NICU

I am not sure what got me to thinking about this today. I had just dropped off Squink at school and I was driving to work, NPR was on talking about the presidential race and more fighting somewhere. I was driving past where I went to high school and...

BAM

The image of Squink's oxygen mask landed right smack in the middle of my thought.

And I was left feeling powerless.

Again.

I revisit Squink's stay in the NICU about once a year.  It always happens like this; I am going on with my life when something, anything, will provoke the BAM and an image will jump into my head.

There are many. they all look alike in a way. I think it is because there was very poor light in the NICU, with the exception of his glowing bili-blanket that cast a ghostly neon glow over things. It might be of him wearing protective eye covers, or with a needle in his head, the feeding tube in his nose, the APAP covering his face.

It is interesting that when that BAM image happens, that my whole body just goes back to those days and I feel helpless and scared. Even if I can see him right in front of me as a delightful seven year old, running and jumping,  laughing, and astounding me with his wisdom... I feel the same way I felt those first few weeks of his life when I thought that maybe if I held my breath that he would be able to begin breathing on his own.

If I am home when the BAM happens. I pull out a box of things I saved from that experience.His oxygen mask, so tiny and little, the heart monitor stickers that let us know how strong his heart was beating, the oxygen sensor that let us know if he was breathing enough, his little itty bitty hospital issue hat, or the eye covers he had to protect his eyes from the bili-light. I even have a piece of his feeding tube and the two stitched up strings that saved his life among his ultra sounds and, thankfully, his discharge papers.

I also saved a lot of things that did not fit in that box, things that were these gestures from strangers that still bring tears to my eyes.

Squink was in NICU over Christmas. Special items knit and sewn by church groups were handed to us on a regular basis. I treasure each and every one of those items. Some are made well, with beautiful straight stitches and evenly knit blankets. Others, are made as if the maker felt like they had to make sure that a blanket was available immediately, seams showing, awkwardly placed prints.... That doesn't matter though. I treasure each and every one of all of those blankets and hats. I picture groups of women sitting at home or in a group at their church; talking and laughing while they made these items that my son would some day use. That blanket that would cover his incubator, that hat that helped keep the needle stay put... In my mind these are the same women that fill craft bazaars at churches with their hand made goods. So, I seek them out. As I walk the tables with their wares on display I ask if they also help out hospitals with their goods and if say that they do, I buy something from them. I tell them that I am grateful. And that the unknown faces behinds each of those items I have saved in my armoire come from a woman like them and that this the only way I know to show my gratitude.

the dead and the most humble 13 cents of my life

I love day of the dead festivities.

However, I have a tough time adapting to the ones we have here in Arizona. They are fun and everything... but they just aren't the exact same dia de los muertos rituals I experienced growing up.

First of all I grew up calling it dia de los difuntos... which stylistically translates more into the day of the deceased rather than the day of the dead. Which in my Andean native cheekiness just sounds more reverent and polite... though, in all honesty I don't really prefer calling it one over the other.  The effect and sentiment is the same.

The general idea is that at this time of year, the veil between life on this earth and life in the "other world" is at its thinnest and that there is a chance for us to visit with loved ones that happen to be on the side opposite which we currently reside in.

I love the smells and colors and sentiments that seem to prevail during this time of the year. 

Where i grew up there are two principal items in terms of food. One is something called pan de guagua and the other is chicha morada. The pan de guagua is "baby bread" or "child bread" and they are bread rolls fashioned to look like bundled babies with colored sugar icing on them. The shape reminds me a lot of the pre-colombian dolls from that part of the world so I like to imagine it is a pretty ancient holdover that managed to survive those pesky conquistadores. The other, chicha morada, is a thick berry based juice-like drink. I have had it warm and I have had it cold. Its base is black berries, blue berries and cinnamon. In Ecuador there are a many other ingredients that one uses to create the beverage, my favorite of those being something called ishpingo. 

The last time I lived in Ecuador I talked the gardener/guard into helping me figure out how to make chicha morada. He arranged for me to go with him to the local street market to buy the items I needed. He walked me from stall to blanket to basket pointing out each item I would need asking about each deal he could get for me for the items, bargaining on my behalf in a rare form of quick Spanish. I certainly could have handled this myself, but there was just something about his demeanor and like he was so proud to be showing this semi-gringa the chicha morada ropes. When we went to buy the ishpingo, he became livid. He was violently angry and pulled me aside to tell me that I should go home because they refused to go down in price and they were charging me way too much. When I asked him the amounts in question it resulted in what would be a .03 cent difference. I am still so touched by how he needed my relationship with the Ecuador he knew to be fair, at least financially. This kind of event happened a few other times, once on the bus when I was charged about 10 cents more and the whole bus was about to mutiny and every other passenger yelled at the fee collector that he looked scared and gave me the change. I have been humbled by a collective 13 cents. It remains with me to this day.

but I digress.

So, we purchased everything and went back and I must have made what is equivalent to 30 gallons of the stuff. I have never been patient with thickening agents added in to food and it got to the point where I had such a thick slop of chicha morada that I had to water it down with more juice.

I returned the kindness by teaching the gardener how to make chocolate chip cookies. I used to make and sell them to tourist hangouts to make money, but would feed left overs to my family and the all servants.

And I confess, it is still hard for me to use the word servants in English... somehow it makes more sense to me that I was waited upon when I am thinking in Spanish.

Zun

Zun.

It was what I called my maternal grandmother. It was what many people called her. It was given to her by her husband, the man I call Grandpa Honey.

No one knows what Zun means. My grandfather, as far as I know, never provided an origin story of how he came to give it to her.

I have never thought to consider it to be anything other than that which encompassed her very nature. The name Zun fit her. She had plenty of other nicknames; Jackie was one I heard her called that was based on her maiden name and was used by those who grew up with her.

She was pretty wonderful as a grandmother. She saw fun and adventure everywhere. She traveled well, she enjoyed people, she was bright, and curious and was a wonderful seamstress. She had a joie d'vivre that was pretty catching.

Much of my life has her at its center.

She visited us regularly when my parents lived overseas. She gave me a doll once, and she had made all of her clothes and even the shoes. They were beautiful doll clothes that I played with until they were shreds of the grandeur they were.

One of the things that I most strongly associate with her is a set of sheets she had. The closest I can come to find are the one pictured below, but that is not it. Her sheets had a dark blue background.  I loved those sheets.

We lived with her after my parents separated and my mother brought my brother and I to the USA. I was terribly homesick for the country I grew up in most, I missed so many things. Those sheets helped soothe those feelings. I would lie in bed with Zun and watch television. She had a king size bed which felt huge to my little body and I would stretch out and put my fingers out flat and I would imagine I was back in the jungles that I was able to visit often. It was as if the caricature ferns on the sheets transformed into the real ones. The big leaves I used to pretend to be an elephant with  would magically appear in my hand as if just pulled off the plants that were pictured on the sheets.

The irony is that I did not live in the jungle, though we were able to visit often.

Those sheets reminded me of my old home as I was trying ever so desperately to get used to my new one.

Walking on broken glass

When I was growing up I loved to play outside. The house we lived in that I most fondly remember sat in the middle of the property with what seemed like huge yards on each side. As this house was in the capital city of a third world banana republic there were some very interesting protective measures that were used to prevent thieves, robbers and even the possible kidnapper (as this was another concern my parents had and seems so much more real as it was about my brother and me, I may return to this later).

On the wall that separated our home from the street were these huge shards of broken glass. They were similar to the one pictured above, though that is not the wall I am referring to. I would often walk the long potions of the wall, maneuvering my small, child sized feet around the broken bottle tops and bottoms, as well as the pieces of plate glass mixed in with other random sharp projectile objects. It was beautifuly made. The cement they were inbedded in was surprisingly smooth and easy to walk on, considering the glass shards that were decorating its surface. Even all these years later, I can still vividly recall moving my feet, gently, slowly, carefully around the pieces. watching my lanky legs poke from under my skirt as I moved one foot in front of the other. I loved doing this and would do it every chance I could, often making sure my parents were not around as they would stop me from this adventurous activity.

All these years later I can recall those images  of my feet and how I placed my foot around each shard of glass and have come to believe that I was performing some form of a walking meditation, a walking prayer, as I navigated the sea of glass on those walls. It felt so pure to do that, I have no recollection of fear nor of worry.... just, that I found deep solace from the upheavals of my youth in navigating a sea of multicolored broken glass.

Teen Age Angst

When I was much, much younger and fancied myself as a quirky intellect deep in the blush of my first blossom into a quirky artist intellectual adulthood. I would have adored this photo and placed it upon my bedroom wall next to this portrait of  Mastroianni and above a picture of a young Sophia Loren, looking simple yet glamorous in a pair of capri pants and perhaps below a picture of Lou Reed. In rather close proximity to a picture of Ziggy Stardust... most of which were ripped from the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. You get the picture?

All my youthful pretentious glory; a high school girl with her wall covered in posters of European Actors, book covers of French existentialists, and random objects, found and loved; like a feather found while walking with a cute boy, a plastic necklace worn to a particular party, prints that I somehow loved. This photo of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir somehow escaped the honor of my high school bedroom walls.

There are times when I reflect on the younger me and wonder where I steered so off course from the me I seemed to have been. I no longer really look at Vanity Fair. I find the French existentialists to be more amusing than provocative. Sophia Loren is still considered beautiful, but somehow it seems that it was at some cost and the beauty is ever so slightly tarnished in my eyes now. The musicians still intrigue, but they grew older as I did, and my youthful impressions of them are tempered now as well.

And after all this, I am left to wonder why I never placed pictures of Scott Baio or John Stamos or other cut outs and "free posters" from magazines like Tiger Beat?