09.09.09 DAY 4, 7:22am

DAY 4, 7:22am
Wednesday, September 9, 2009 Your spark can become a flame and change everything. – E.D. Nixon


Synopsis:
Visiting the school in Liberia, Tearing down the house on the beach, Kassidy determined to speak only Spanish, missing dad

Our address: Residencia Privada, Palo Alto, Villa Quetzal, Playa Hermosa, Guanacaste.
We’re told that the mail system is mostly reliable, but not to ship expensive things.



My grandparent’s house is a place of baking cakes and decorating them, of stealing chocolate pieces intended for candy making, of the strong smell of garlic cooking, of oranges picked directly from the tree and eaten immediately and positioning orange quarters in our mouths so that we looked like monkeys. It is a place where every child in three generations who ever walked through the door was measured against the door frame and a pencil mark was scratched above our heads. It is where I learned to play pool badly and garbage and pinochle. It is the house where my dad and uncle built and played in a tree house in the orange tree. It is the house of hundreds of Christmases and church days and pictures on the front lawn. It is the house where my grandfather built a room in the garage to accommodate their growing family and never have to move. It is the house where, after assuring the bank that they were a two income family and could not have children, that my grandmother found out she was pregnant. It is the house where I learned to grow strawberries and zucchini. It is the house that survived earthquakes.

A tiny little house like that housed a mom and her fifteen children. She raised them in a house no bigger than most master suites. She owned property all over Playa Hermosa and many of the children stayed right there on the beach. Three still lived in the house they grew up in. One lived with his family in the house immediately behind it. Another lived yards away on the other side. Together they ran the family business, two side-by-side restaurants on the beach.

The law in Costa Rica does not allow grandfathering of property, so structures built within 50 feet of the beach are being torn down this morning. 100 people, all related to each other, went to the beach yesterday to tear off the useable pieces from their grandma’s house so that they can back the house and the restaurant up a few yards and build again. Last night they built a bonfire from the scraps and sat around it talking and mourning.

It does not feel strange to laugh and joke and chat and play while the history of this family is in flames. They are somber, certainly. But those who I imagine are most devastated are the Aunts and Uncles who were raised here and they are outside the house set back a little in a circle of chairs drinking. It seems too invasive to be that close and instead we are with the descendents of the people who grew up here, where the grief is more tolerable and the conversation wistful and nostalgic.

Kassidy became determined yesterday to speak Spanish. She sat on the beach near the bonfire and played with three children at just her language ability, Floriana (3), Quiana (6), and Kevin (4). “Mom… how do you say, ‘Mermaid.’” I walked over and she had Floriana buried from the waist down in sand with a mermaid tail. She had brought a container of juice and one of the older boys walked over and asked if he could have some.

“No estás importante,” she is saying as I walk over. When I tell her that rather than saying, “It’s not important to me, sure, go ahead and have some juice”, which is what she thinks she is saying that she has said, “You aren’t important” she breaks into peals of self-conscious but authentic laughter and all the little kids laugh along even though they don’t’ know why. At the rental car place she said, “¿Tengo un baño?” (Do I have a bath room?) The employee said, “out the door, on the left” in Spanish.

Her determination is born of fear. We visited the school yesterday. It looks like the schools in California. The classrooms are all air conditioned, but there are no hall ways. They all open into the outside. The entire grounds are surrounded by a gate with two guards. No one goes in or out without them knowing. It is comforting. As people tried to talk with her, she realized how imperative it is that she improve her Spanish instantly.

The school is next door to the mall, and we are so happy to find a greater variety of things in Liberia. It occurs to me that creative and angst-ridden people need a voice, so we buy paint and paper and canvases. We cannot find an easel. We have come for a Spanish English dictionary for Costa Rica, since all their words are conveniently different from any I know. We have not yet found a book store, but we found a small section of books. There are children’s books that are completely uninteresting to my child prodigy. She chooses Nicholas Sparks.

When we got home last night she said, “I can’t believe how much more Spanish I’m speaking in just an hour!” (After talking to the little kids.)

Driving back from Liberia we had to stop because there were cows in the road. Seriously. Lots of cows. I had the ridiculous and paranoid thought, “Cows don’t attack, right?” No… they don’t…they just stand and look at you. Turns out, though, that the cows were not between Liberia and Playa Hermosa. I missed a turn. We were in Papagao, about 20 minutes down the road. I’m thinking about returning the car and walking more. Without a GPS I might as well. We talked in the car --- really talked, the way we do when it’s comfortable and easy and I’m remembering not to tell her what to do, but just to listen to her. We are trying to speak in Spanish and when I lapse into English she chides me. “No tienes hambre” she says. (You aren’t hungry.) I begin my Spanish teacher speak, “Oh, yo no TENGO hambre. Hmmm… yo no tengo hambre tampoco.” (I’m not hungry, either.)

When we get home Tuesday night she is wild about Floriana, the three year old, who spent most of the evening on her hip. She is happy that Floriana’s mother, Gloriana, really likes her and went on and on about how fond she already is of her. The three children in the family who are more or less her age (12-15) are not talking to her yet, but stood in her vicinity rather than shunning her all together and were involved in the conversation, though not in direct conversation with her. We’re talking about going dancing Saturday night and leaving all of the kids (3-15) with one of the Aunts, so they are all interested in the conversation. She is fine. She is at the very least beginning to make lemonade from lemons. I am encouraged and let my guard down a little. We are talking about cuddling and watching a movie before we go to bed and then getting up early to watch the bull dozers and be supportive of the family. We are chatting. We are having a good time. She is reveling in the feeling of having been understood in Spanish. “I thought it would be harder.” She is teasing me. We are smiling.

And then I make this enormous fumble. “It’s not too late. Let’s call your dad.”

By the time she is off the phone she is crying. She opens her email and reads a message from him and cries more and she starts to write back. “What mom is writing is bs.”

We look at the pictures. I have photographic evidence of her happy. I feel betrayed by the moment. What are the perfect things to say from far away to express enthusiasm instead of aching to a child who teeters on the edge of despair, but rarely falls in? I don’t know. I imagine if anyone else knew, they’d be saying those things.

She is genuinely miserable and it expresses herself through the two fingers she types with. It’s not enough to just tap it out. She has to make sure I read it, so I know that the only bright spot in her day today was Floriana. It’s not enough to be miserable. She has to be miserable at me. Even that’s not enough. She has to be dramatic, too. I know there will be more and more bright spots and I know that soon she will have friends here and it will be hard for her to leave them to come home, but to say that doesn’t sound prophetic, it sounds insincere. So instead I say, “Do you want to sleep in my bed?” So she watches Charlie’s Angels in Spanish with English subtitles and I fall asleep next to her.