Team Guate 2011 in La Antigua, Guatemala

I’m selling my wedding dress and I’m sure my mother doesn’t want me cryogenize it, freeze it and preserve it for posterity. She quietly backed into the topic while were were talking on the phone about the minutia of moving back to Guatemala, to all of Central America, but for three years this time. It starts out with a simple question: “What will you do with your wedding dress?” Right now it’s on eBay, Craigslist and a boutique wedding dress website that will pour oodles of bridezilla money down my way for a new digital camera or feed into the new Toyota Tundra fund. It’s only a matter of time.

“Well you know I was thinking, maybe if you decide to ever adopt a little girl, maybe she could wear the dress?” What little girl mom? An imaginary girl somewhere in the future? And what if she doesn’t get married, what if she’s gay, what if she’s obese, what if she couldn’t care less about a yellowing lace dress that her mother had kept all these years just for her to wear, for what, exactly so her mother has a visual symbol of the continuity? What if I’m the last person she wants to be reminded of?

“Well, then, you could have your dressed preserved, like people’s bodies get preserved or frozen.” I should freeze my dress?

“I was just saying, mija, what if you change your mind? I could keep it for you.” The last time, I remind her, she safely stored anything of mine was when I left for college and she and my stepfather forgot to pay storage and all my boxes of photos, art, books, clothes and my favorite oak desk were sold by some random guy in North Carolina backwoods town. “But I don’t do that sort of thing anymore.” The scorpion bites and the frog jumps, ma. “I’m not a scorpion.” No, but you’re a fire and you burn through things. “People change.” Maybe, but their essence stays the same. And what does any of this have to do with selling the dress? I wasn’t listening. I was going to sell it and that was that. “Lo voy a vender, si solo es un vestido.”

I understand,” she said quietly. I immediately got off the phone and told her I was going for a run. Estaba alterada. I ran and I ran, against the wind, as the sun peered through the mounting gray clouds. I thought perhaps like reverse engineering, my mother was reverse inheriting a legacy. Perhaps because she never had a vestido de novia, she wished she’d had one to present to me, a gift a mother gives to her daughter, of herself, of her innocence, of her youth, of her hopes and dreams embodied in one dress that women in the US and UK were now burning in protest of the bridal industrial complex. I felt her sadness now in her silence. She always accepted my revolt, because in part it was hers.

She would keep it for me because that would be her gift, that would be our tie formed from myself to her, a trust as fragile as the lace that lined the blusher draping over my back. She’d spent hours on my hair before the wedding. It’s all I wanted from her, to take the tangles out. My scalp throbbed for hours later. I sat crossed-legged on the chair with my little radio listening to the news and she hummed to herself.

A pear cannot fall from an apple tree. If I had listened I would have heard the branch rustle. I would have heard the fruit’s journey through space, time a moment’s breath, as it fell towards it destiny, hit hard against the ground – a noise perhaps no one would ever hear. It would use the momentum of gravity to exert some will into its final place and then bide time under the sun.

Nothing like running errands on a Sunday afternoon to get a crash course in the weekend habits of Chileanos in Santiago. After a four-hour nap I woke up to my trusty shortwave radio blasting bad 1980s hits. I dragged my disconcerted self out of a bed which faces the balcony overlooking the Cerro Santa Lucia where I was already plotting a Monday run. I threw the androgynous parachute pants on, just to play it safe and get the street pulse. Cloth bag over my chest, I mentally prepared to part with any of the goods inside of it should it come down to that.

I jotted a few things: electric plug converter, hairbrush, SIM chip for my cellphone, a hot spot (the Internet was down at the hotel, not surprising), bottled water (the water from the tap tasted like chlorine), and Peruvian ceviche. It was an eclectic mix of needs, but I promised myself a partially successful mission.

Already I had realized from ambling around the Santiago airport and shuttle ride chatting with sleep-deprived locals that Chilenos are in fact, much like the older, more prudent brother. Quiet, tranquil, unswayed by the day to day dramas. The proved to be good listeners. With at Chileno I was starting to feel there was never really a need to shout or lose your cool. They had a quiet hustle, with very little bustle to it and a shrewd paying of attention to the right details.

I had begun to appreciate the Chileno. They were used to tourists, knowing exactly the subtleties of navigating someone through their country’s customs. That became obvious when I tried to order a cappuccino and created a state of confusion between the tightly clad barista, showing plenty of leg in an industry that is more like bartending; the cashier (who takes your money and issues you a ticket for admission to your much-needed drink), and the owner of the cafe carefully reading his Sunday newspaper at the front desk.

It was hot, it was muggy, I wanted an iced cappuccino. I knew I was asking a lot, but I had to do it. I had to know sooner, rather than later, where Chile was with customer service and picky people like myself.

The two women were confused by my request iced cappuccino request. I was quickly ushered over to the owner who raised his eyes from the newspaper. He peered at me over his bifocals. “So what you want is a separate cup of ice and also the espresso and milk?”

Yes, I told him, just a separate cup of ice. It’s true, I had wimped out when his eyes penetrated right through me and made me forget all my two years of barista knowledge back in college. He nodded his head at the cashier behind me. I walked back not daring to turn my back to him. She gave me a ticket and then I quickly walked over to the slinky barista in the spandex black dress. I gave the the stub to her.

“So separate cup of ice and no sugar?” No, I wanted it plain. “Crema?”

Of course, I want crema, milk that is. She moved to the espresso machine with a confidence I had not noticed in her before. The men watched from the corner of their eyes without turning their heads.

She poured the espresso, brought the ice, and the mineral water (compliments of the house) and began steaming the milk. I was in good hands. I relaxed. On both sides of me were two locals – a tour guide and a cab driver. The tour guide lit his cigarette, offered me one, I turned it down. He then asked softly, but not timidly where I was from.

“Guatemala,” I said. “Via the United States.”

“That’s a combination you don’t often hear,” he said. He puffed placidly on his cigarette. It was a standing up cafe, so we all quietly leaned in to listen to one another, conspiratorially. Here was our tryst. He looked over and signaled to me with his pursed lips that the barista was coming. I was aghast when I saw the swirls of whipped cream on my otherwise perfect cappuccino. She noticed it in my face.

“Thank you,” I said reluctantly taking it.

“You don’t like it?” She asked.

“Oh I do, very much,” I said and started scooping the whip cream off. Her face looked beyond confused. She looked over to the cashier and then back to me. “Oh, you didn’t want it with crema?”

“I’m sorry, I just didn’t know crema in Chile meant whipped cream. In Guatemala it’s sometimes used interchangeably with milk.”

She politely picked up the coffee, “Permitame, no hay problema.” She set the lovely frappucchino next to the espresso machine and then returned. “What you really want is a cortado grande con espuma. I will make it, no problem, but you have to get another ticket from the cashier.”

Of course, that was the logical, orderly and sensible thing to do. So I went up to the cashier who then shuffled me over to the owner again who this time put down his paper, neatly folded his glasses and pushed himself off the counter. He opened the barn door to his stall and walked me over to the coffee counter where the barista and my new friends where. I dragged my feet behind him.

“Let me explain to you how our coffee works,” he told me in the gentlest and most patient voice. For the next five minutes he explained their entire menu to me. The entire cafe leaned in for this important lesson. He might as well have had a microphone. When he finished, there was silence. He then nodded his head at the barista. That was her cue. He waited right next to me chit chatting until she came with my new coffee.

He waited until I sipped it and smiled. It was delicious. “Muchísimas gracias.” He nodded in approval to all.

“Disfrute su cafe y bienvenida a Chile.”

And the ceviche you ask? I got that, too, although it proved a little easier at the local Aji Seco:

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Santiago, Chile – There are many things mi mama taught me – many of which I wasn’t prepared to learn until adulthood, but slowly the knowledge seeps into the roots.  One of the most important things she taught me is to be fluent in Spanish. We struggled over it. At school I spoke English, at home, it was only Spanish. She didn’t care what the nuns said, she didn’t care how many people teased me, she didn’t care how important it was to me to sound American. “Tu lenguaje es tu cultura, es de donde vienes.” Your language is your culture, it is where you’re from. She taught me to remember my culture by living its reality in the words I shaped wherever I went.

Spanish has served as an immediate lifeline, connecting me to what will soon be, by 2050,10 percent of the world population. Anywhere the winds take me, even in Taiwan, there is always someone I connect to immediately in Spanish at the most basic level of interaction from taking a bus to ordering food.

This morning as I stepped out of the airport into Santiago, Chile – thick layer of gray cloud topped with the red ball of sunrise – I was grateful again that not a few minutes after I set foot in another continent, after surviving a 12-hour flight, I spoke my mother tongue, as my mother had intended it. At the very least I did my best.

It does help that the culture of airports is similar in Latin America: a dubious entry process and close-up encounters with customs officials, babies screaming, six giant bags per person and then the wall of people that greets you as you part the sea of taxis with hand scrawled signs. Before you know it,  drivers have attached themselves like plankton as you make for the open sea.

At dawn Santiago is not a pretty city. It is not Oaxaca, Mexico; it is not La Antigua, Guatemala. It is a dusty, sleepy, colonial city somewhere in Latin America where the street dogs don’t look as desperate or decimated and there’s a certain peace that lingers in the emptiness of the Sunday streets where not a single church bell rings and the buses don’t spew out plumes of black smoke. On the radio I hear old Chilean ballads from the 70s, before I was even born, or perhaps as I was coming into being in a completely different reality.  In another country, where I was born. But I could just as easily, just as randomly, have been born here.

Kara stumbled on this photo of the Lancetillo kids and me from last year. Most of these kids don’t have a lot of experience behind a computer so it’s all new and shiny to them. As I was showing them my MacBook Pro, they expressed an interest in viewing any photos I had. Lucky for them, I obsessively collect images of all sorts: internet memes, wiggly .gifs, graphic design inspiration, weird old archival stuff and personal photos. As I recall, here were some of their favorites:

This is a pic I took a few years ago of my friend Jay & Eilleen’s two boys. The Lancetillo kids were pretty much in awe of the hair. ¡Que estraño!

I collect old ads because, ahem, “I’m in the biz.” This one got a lot of giggles because, well, it’s a man spanking a woman and they’re a bunch of Catholic school kids who’ve probably never seen anything like this. Needless to say I clicked through this one pretty quick.

The girls’ favorite.

The boys’ favorite.