Let´s See How Far We´ve Come...

music: let's see how far we've come (matchbox 20)

When you start losing hope in where you going,

look back to see how far you have come.

The World´s Greatest

Today, I am braving the storage unit with everything I left in the US when moving to Chile for "a year" then hoping to end the day with some celebratory surfing and tacos.  Watching all of my old Libros a Lobitos and travel slideshows with students at my old High School yesterday was such a blast.  I didn´t get to play this one so I wanted to share it with all of you.  It is one of my favorite videos and really favorite things of all times.  It still gives me goosebumbs.  These kids elected to study English with me TWO HOURS a day, FIVE DAYS a week for two months.  They are such motivated, energetic and good-hearted young people and working with them fills my life with more joy than I ever could have imagined.

Big thanks to Tom Chadwick for this video!  You are a beautiful human and wonderful filmmaker.  I miss you, friend and I miss these kiddos too.

They are hands-down, the world's greatest.

To Everything, There is a Season...

Today´s post goes out to Nicholas Michael Bourassa: a good friend and neighbor who left us six months ago today.  

It was already a heavy week when the news of his death reached me.  The aunt of one of my best friends in Peru had recently been killed and I had spent the majority of the week prior in Talara sitting through burial preparations, family arrivals from Lima and all of the various stages and formalities of a Catholic funeral.  I mostly just lingered around waiting for Luchito to have a spare second when we could steal him away from the sadness for a few moments of laughter and an empanada or two.  Later, he would thank us for being the only glimmers of hope and happiness in the wake of the most shocking and traumatic loss his family had ever suffered.

 On that particular day, I had spent the majority of my afternoon running around Talara trying to hunt down lice shampoo and popcorn kernals in 100-degree weather.  Nico texted me to tell me that he and Emi had nabbed the last two spots in the combi so I knew I´d be cutting it close in terms of getting back to Lobitos before the kids´ film festival.  Somewhere between my lice treatment and running down to L.C.P. headquarters to make palomitas for 100 kids in a pan that was comically small, I checked into my facebook and found a message from Jeff.  He had sent me a link to an article in an Orange County newspaper.  I clicked it to read a vague description of a young man who was fatally injured after being hit by a car on the freeway.  I barely had time to process it between the ticking clock and my itchy head so I shouted goodbye to Mari and ran out the door to find Emi and get ready for the event.

As we stood over the tiny gas stove in her kitchen, already popping batch five or six out of a dozen or so pans of popcorn, I told Emi that I had recently gotten word that a good friend from college had passed away.  Her shock overshadowed mine.  Between scratching our heads and finding the humor in the horror of having contracted head lice for the first time in our adults lives, we shared a somber moment for sad news sent from far away…a reality we both know all too well.

The film festival was a hit.  As usual, any stress or sadness I was feeling was squeezed out of my lungs by the hugs of many beautiful little friends.  All mental energy was channeled into entertaining them, distributing snacks and preventing the event from erupting into total and complete chaos.  An impromptu game of duck, duck goose (pato, pato, ganso) kept them entertained long enough to clean up after the event and we even managed to keep them (mostly) quiet long enough for Nico to introduce the videos.

When the crowd thinned out, I headed up to La Casona where my girlfriends had gathered to have a few beers.  I wasn´t up for it.  I hadn´t eaten all day and hunger and sadness were starting to creep in.  I snuck off towards the only store that was still open to buy a massive bag of fried banana chips.  As the grease settled into my stomach, I stomped on thorns and wandered in the direction of the sea.  I kicked off my flip-flops and let my feet carry me to the water.  I flopped down to my knees at the shoreline and let myself cry.  I gave myself up to whatever it was that I was feeling: confusion, anger, hunger and overwhelming loss. 

Everything felt surreal; I had never felt the presence of death all around me as much as I did during those weeks.  It seemed like all of my expat girlfriends had also gotten unexpected news of freak deaths from home.  One of the sweetest men I know had recently run over and killed my best friend's puppy after a particularly rowdy Corrazón Serrano concert and, back in Lakeside, my own family was torn up after the sudden death of my nephew's 20 year-old cousin who was killed in a car crash in Hemit just ten days before.

I looked up at the gorgeous night sky at a billion stars that stared down at me, unpolluted by city lights.  I gave myself the time to think about Nick and our big back porch at Gustafson apartments. There, we shared war stories and confessions over Sierra Nevada Pale Ales.  The porch connected our two little apartments which we shared with our respective partners. We wandered out when we needed to and sat on the steps for fresh air, perspective and cigarettes.  The back yard was filled with raccoons, the smell of orange blossoms and ferel cats.  Though we were a strange little community, we always had each other’s backs. 

Together, we protected our apartment bike rack from theft (the number one crime in Chico, California).  Joe's moms warded off the evil spirits with some kind of séance ritual, the smoke of which was visible from our perch on the porch steps.  Mattie did his part to feed Orangey who had been abandoned by her alcoholic mother Paula when she was dragged off to rehab.  Being the nurturing soul he was, he felt it was only fair after he had lucked out and scored an apartment so close to two of his best friends.

Nick and I kept our cats (Nico and Gizmo) indoors in our respective apartments, away from the perils of Chico alley cat life.  When I shipped out to Chile, I left Jeff in Nick's care.  They became gym buddies, pizza partners and eventually, best friends.

Nick was no stranger to death.  After serving in Iraq, he knew it well.  He showed me the scars left on his flesh by roadside bombs and talked about the deaths of his comrades casually.  The only thing that really got him teary-eyed was talking about his little girl Melanie, who he didn't get to see as often as he would have liked to.  He was honest and sincere, tough but not too tough to admit his mistakes and ask for forgiveness.  Ironically our friendship actually began with an apology.

A few days ago, I found a photo of the program from his funeral on his facebook.  It reads, 

"To everything there is a season 
and a time to every purpose under heaven.  
A time to be born and a time to die."

 Be it a hard pill to swallow that a twenty-five year old veteran’s “time to die” was on the side of an Orange County freeway, crushed by a reckless driver, fairness was never something that death took into consideration.  Be it by way of cancer, stroke, shark attack, old age, parachutes that don't open or grenades thrown through bedroom windows, death isn't something that is earned or deserved.  It just is.

As you may have noticed, I am on a bit of a Passenger kick these days and I thought today would be a good day to dedicate this song to Nick, a man who understood that life is for living.  I hope you will all take five minutes to listen to the lyrics of this song and let them sink in.  At the risk of sounding both morbid and cliché, we really don't know which day will be our last so make sure you're doing things right, saying what you need to say and living and loving with all you've got.  Do it for the ones that aren't here anymore to do it themselves.  

RIP Nicky boy, we love you man.  

 

"Well grey clouds wrapped round the town like elastic 

Cars stood like toys made of Taiwanese plastic 

The boy laughed and danced around in the rain 

While laundrettes cleaned clothes, high heals rub toes 

Puddles splashed huddles of bus stop crows 

Dressed in their suits and their boots, they all look the same 

I took myself down to the cafe to find all the boys lost in books and crackling vinyl 

And I carved out a poem above the urinal that read: 

Don’t you cry for the lost 

Smile for the living 

Get what you need and give what you’re given 

Life’s for the living so live it..."

Brujo

I didn´t believe in messages from the universe in the same gentle, curious way that she did.  Still, in that moment, I tried to listen for one.  My devout agnosticism allowed for neither belief nor disbelief in anything.  Sometimes I was smug about it; feeling exalted above the need for false security and “absolute truth”.  Sometimes, it was exhausting.

“El universo es sabio,” my expat girlfriends told me borrowing from a variety of different clichés and languages -- the universe is wise.  “Everything happens for a reason.”

Perhaps it was a chink in my armor that allowed me to entertain the idea.  I try not to linger too long near the doors of churches in moments like these.  There is something about the things you allow to touch you when your guard is down.

My incredulousness wasn´t reserved for conversations on religion.  It also extended to modern medicine as a whole and, with more tangible reason, to the medical system in the small Peruvian village where I´d chosen to carve out a home.  The pain was bad, but the nearest clinic was not only a hassle to get to, but offered little hope of resolution. I ruled it out almost immediately though I was vaguely enticed by the promise of strong, easily-accessible painkillers, illegal in the country I had left behind.

Later, a friend from Lima would laugh at me over cervezas and ceviche about the route that I had chosen to take.  “Fucking gringos,” he would say if though my decision was typical of my kind.  His reaction was fair enough, I suppose.  I couldn´t keep a straight face through the story myself and as soon as the word “brujo” (shaman or wizard) escaped my lips, the table erupted into laughter. 

As I walked home from dinner through the chilly desert night, I thought back to the so-called “brujo” who had pushed on the back of my head in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  In my mind, I had neatly labeled him as a chiropractor.  Still, in his own, the work he did was irrevocably tied to God´s.   It made it hard to maintain the secular little bubble I so wished to confine him to. 

After a few minutes of pressing his fingers deep into my shoulder blade, he paused.   He left his hand cupped a few inches from my head, presumably to stop my soul from spilling over.  Moving his hands over a few inches, he went back to work.  Something cracked deep in my neck and a gaggle of goose bumps flew south down my spine.  He slipped softly from the room.  I could hear his kind voice from the other side of the door.  “Está durmiendo,” he said—she´s sleeping.  I wasn´t. 

Her voice softened to meet his and their conversation slid under the door into the tiny room which was barely wider than the cot that supported my wilted body. 

She had come to the brujo with burdens of her own and her hopes that he could help her seemed to be higher than my own faith that he would put an end to my two weeks of migraines.  Her man, she said, could not be brought to God.  I wondered if the problem was really his lack of faith or its perceived connection to his lack of faithfulness.

Familiar with the machismo reality in which we existed, the latter seemed, to me, the most probable.  I understood her desperation intimately.  I did know a few honest men who had seemingly been kept honest by religion here.  Far more common, however, were contradictions definitively not unique to this corner of the world.  Splattered across the windows of every motorcycle taxi and family restaurant in town, God was flaunted ostentatiously but seemingly absent from day-to-day dealings.   The incessant cycle of sin, repent, sin, repent was as deeply ingrained as the other rituals rarely questioned in Catholic country. It dribbled out of the churches and into the Peruvian men we were trying so hard to love, or not to.

Hold him, that was his answer for her; simple and precise.  Instead, she held me.  Tiptoeing into the room where I lay, she hovered over me and draped her arms across my bare back.   Hot tears trickled from my pounding head into my ears and I wanted nothing more than to run.  I wanted to run to the place that felt closest to home here, so far from my own.  I longed to sit in his earthen-floored living room.  I ached for the familiar smell of his mother´s cooking and the resolute way his father talked about God.  I cautiously toyed with the notion of prayer and how nice it must be to have a one-size-fits-all remedy for everything.  I knew that I was playing with fire, even just  thinking it.

The next day, the migraine intensified, just as the brujo said it would.  The world around me blurred and pulsed to the rhythm of my beating head.  I strained my eyes trying to find beauty in the reality I had chosen.  The distinct life I had carved out on this seemingly randomly selected speck on the map made increasingly less sense.  At the end of a long day, I collapsed into a puddle of pain, exhaustion and doubt.

In the morning, the clouds parted.  Once again, I had the necessary headspace to grapple with the uncertainty of the unknowable.  Once again, everything was equally as likely as it was unlikely.  God was everywhere, and nowhere.  The pain was gone.

I didn´t believe in messages from the universe in the same gentle, curious way that she did.  Still, in that moment, I tried to listen for one.