the returnthe decline and fall from ripeness of autumn. Trees trapped by lamposts cast lines of gleaming orange paillettes over walkways.
I take the bait every time. Hungry for image, folding myself into strange public positions, I am determined to capture a perfect angle.
The ducks and geese are back on the pond. The beaver who has appeared for three seasons and is rumored to have been transported and dumped in the city-locked waters still builds and rebuilds his lodge as if for family. At dusk he skims the waters like a fat little submarine.
In silence the dark-haired boy looks up while his teacher explains this is his last art class. Wordlessly I stare into infinite pools of deepest brown while he scans my face, ever-vigilant for the slightest shift. I hear the teacher say that she and her staff just found out themselves- in two days he goes back to Oaxaca.
The boy is deaf; lip-reads Spanish. Like many Hispanic deaf children, he leaves us wondering: how much can truly be heard; which language is most comprehensible; which abstract system of word is uttered or pictured inside to make sense of the outside world.
Perhaps none... perhaps neither is needed on the inside when you have a direct line to truth of experience.
Some of the children are mute. They do not speak, but do hear.
Once upon a time a little girl and I communicated over the course of years by my talking and her eye expressions and acting. Once in a while she would whisper, barely audibly, a few phrases in the language of her family. But this was quite rare and was quickly carried away like the breeze.
One day she left as well, pulled out as if by root. The hope is that she is a sturdy bulb who will bloom again in Spring.
In my mind's eye I see the boy crossing the main plaza in Oaxaca, el zócalo, with his mamá. Scene of human gatherings and drama for over 500 years, it is said to be one of the most beautiful public spaces anywhere and ever. His father will stay here, en el norte, to work and send money back home. Mamá has become homesick for family; the story, cliché by its repetitive warp and weft through so many lives.
I try to imagine him in school in Oaxaca. Could there possibly be an equivalent level of special services for children there to that which he has received here?
He is in first grade. For two years he has come to art class, the first in a group of six children in preparation for the transition into a full first grade class of children who hear. He has done so well.
Googling yields a report from the past spring describing the occupation of the school for special needs children during a protest that echoed back to the Oaxaca of 2006, when extreme unrest and violence held the city hostage for months. This latest event must have terrified the children.
And he is dark, not fair. Another strike against him there. Or three.
Music blares, ground fireworks suddenly shoot off three feet away. I feel the spirit of the plaza raise me up while marchers performing
Posadas and carrying
Guadalupes on litters made of heavy posts sway past the crowd. Around and around the stone square worn smooth by thousands of footsteps a day, they circle. This is Christmas Eve spent with strangers and it occurs to me I've never felt more at home.
The first woman I chatted with brings her friends over and introduces me. The women are either old or old before their time. They explain how far they've come from their villages, some very far, just to be here for this night. They wear their best black dresses.
They ask me about my life, well, about part of it, the most important: "Where is your man? Where is your husband?" Incredulous that I am here alone, they ask how I got here.
"By plane."
"But how did you afford the ticket?"
"I work- I teach, I bought it."
"Is it one-way?"
"No, señoras,
de ida y vuelta.....going and returning, round-trip."
The circle of women around me gasp as they repeat to each other, "de ida y vuelta,
¡dos boletos!"
"
Yes, two tickets, both ways."
As if rehearsed, the women start to pray for me, actually they pray for a husband to be sent. I take this as my cue to take leave- I have become conscious of other people starting to watch the healing the women are attempting to impose, and it all has become too much. I say goodbye, they bestow serial blessings as a send-off. Walking away, grateful to sink again into the anonymity of the crowd, I can still hear them praying.
