se souvenir: humans

[ odes to the ones we meet ]

chicas

1999 san pedro sula

for most of my childhood, i didn’t think twice about our family vacations. we went to the caribbean once. parents cave, eventually. friends would head to florida to lie by the pool with a beach read and a virgin daiquiri. they’d shower in the late afternoon, apply makeup in time for a 7pm reservation at the cafe downstairs. we didn’t do that.

i was seven years old the first time i flew to honduras. my dad wore a red bandana and white chuck taylor hightops. in retrospect, he was pretty hip. then, even as a prepubescent overly attached daughter, it was humiliating. my mom brought one outfit. cargo shorts she likely found in jr’s giveaway pile. (he was nine.) an old st. columba’s tee shirt, yellowed under the arms, and never a bra. she wore it five days in a row. she loved any excuse to skip a shower. that is still true.

over a few decades, my dad had fostered a friendship with a honduran man named paulo. he’s an episcopal priest who, in the 1980s, answered a call to serve ostracized hondurans living with hiv/aids. he founded three clinics throughout honduras on a few pennies and a few supporters. my dad jumped on board. by default, so did we. we’d go each year to help with various projects. one afternoon, after a long day of hauling cinderblocks and mixing cement (i speak for others in the group. i sunk into coloring books with hondurans of my generation. on a good day, i found a stray puppy to chase.), we visited a nearby clinic for a tour of the facility. upon arrival, a few hiv patients greeted us with trays of soda. ice in the flimsy plastic cups.

we messed up. we always tried to avoid tap water and raw vegetables to minimize the risk of diarrhea and other gastro-nightmares. my dad told us not to drink the coke. which really made me mad, because soda was never allowed at home and i figured we’d get some concession on vacation. he didn’t want to deal with us on the toilet. that’s why we didn’t drink it. the two women, who spoke less than three words of english, didn’t know that. they thought we thought we’d get aids if we accepted their generosity and we realized this right when we shook our heads and kept our arms crossed, denying them. and we regretted it immediately but none of us could explain that we really just didn’t want to deal with diarrhea anymore and all we had were regretful faces which could be misconstrued too because we were really all alone and all just trying to be understood.

we were really the same.

amber

2011, WILMINGTON

her name wasn’t amber. i know this because amber isn’t a tough name to pronounce. my grandfather loved and honored her. but he could not pronounce her name. i’ll call her amber because i can’t remember her name.

i only knew amber for a few days. maybe a week. she was a big chocolate-colored lady. much younger than my mom, it seemed, but had a slew of grandkids. she had a hip shaggy shiny black bob, dark red streaks throughout. she wore glasses when she read. she read a lot. she read the bible. when she read, she hummed. she sat in the room where my grandmother was dying.

we sat on various couches around the living room and she sang to us. she was very joyful. i think we sang amazing grace. she had her hands raised up towards the ceiling. i didn’t do that but i kind of wanted to.

on the day of the funeral, my grandfather walked the aisle with her on his arm because even though one of us had died she had kept the rest of us alive. and we really didn’t know much about her but we knew the important things. i wish i remembered her name. 

bo

1996, durham

it didn’t mean much beyond diet tonic (hold the vodka) with a few chunks of lime and a revolving door of tattooed, buzzed cut women sitting at the island in our kitchen. there was one named barbara bowen. she went by bo. i found it funny that her mother chose a first name for her with such striking resemblance to her last. i’d trade it for mine, though. she spent a summer lasering off the ink on her arms. she’d tat them back up before her removal sessions were over. she couldn’t quite decide. she had scars all over and hairy armpits and bipolar disorder and a cordial relationship with crystal meth. she’d be outside the house smoking cigarettes on a sticky afternoon. i was in kindergarten and this was normal.

bo wasn’t around for long. my mom started laying down the hammer. she might have told her she was going to die. even at five, i figured people didn’t like to hear that much. people like bo didn’t stop coming around. as i grew, i began to fear. it’s too bad that’s the way the world works. we grow and grow and learn and the more we learn the more frightened we get and we shrink in the fear and we’re trying to grow and we can’t help but shrink so we’re stuck in stalemate and we’re in perfect balance not growing or shrinking but stuck in one place which is really the worst place to be.

my mom always went to meetings and she never drank a sip and she helped a lot of bos. she and my dad, who drinks cheap, lukewarm chardonnay, moved to the beach a few years ago. she goes to her meeting every morning. when i’m home, she brings me. there’s a man named billy. he lives in a shelter and he mops the floors at a public high school. he usually sits in the same row of fold-outs as my mom does. billy is a toothless middle-aged man with leathery skin the color of coffee beans and limbs that move a lot. billy is biscuits and gravy, love the lord, deep south. he starts off like this. “hey everybody, my name’s billy, and i'm an alcoholic.” we reply, “hey, billy” he cuts us off with, “i'm real happy to be here."

wherever here is. 

grace

1927 - present, winston-salem

i could write a hefty novel about her. maybe one day i will. there were the mornings – decades before me – when she’d empty the dishwasher, clanging pots and pans, before the sun rose. dad slept in a makeshift bedroom off the kitchen. he’s an early riser now. there were the days in june she’d ride across the bay in the light blue motorboat with bags of groceries. she'd ride back in august. she’d bake trays of ziti and sometimes tater tots. she’d leave it out on the wooden ledge by the door all day, picking at it with soft fingers. adorned with tattered cuticles. a worrier.

there were many nights when we were just little kids. we’d eat chicken pot pie and then klondike bars and then we’d play boggle or scrabble or something with words. she’d cheat, if she had to, to ensure she always won. she’d give herself extra points for a word we’d already mentioned. we began to grow and gain awareness and feel courageous, like humans do, and we’d call her bluff. she’d giggle. it’s a silent giggle. her shoulders move up and down like the men’s do in that song about trouble on the train in the music man. she is the most wonderful.

on wednesdays, she goes to the jail. sherry drives her and then sits in the car. sherry can’t go in. it’s not easy to get authorized. she goes in alone. as an aside, she’s one hundred days shy of eighty-nine. she meets her girls for a bible study. they are kidnappers, drug dealers, murderers, robbers. they pray for each other and every day she prays for them. she sees them and she loves them and she believes in goodness and she is goodness. you are, of course, what you believe. 

mme

2011, paris

she greeted me for the first time with a big mug of coffee as thick as gasoline. i was young and unrefined and jetlagged and tired and afraid and as a result of all of these things i needed milk in my coffee, and preferably steamed. foamy. this, the launch of an era when we’d try new things, because when you travel to new scary places, especially when you’re alone, that's what you do.

we’d go to class and then adventure somewhere – a museum or a wooded park on the northern cusp of the city or, most often, a bakery – and then come home and wait for her. she was the principal at a low-income elementary school far from the fifteenth arrondissement. she’d arrive in the late evening with three baguettes, one for each of us, and begin. we’d sit at the table, just the three of us, course after course of foie gras and mussels and rabbit and cow tongue and frog. six or seven cheeses for dessert. she smoked long cigarettes throughout the meal. no open windows.

she’d ask questions in french. we’d stumble through answers. she’d wait, giving us time to think and more time for her to burn through tobacco. she wore bright blue eyeshadow. she needed braces and maybe some crest whitestrips but i suppose that’s subjective and certainly unveils my americanism, so vain and so intent on aestheticism. there was a man she called her husband, though she didn’t wear a ring and he lived in bourgogne, quite far from the city, and i'm not sure they ever married. he was an englishman, spoke no french. madame learned, and well. so most of our meals ended in english. it was hard to construct legitimate syntax on a full stomach. 

berta

2014, tribeca

i’ll admit, she said everything very loudly. and most of what she said was ignorant. but i think she got a bad rap. new york has no mercy. i imitated her thick accent so often (sometimes straight to her face); it was a decent sketch. it’s been many months since i’ve seen her thick, leathery fake tan and the bangs that she’d trim every few weeks, all by herself. my parents still ask about her.

her desk was just a few cubes away from mine, so i got a full show, for free, every day. she was about three decades overdue for a promotion, but age is just a number. they finally upgraded her to an office in an effort to soundproof, because she’d say things like, “how the fuck do i get rid of my muffin?” (that’s in reference to her love handles) and “man i fuckin’ miss michael jackson” (and then break into “man in the mirror” on repeat) immediately followed by “i don’t understand why people fuckin’ laugh at me” and “you skinny bitches have no fuckin’ clue what i go through.” she said fuck a lot.

i think she drank vodka a lot.

my first few weeks at my first ever job were lonely. i imagine most soul-searching twenty-somethings would drink to that. i repeat, new york has no mercy. berta noticed me and she was nice to me. she got hammered at the company-wide summer party at greenwich country club. she left her flip phone in the bathroom stall by the pool. i happened upon it a few hours later and traced it back to the lady. i spotted her, leaning on the tiki bar, shoveling goldfish in her mouth. when i handed her the phone, she hugged me tight around the neck and said “i love you so much.” at last, a hint of mercy. 

isaiah

2013, KARATU

there was a binder with laminated pages with a special place on a special shelf in the rifti offices. on every page, it told the story of a kid in crocs, before the crocs. it explained, as well as it could, the history and mystery of every child who arrives at rifti.

i resisted even skimming through the binder, relying instead on little cues in behavior and demeanor to understand the little people. tried to engulf each little person in equal, unabashed, unbiased sunshine. i did, of course, have favorites. and some little guys favored me. isaiah peaked his head through the crack in the heavy doors of the volunteer house every morning to yell my name. that precious three-year-old swahili lilt.

we spent many days building lego castles and coloring masterpieces and competing in freeze tag and sharing buttery pieces of chapatti.

i never sought details. but one conversation told me the story of isaiah and his two older siblings, emanueli and marguerite. they were part of the “kids living with relatives” (klr) program at rifti, which provides food, clothing, and education to particularly impoverished and/or neglected kids living in nearby villages, as well as food, clothing, and funding to their living family members. these three little humans lived in campi nairobi, the muddy village right outside the rifti gates. i'd known this from the start.

i hadn’t known of isaiah's father, abusive and negligent alcoholic. his whereabouts unknown. isaiah’s mother, hiv positive, died a few months before i arrived at the village. a combination of liver failure and heart disease, undeniably exacerbated by her own alcohol addiction. 

in my time in africa, i never read the special binder, imagining that each child’s story was similarly stunning. even remembering is too much, sometimes, to swallow. so we take small bites. 

jerry

2008, north shore

i’d never had a job, so i walked into my interview, which was at a table in the corner and lasted less than three minutes, with a feigned air of professionalism. realized quickly that that was not the x-factor required. blonde hair maybe was.

there was a crew of us that sidled in after school. we’d make extra foamy lattes and throw in squirts of sugar-free hazelnut for free. self-serving, we’d put gelato in paper cups. eat, refill, flip through textbooks to find the precalculus problems assigned, repeat. we’d accidentally purposefully drop muffins on the counter – couldn’t serve them, had to eat them. we earned five dollars an hour, or something like that, but it was a good gig. we had nana’s shirts but we never wore them.

jerry opened nana’s with his ex-wife, which is an interesting business venture. he had a lot of girlfriends who’d come around the café. middle aged, thick liner under the eyes, fake tans, botox. that was the prototype, which was not unlike the prevailing demographic of the county.

jerry assigned me to the 6am sunday shift often. one sunday, mid-winter, i kept the car running while i waited for him to pull up in the chevy he worshipped. i didn’t have a key. i waited. joan and debbie and beth and all my favorite 6am regulars pulled up to a dark café in a chicago winter and waited. i called and texted and called chuck. unsuccessful. my phone lit up around 6:30. chuck was at a divorced lady's mansion off of deerpath road. (i hope she was divorced.) his car was in the driveway but he’d lost his keys the night before, and could i please come pick him up? i put the car in drive and headed to the address he’d given. he got in the front seat, “hi hellie,” and we drove to nana’s. he smelled like stale beer and cigarettes. he opened the door. a line formed in the dimly lit space while the espresso machine woke up.

he left me the key when he walked out.