Memory Chutes, Chronicle One

Chronicle One, from a collection of memoirs I wrote last year

I want to remember it all, I want to remember because, like every human being, I am trying to make sense of my life. I am trying to understand where it is that I currently stand, how I got to be who I seem to be. I don’t know yet. The life of a wanderer has made my memories foggy, and in fact, I often believe my memory is poor when it comes to facts and particular events. A friend asks “Remember that time when…” I stare back blankly. I don’t remember.

The life of a wanderer is fragmented. It is a kaleidoscope of memories, of déjà vous and sometimes even the lines between reality and past dreams becomes foggy. Often times, I fail to remember what actually happened. I am seeking out emotional memory, physical memory, cognitive memory because I want to feel more whole. I want to distinguish my identity and in this probing, reflecting and conjuring, memory is of utter importance. Finding and reflecting on memories is relating histories to my identity. Memory gives us a sense of where we have come from, what life events have added up to bring us to the time of now. Seeking memory is seeking truth, my personal truth. Seeking memory is connecting the dots and reaching out from a place of isolation to share and reflect through writing.

Up a Ladder
When I first arrive back to Tequisquiapan, a pastel colored town in northern Mexico, I want to remember it all, I want memories forgotten to jump back to life, to remind me of something I have forgotten. On a bench in a windless plaza, I sit in the last moments of dusk staring with glassy eyes at the looming colonial church in front of me. I’ve known this church since I was seven, but all I can remember is that it is pink. The façade is lit up with winking neon colors tracing the edges, and I notice that some of the light bulbs, like my memories, are missing, leaving dark and mysterious spaces. The stars behind the church are in competition with the street lamps and a balloon peddler is struggling to keep her shiny globos from flying away into that starry sky, now an indigo blue. With the other hand she is trying to smooth down her static anemone-like hair.

I am photographing a nut stand next to a hat stand next to a postcard stand; a home made wooden apparatus with roughly made separate boxes for each varying kind of nut. Tilting splintery shelves and slippery plastic baggies overflow with cashews, peanuts, walnuts, and almonds, which are dusted in an unearthly shade of electric red powdered chili, just waiting to burn holes in my northerly tongue. A man selling old magazines, chuckles at me beneath his mustache as he notices me buying a handful of peanuts, cautiously chewing on a few at a time; my mouth and lips begin to burn familiarly. And then, the memories flood in.

Down a Chute
Seven years old, Tequisquiapan, Mexico. I am sitting on a latticed metal chair in my grandparent’s back patio. The chair is still cool from the night, and my feet don’t quite touch the ground. Dewy bougainvillea cascades down the interior of the fenced in garden, a little lizard basks on the terracotta floor in a ray of morning sunlight, his eyes darting around in his slick head. I am eating cereal with watermelon, and I’ve already stained my pale sun faded shorts. Grandma Dorothy is inside in her rocking chair, it creaks as she pumps her thick ankles up and down on the cement floor. She is sewing another quilt. This time the quilt is for me; it is embroidered with plaid flowers and little lacey angels to protect me from the bad dreams I’ve been having. I’m afraid that she will see my shorts, because grandma can be really mean sometimes. When she’s really mad about something, her rocking becomes swifter and it seems she might lift right off the ground like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz but when I picture her with ruby slippers she doesn’t seem so grumpy.

The sun climbs the sky, hot on my freckled face and the air smells like the neighbor is cooking something with cumin. My mother is back with my older brother, she walks breezily towards me with a faint smile, she is wearing another one of her Mexican outfits which just embarrass my father, but this is always how I’ve remembered her, so I like them because they remind me of sunshine and mother’s skin. She sits next to me and fusses over my shorts. I’ve ignored my cereal, too distracted by the exotic lizard on the wall and I rummage through the paper bag she has just arrived with. Arroz, leche, bananos, and something I don’t recognize. I rip the little plastic baggie open, they look like peanuts but they are so red! I think. I eagerly pop a handful into my mouth, “uh oh” my mom looks at me. A few seconds pass and suddenly my mouth and lips are on fire and hot tears roll down my bellowing cheeks. Mamma rushes to bring me a glass of milk and now I’m OK. She says I’ve just tried my first mani con chili, peanuts with chili pepper, and that I’m a big girl now. The peanuts were for Grandma Dorothy, who, not unlike me, liked a little spice in her life.

Later that day I explore the crowded town square, running through packs of rainbow winged pigeons with my brother, making them take to the bright blue sky. I distinctly remember staring at a small group of women squatting on a corner stoop, striped rebozos wrapped around their worn shoulders while they scooped fried black beetles into hand made tortillas and took big toothy bites, shoveling skillfully with their thumbnails.

Thumbnails and Chipped Bowls
Fat spattered in a greasy fish pan, with crackling and sizzling spiny fins and salty scaly skin; the trout lay with their eyes frozen, jaws ajar displaying little jagged teeth. I would later pick tender meat from their bones and put one’s head on a plate. A twin pot sat bubbling, as steaming water cooked little lumpy potatoes while they turned and spun in the boiling water, as if playing, skins rubbing and bumping, clean and squeaky, spongy inside. I love potatoes. Outside haze gathered grey against the mountain skyline, chilling whipping winds suddenly would pass through, bringing with them a hollow noise to the Otavalan village of Peguche. The kitchen was balmy and glowing and the ever-hissing claw footed gas stove sat in the center, with its greasy knobs emitting a gentle scent of lime and quinoa.

The peeling robin’s-egg-blue door creaked small centimeters back and forth in the Andean breeze, as our host mother finished the final touches to our last meal of the long day. The floors were cement and discolored with dark circles of soaked oil stains, especially around the stove. We all sat down at a wooden table in a warm stillness away from the winds on the other side of the walls. Occasionally we would exchange glances, smiles, and many slow nods. The mother emerged from the kitchen, her long braid swinging behind her, carrying chipped bowls filled with steaming broth, stringy slippery chicken and whole potatoes soaking, bobbing in a sea of quinoa, cilantro and chive. The steam spiraled up into my face, I closed my eyes, and I instantly remembered being a child and my Ecuadorian neighbor, David, saying his mealtime prayer; I could hear his voice in my head: “ en el nombre del padre, del espiritu, del santo, Amen.” I remember his daughter, my best friend Ana’s black eyes flashing.

The family watched me from the corner of their dark eyes as I lifted a bent spoon to my mouth, dribbling liquid in: delight, warming like a hot garden of earth and herb. Abuelita chuckled in agreement as she spooned the comforting liquid into her smiling mouth. She continued by skillfully popping juicy corn kernels from their steaming buttery cob with her thick thumbnail, popping them like “little doves” into the baby’s boquita. The family sighed and the insects outside sang our meal blessing accompanied by no other noise but the clanking of cutlery against bowl, against tooth or table and the pleased coo’s of the cinnamon skinned baby in abuelita’s lap.

Some seven years earlier I was sitting, knees bent to my chest, with a group of leathery skinned village woman in the Karen hill tribe of Thailand. A bowl, plentiful with very large fried beetles was being passed around as an afternoon snack. When the beetles were passed to me, the only thing I could focus on besides the terror of eating an insect, was a large and porous chip in the inside of the bowl. I remember the village eyes on my face, and the moment of feeling the insect’s spindly brittle legs scratching my throat as I swallowed it whole after one horrifying crunch. I was disgusted in the way fourteen year old girls do best, yet with all my might I tried to conceal this, I smiled and wanted to prove that I could overcome a glaring cultural difference, that I, an adolescent American girl, too could throw my head back and laugh while popping salty black beetles into my mouth as an afternoon snack.

Earlier that morning it was frogs, I watched our host mother cook them at five a.m. I’m not joking. Sleeping was of no use due to the abundance of roosters that were kept in a bamboo pen under where I slept on the floor next to my mother. One of them couldn’t crow like most roosters do, he tried persistently all through the earliest hours of the dawn but never reached the highest “doo” of the “cocka-doodle-doo.” (Personally, I always thought “ki-ki-ri-kee” a better version.) Squatting, she tossed the frogs with skill, moving around her wooden spoon in the skillet, thick with boiling liquid oil, child strapped to her back, her few teeth a deep red from chewing betel nut. And the light! The morning light that filtered in through the dancing leaves of the almond and banana trees was almost ethereal…but Thailand is another story. I am merely following my nose into the labyrinth of my memories, as one leads to another.

How funny memory works, how it stops and goes how it flows from one image to the next. Of chipped bowls and thick thumbnails, of chutes and ladders; to a place where a soft breeze, a thick smell, a strand of hair, an emotion almost impossible to describe in words, and most often, where the many characters of light, live.