CR121409, 6pm

SYNOPSIS: Rescuing kitties and puppies and monkeys and mermaids and children and in the process each of us finds ourselves.

Thou rememb'rest
Since once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Oberon at II, i)

THE METEOR SHOWER

I am sitting on the roof of the house in Costa Rica, carefully and gently negotiating the roof tiles. Kassidy is in the crook of my arm and I hear her gasp quietly as she sees the first meteor fall from the sky.
I want to shake the package of her future to see what’s inside and to see how much of her is made of memories made at 2am while the earth spins past shattered fragments of heaven.


FINDING GOLD AT PLAYA PANAMA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

This week a 3rd grader I had never met walked up to my waist without tilting her head to see who I was and wrapped her arms around me and stayed while I rubbed her back. This week I tried to be a quiet bystander on the outskirts of the elementary school here, but the desire to be who I am bubbled out of me like passion. I took the kids not directly involved with the arts and crafts Christmas project who were milling about aimlessly waiting for the bus and made them stand up and sit down about 75 consecutive times. Kassidy, familiar with this process, was writing the words I was teaching on the white board behind me. I am so remarkably, staggeringly out of my element teaching elementary age kids instead of high schoolers or adults, but it was still so much fun. The teachers were amenable to my returning and teaching English when the school year starts next February.

My Spanish teacher friends, I got gold. I asked the kids to talk about their school, their favorite classes, their friends, their families. They sat two at a time on a chair and spoke slowly and smiled. Then I asked them to show me their classroom. They were instinctively comprehensible. They walked around pointing and saying, “This is the chalkboard where the teacher writes. This is the other chalkboard where the teacher writes.” It was very cute and very perfect. My Christmas project is to figure out how to load them up so that they can be used.

PUPPIES AND KITTIES AND FLEAS, OH MY!

Kassidy volunteered at the CARE spay and neuter clinic on Saturday, while I made a terrible faux paux. She picked up a flea-ridden stray puppy and nuzzled it to her chest and pet it. I told her not to because the fleas were crawling all over it. The woman who runs the clinic regarded me with nothing short of disdain while telling me, basically, to get over it. They were all covered with fleas and she had been here all day already. No cure for it but a hot shower. There’s something in my daughter that I did not put there, and there is a tolerance in her that I lack. It’s really amazing to watch how generous and gentle she is with tick-ridden, fluid seeping animals. She captured two of the three kittens from the grounds that are cared for by the day guard and brought them in to be spayed and neutered. When we brought them home so drugged they appeared to be dead, she nursed them in a kennel overnight and returned them to the guard in the morning. Her eyes were puffy and red and swollen in spite of the Benadryl.

FINDING A MERMAID

So Saturday, as I was driving back

(Okay… seriously… it’s a REALLY good story but, and I’m not kidding… a congo aullador (howler monkey) just fell from an electric cable by the guard’s station. We have already returned the rental car so we’re going to walk down in the dark and see if there’s anything we can do. You just can’t make these things up.)

So Saturday, as I was driving back from Playa del Coco for the third time, feeling like a soccer mom whose kid’s sport is collecting stray cats, the traffic began to slow because there was a barely dressed woman crying on the side of the road. The truck in front of me stopped and the drivers got out. I pulled over and got out. She was not hurt, but she was sobbing and she was in a bikini. Deciphering Spanish through choking sobs is not a skill I’ve practiced and it was actually the drivers who interpreted what she said for me. What did not require much cross-cultural understanding is that you don’t put a naked woman in a truck with men. So, a minute later she was in my car. She and her boyfriend had had a fight and she was scared so she told him to let her out of the car. I told her I felt like I had found a mermaid on the side of the road. She spent the ride back to her hotel screaming into the phone at her boyfriend about being fed up with his drugs and hitting her in the face and saying mean things, but she later told me he never hit her, he just said mean things about how no one has ever loved her and he’s the only one who doesn’t abandon her. Their next conversation was her assuring him that the people at the hotel would not know what had happened and think badly of him. By the time I dropped her off at the Hilton by the airport in Liberia, I was sure she would have dinner with him and that she probably wouldn’t kick him out of her hotel room tonight. Mermaids have to want to swim away before they can really be free.

THE SHOCKING STORY OF THE CONGO AULLADOR (HOWLER MONKEY)

We are leaving for San Jose in 14 hours. We should be finishing packing and going to bed early. Instead Kassidy is hurrying with such drive her feet remind me of when she was little and we would spontaneously drop everything to seek whatever adventure her imagination was captured by that moment. We are walking to the guard station in the dark with a camera and a head lamp and a cell phone, to try to figure out what you do with an electrocuted monkey. The congo aullador fell from a branch and grabbed the live wire on his way down. Our friend Heather pulled up with her three small children and we all quietly marveled at him. He was moaning and trying to get up. He looked exactly as one might imagine a drunk monkey. Confused and disoriented and compelled to get in his car even though someone had taken his keys already. One of the three kittens that lives down there, too, was apparently curious and sat a meter away from him, staring calmly. The congo would get up and stagger and occasionally notice her, but no matter how close he came, the kitten wouldn’t move. He tried to climb the rake propped against the guard house, thinking it was a tree. The guard caught it on its way down. Hmm… that’s not a tree. Are you a tree? We called a neighbor who said she would call the monkey rescue place, but he was already responding to the deep howl that was calling him home. Since we had been there, we had been hearing the howler monkey in the tree. It’s the alpha who hollers so that everyone can stay together. Once they lost this one, they stopped and waiting and howled. He took several breaks on his way to the tree. He would stagger and then stumble and rest on his chin for a few seconds and then try again. He never appeared to be even peripherally aware of us watching. He climbed the tree and rested on the lowest branch. Hurt as he was, he would make his way back to that howl and the howler family would sit and wait and howl until he did.

It’s funny that this week tidied itself up so nicely in a little theme. In the process of rescuing, each of us had been led to our passion. Me in an environment with fleas and ticks and mange – nyuh uh. But Kassidy seems entirely comfortable there and also driven to capture and care for them. Her compassion leaks from her face and reaches from her hands. I didn’t even know how much teaching was a part of me until I was in front of kids who were telling me that they knew their numbers up to 60 and they knew how to say all of the animals in English. She’s an artist and a writer and singer and an actress. But she was also the kid who dissected a dead garter snake in our backyard a couple of years ago. So… maybe she’ll be an artist / veterinarian.

We are on our way back to Colorado for Christmas. Thank you for keeping up the howling all this time.