close to her body, like all the people she loved and who took shelter there. She waved and you couldn’t tell if it was a wave of farewell or hello or simply “Here I am”. The ocean roared behind her and cool wet sand touched her bare feet. I thought of her pain until the end. I thought of her happiness. And this time, I waved back.
