El Gringoqueño

Olaia has been growing with us for the past 11 months now. For the first 9, she was an abstraction, something we were anticipating but had no idea what to really expect. How would she change our lives? What would she be like? I’ve been doing some video editing of her to send to our families and after watching her (both in person and on film) over and over, I find that I have some strange feelings, feelings that I didn’t expect and maybe don’t quite understand yet. I look at her there. In one scene she’s in her bouncer seat, (thanks Leila) and I feel like it’s the first object in her life that she can interact with, as in touch, and manipulate. I watch her struggling with the little spinners and gadgets that make up the play bar in front of her. She now reaches out and hits what she’s looking at. Sometimes she’s not successful, but she’s getting better. Today, however, she got her hand caught under the bar and rather than put her arm down and withdraw it, she tried to raise it against the bar. Obviously she felt that this thing had stolen her hand and that she was stuck. Daddy was right there and as she started to cry for help, he was there to gently pull her away from the entrapping device. Ahh, I don’t know what I would have done without you, daddy.

It was then that I had this overwhelming sense of, I don’t know quite how to say it, protection? of needing to help her, of wanting something. I can’t explain it. There she was this little girl, so helpless, so dependent on her parents, trying to reach out and really trying, but having trouble. There was this melancholy, this regret that she would suffer failure at some time in her life. She’s going to have hard days ahead and even though daddy will be around (I hope so anyway), I can’t help but feel worry, angst, and well, my heart just goes out to her. I watch her on her tummy trying to lift her head, she does it for a few minutes but after that she gets tired and ends up face down on the mattress. Poor thing. She does so well, but then she can’t, and she kind of panics (because she can’t figure out why she can’t lift her head and why she’s face down), and daddy helps her out. Ahhh, much better. She just has such an earnest look on her face, like she’s really really trying and just can’t do it. I don’t know why, but it breaks my heart.

I wonder if we ever figure out how to succeed here in this life. Life is just one big confusing trial after another. There’s childhood where everything is so new and you’re so dependent. There’s adolescence where suddenly when you thought you were getting the hang of things, the rules change. You turn 18, graduate from high school thinking you know everything, and bam, college is another blow to your mastery of the universe. You follow on, conquering challenges (because your parents taught you well), and again you find yourself graduating and being as lost as you were as a newborn. What do I do with the rest of my life? Have I made right choices? Why are these things such surprises to us and why do we place our hopes in our experiences that flee us at such regular intervals?

There are lots of places where we trip and wish there were someone who knew it all to help us out. What’s the big picture? Do we spend all our lives gathering consciousness only to in the end fall short of complete awareness. At seventy we still get our hands stuck under symbolic bars and instead of having awareness of what to do, we yank and pull and scream and cry, not getting it and not really having learned the smallest lessons, the ones that release us from a prison where we are just children crying out for our daddies, so helpless and alone.

I have to say that all these things go through my head as I watch Olaia struggle with awareness and I am reminded our own struggles. They are no different and she is just at the beginning of a long and complicated road. I wish I could take it all away just make it all simple. I’ll do my best, but I know I can’t do it all, and I know that some day she’s going to have to figure out that bar herself.

Now, lest you think I’m being all melodramatic and fatalistic, I know life is a wonderful gift, but I just can’t help but wish we could transcend our human frailties, our inability to "get" certain things. There are math problems that just perplex me and that bugs me. I can feel sometimes the limits of my brain, the places were my consciousness fails to penetrate. I know where they are and that bugs me. There are certain things that I just don’t get. Certainly we all have our blind spots, but wouldn’t it be nice to find a way just clean them out and illuminate and move beyond our sticking points?

I just love that little girl so much it would be a wonderful gift indeed to bestow upon her a calming awareness that it’ll turn out all right, a peaceful mastery of her surroundings, and a tranquillity that will never allow her to be caught below another bar.

The Day of the flat tire. I don’t know how many of you have had flat tires, but today I have been initiated. This is no small thing. I am sure that aside from excuses for arriving at meetings-work-dentists appointments late it is a rare occurrence. Let me tell you about how it works down here. Half the cars drive around with those ridiculous little donut wheels (small spare tire). It’s almost an epidemic. The other day I say a BMW (a nice one too) driving around with that silly little wheel. If he had been in a car locker room the towel whipping would have been fierce.

It’s all fun and games, however, until it happens to you which if you live in Puerto Rico, it will. Maybe it has something to do with the heat (perhaps the rubber is half melted anyway allowing anything from a toothpick to a hard jolly rancher to penetrate your side wall), or the fact that the streets seem to have an extraordinary quantity of pot holes and debris. I don’t know. But today I came out to the parking lot to find out that I had a flat. Aw man. I breathed a sigh of relief, however, because thank God that it didn’t happen in rush hour traffic.

I whipped out the tiny silly diminutive God-awfully goofy little spare tire and cranked up those silly little toy jacks that take a million turns to go up half an inch, put the silly spare on and drove gingerly (avoiding pot holes and debris) to Santurce, a working class neighborhood (some would call it a tough neighborhood) and found a guy who repaired tires… for, get this… $5. Yes, you heard right. $5. Tire repair around here is such a booming business that they charge $5 a tire and work around the clock. Hell, maybe I should get out of the computer racket and cash in on the booming flat business. So the guys found the hole repaired the tire and slapped it back on in about 5 minutes..

…which is good, great wonderful, brilliant, but remember that $5 I was talking about? I didn’t have it. I had $4.50. Now I couldn’t exactly try to scam this guy out of fifty cents on an already impossibly low fee. Wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t accept credit or ATM. To further compound matters, I was in an area where there were no ATMs. Oh, did I mention it was now 5 o’clock. Aw geez, now I have to navigate down streets that when they were designed were intended to be two way streets. Today, however, Puerto Rican’s have taken parking to new levels as cars are stacked on either side in impossible configurations making this already small two way street an even smaller two way street. So it became the Samurai on the bridge all over again. You gonna back up to the nearest cross street or am I? I think not knave. I have to find an ATM. You will suffer should you wish to challenge me. It worked, he backed off and up he went to the nearest cross street. I gave a little wave of thanks and made my way into the heart of a six pack a day smoker, potato chip snarffing, egg guzzling, red meat devouring, whole milk drinking, 500 hundred pound overweight 50 year old. CLOGGED is the word that kept rearing it’s ugly head as I banged on my steering wheel and cursed the accursed traffic and the pot hole ridden tiny streets. After about an hour, I spied it, an oasis of money. A-ha, doh!, I’m on the wrong side of the street. Quick stop in a gas station-run across the street on a pedestrian cross walk that only half remained-narrowly missed by cars honking at this brazen fool who stepped out of his car for even a millisecond-lunging for the security of electronic cash, information age technology that would save my ass, give me my cash and allow me to get on with my life.

So the deed it done, now I have to get back to the tire shop. To relive the feeling, reread the above paragraph. Now I arrive back to the shop and it’s closed. Ah, there he is. I breathe a sigh of relief, and notice the humble tire change guy hanging out at the bar next door. Here’s your money, I say, and thanks for your patience. Whew. The day is done, the tire is repaired, I can go home complete, satisfied, whole again.

I’ll worry about putting that jigsaw puzzle called the jack, lug wrench, wing nut, spare tire assembly sometime next month. For now it’ll just kick around in the trunk. Hey, maybe I’ll need it again really soon.