Yesterday was a challenge in so many ways. The greatest being that while Jim was at church I was home, waiting in nervous anticipation for the repair guys from our local cable and internet provider. Our router had kicked the bucket.
The challenge, for me at least, is conducting the conversation entirely in Spanish. My brain seems to be unable to root out and replace my primary foreign languages of German and (way back) Cajun French with Spanish. A Tico will ask a question of me in Spanish and German will unknowingly spill out. Most annoying. I knew I was going to have to maneuver in a foreign language my brain hates so grievously.
When the phone call for ‘direccions‘ finally happened sure enough I stumbled along clumsily trying to find a way to tell the man we weren’t in Refundores proper or that near Coyolito. Finally I resorted back to that thing every male Tico seems to know. Go to the local house of ill repute, hang a right over the main road, take the next left, the gate is to the right and if you see the airport you’ve gone too far. It worked! He knew exactly where I was even as I was telling him the rights and lefts, even as he had not a clue without the guidepost of the local legal house of prostitution. I was able to simply utter “Soy aqui!” (or “I am here!“) and “A tortones abierto.” (“The gate is open.“) We were cooking with gas!
After they left and our internet connection came back up our phones exploded with phone calls from family in Louisiana. I don’t mind saying I cried during a few of them. Apparently I am not the only one being triggered by so many things in recent times. During some of these so uncomfortable phone calls I kept trying to point family members back to the North Star, the true guideposts on our journeys. It’s so hard to navigate without our true norths, and sometimes we forget what those things are.
For me it’s been my husband, my children, my art, the wild animals we are surrounded by, even as I hate to admit it, my belief in the divine. Why is it so hard to admit that one? Because of what so many mistake for the divine reduces it to a cheap parlor trick, or a petty being in service to those enmeshed in main character syndrome.