Another Door

As it turns out, I do not run from this place, although I have had numerous opportunities and several provocations. Is it procrastination, a lack of conviction, or do I cry with egg in my beer? Certainly, there are some small satisfactions in my life that I had never previously experienced, and because of other commitments, could not have experienced in my prior life in New York.
Ever since reading Frank McCourt’s ‘Tis, I have had a hankering to be part of the educational system. Earlier than that, actually, before he wrote Angela’s Ashes, before he came to one of our parites with his brother Malachy, and they regaled us with tales of the opportunity that came their way on their return to America. Yes, before Frank spoke of the joy of connecting with kids and how he made a career of something he was virtually qualified for albeit without license, I had longed to teach, but somehow I always settled for clerical jobs. I recall reading a novel called The Fly wherein there was a scene that took place in a teachers’ lounge as observed through the eyes of the title character, and I was much charmed by viewing various films when younger such as To Sir With Love and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. I guess I have always longed for that sort of adulation—to be the one teacher who has a strong effect on his students. Realizing that my writing will probably never bring me lasting notoriety, teaching and being remembered was one kind of fame I could aspire to. It couldn’t have happened in my other life, but there was always the future, the unknown and unforetellable future.
In April of 2000, with the passing away of all I had grown accustomed to, every conceivable future opened its door to me. At that time, I had no desire to enter any. I wanted my own existence to end. I returned to the church and prayed for guidance. I worked (in an office, of course) during the day and at night I led a solitary and contemplative life, waiting, just waiting, I suppose, for everything to disappear—to awaken from a nightmare of loneliness.
The days drifted into months and I realized in December of that year that nothing had changed—except everything. And then, through a chance encounter and the discovery that throughout those long lonely months some doors had remained ajar, I chose one and slipped through, unnoticed, and soon found myself on the other side of one of those unforeseeable futures.
From what I had relearned during my Sundays in church, I could perhaps come to believe that this turn of events was predestined and, my underlying character being rather lethargic, this would be the easiest perception to come by, but it frightens me to think that stranger metamorphoses might await me. The fright is there in the notion of changes whose timing is off, much like the fear of Alzheimer’s Disease erasing a lifetime of knowledge.
I digress.
Now, I am an English teacher working at Tec de Monterrey, but with barely enough hours this semester to sustain a “way of life.” There is only that modicum of satisfaction in my performance that helps me to persevere whenever the doubts creep in. My first semester was average. At the end of the second, I was awarded a citation. Last semester, though personally satisfying, did not bring any notice of achievement. This, my fourth, which began Monday, the 11th, feels so far like another open door, only this one appears to require a key. I hope with my reverberations I do not miss finding it on the side of the road as I race forward, for that must be my direction. I must not be diverted by confusion nor dissolution.

Writing and Running

Something is wrong. Something is definitely wrong. At this time and place, I can’t get a handle on it. I’d like to be happy, successful, wealthy, independent, but at the moment, I don’t feel any of those things. How did I arrive at this state?
In April of 2001, I left my home in New York, left my previous life behind and moved to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico, not least of all to begin something different, something fresh, something that had no resemblance to the life that had turned sad for me. I had mixed expectations and only a vague awareness of what awaited me here.
I guess I’m hoping now if I write about my experiences that I’ll be able to make some sense out of where I’ve placed myself. At the time I made this move, I felt very brave and some of the people around me said they envied me making such a decision. They seemed to think I was leaving the rat race behind and moving to fun in the sun—a permanent vacation of lying on a beach with a cold beer beside me and music playing. I guess I saw that too. I had been to Mexico before—the resort areas—and I think that’s what I really wanted. No obligations, no responsibilities, no attachment to things that turn sad.
I couldn’t see then that vacations are the way they are because they are not permanent. That it is their very fleetingness that charges them full of memories of lassitude and drains them of a sense of responsibility. You try to turn them into lasting situations and they morph into some halfway limbo condition.
In any case, there’s no beach here. It’s a three-hour drive away, and I’ve been there twice in a period of more than two years.
In looking back over one’s life, the good times sparkle like diamonds or bits of gold among the dross of the quotidian and one longs to relive them, to gather them together and make an other life out of them. One doesn’t see that they glitter precisely because of their juxtaposition against the ungleaming days and months. It takes the mistake of trying to do such a thing to recognize the folly of feeling that way.
Firstly, in the long view of hindsight, one doesn’t see that those bits were not faultless, but in gathering them together, in trying to relive them, their faults become magnified.
There are thousands of bugs, tiny ants, crawling over them, whose presence, when perceived, is an irritation. Then too, there is the fact that nothing can really happen the same way twice. So, yes, it is folly to believe one can recapture something that perhaps had been perceived incorrectly in the first place.
That being said, I find myself now in this place in the middle of a race toward a goal I already know will not satisfy, unable to return to a starting line that has been eradicated. Nor can I take off these uncomfortable running shoes to sit on the sidelines for a few moments to get my bearings. There are spectators who have come to watch, expecting a winner, and if I don’t keep moving, then I am just an impediment to the other racers.
The thing is, I want to keep running. I want to win. I want to hear the cheers of victory. I’m afraid, though, that I won’t stop to collect a trophy. I’ll just keep running long after the race is finished, and the spectators have gone home. I’ll keep running and running as I don’t have any home to go to.

Na Bolom

Na Bolom

Blogging Phenomenon

projection of
The Blogging Phenomenon:
An Overview and Theoretical Consideration by James M. Branum

What Are You Trying to Say?

Some of the best inventions of 2002 had to do with translating. The Braille Glove turns sign language into text for deaf people, the Dog Translator lets people know what dogs mean in English when they bark, and the Infoscope helps in translating signs and posters in other languages into their equivalents in English. These may only be prototypes at the moment, but technology is improving all the time despite fears that we may meet with the wrath of God for overstepping our bounds.

The One After the 8:12

Overweight, balding, a bearded father is standing at the bus stop with two young daughters, perhaps seven- and eight-year-olds, both extremely thin and waiflike, blond. The seven-year old stares unmovingly at a woman who is shabbily dressed, looking homeless, who is wiping a window on the lobby door of an apartment building. The child stares and stares at the woman while the other sister is oblivious to her surroundings, skipping in place while holding daddy’s hand. As the bus pulls in to the stop, the seven-year old lightly punches her father in his big soft stomach and then hugs his waist. He disentangles himself from them as he leads them to the bus doors. The girl looks back for the woman, but does not see her.
On the bus, there are five other parents taking their five children to school. The windows having been left opened, allow bits of conversation to be heard on the street. The parents have kid names such as Jody and Buffy. The kids have adult names like Laura and Fergus. Also their conversations reflect their names. The parents’ interests seem innocuous, while the children appear to be speaking of serious subjects. And these children seem younger than both the girls who just boarded.
As the bus finally pulls away, the woman, belying her appearance, stands with a container of steaming coffee from Starbuck's. Holding the container with both hands, she watches the bus take off on its uptown route. The school is off of Third Avenue in the thirties. She used to take her own child on the next bus after this one when she was working in midtown a number of years ago. Some situations never change or do but only imperceptively.
Her bus should be coming shortly. More parents and children are gathering, though less than regularly wait for the 8:12.
The coffee has cooled enough to drink but it leaves a terrible aftertaste and so the woman never finishes it. It’s that way with many things. She finds she rarely finishes anything.

Her Turn

Now Eileen gives English lessons to a young couple from Mexico. They both come for the lessons, but only he seems to be improving his English and that only marginally. He’s taking the class to please the wife and keep her occupied. For every fourth or fifth question, she says, “Your turn,” to him, but she pronounces it, joor toorn, with what sounds like a French inflection. Otherwise, she blurts out answers as if oblivious to his presence. They are an attractive couple and would be more so if she would let him get a word in edgewise.
Eileen wonders if the husband, who introduced himself as Paco, but whom his wife insists on calling Francisco Javier, was so quiet before they moved to New York. She is fairly sure she knows whose idea the move was.
The oversized tennis racket-shaped brooch studded with what appears to be diamond chips that the wife frequently wears was instrumental in Eileen's decision to move to Mexico. She has told them she is about to go, any day now.
The wife tells her she "is being, how do you say, improbable?"

The Perfect Game

Eileen's boss was a tennis buff who used to demo every new racket he learned of. He never bought any. He was seeking the perfect 4 ¼ handle. He said he was looking for the perfect game. When he would send her to the tennis store to pick up the new models, he would ask, “Can the person demo-ing designate the tension of the strings?” She always felt a little foolish bringing back the rackets a couple of days later and having to tell the salesman that her boss wasn’t buying them. In the four years she worked for him, she must have repeated these little treks a hundred times and the day she left the company he was not in. He was away on a retreat, probably playing tennis with his old unreliable racket.

Paco and Anilla

His mother says, “Mi amor,” and “Precioso,” on the telephone. At home, she solicited his affection with food and nouns. His father was more likely to ask Paco to fix him a drink and used adjectives such as chingada and de mierda. His brother and sister were differently affected by their parents’ vocalizations. Now with Anilla, he just lets her do all the talking. Much of it is in French or her halting English so none of it stays with him so much as the nouns and adjectives he heard at home.

San Cristobal

Odyssey?

2001 was supposed to be the year we went on a space odyssey, but the biggest event of the year was 9/11.

Missing Notes

"Even though I haven't moved up the corporate ladder, I now and again merit these awards for excellence in various categories. One or two have had a high degree of prestige.
"I was nominated for one four months ago, and it came down to this: My last supervisor, a woman I had had a disastrous affair with, had to sign her approval to the nomination, as it was proposed by my current manager (a woman with whom I've always gotten along very well), and it upset my old supervisor to have to sign the form as she had written some bitter notes which she made part of my personnel folder. She checked the folder to see if the notes were still there and discovered they weren't.
"She let it be known the notes were missing and though they had only her word that they had ever been there, the bank started an investigation.
"They discovered that one day for about twenty minutes I had had access to my folder and they were ready to accuse me of tampering with bank records. I was put under pressure until one day last month when my old supervisor, my ex-girlfriend, had a nervous breakdown in the office and it became clear she had been ready to crack for some time.
"They found denigrating notes, scores of them in her desk, in which she had written false accusations of a plot concocted by me and my new manager, of whom she was insanely jealous.
"So they gave me this cruise for two to make up for it. I'm here with my new girlfriend, who's a writer. We intend to write my story and see if we can make some money from it.
"I know it is only a matter of time until they squeeze me out of the job. They don't like these kind of things occurring during working hours. I think they were surprised I didn't ask my manager to come with me."

Guatemala