And we are put on earth a little space,
William Blake
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
…………..
“Okay, Ally.”
“¿Ya?”
“Sí.”
“Wow… y entonces,” I pause theatrically, “…el tercer dia está cumplido.” And so, the third day is completed.
“Okay,” he says, not one for theatrics. The Honduran accent makes “okay” sound like a singsongy “o-kie,” universally, not just with Ever, and I still never know how to read it. But it seems an anticlimactic end given the reams of hype and testimonies.
Until he continues, “Y ahora, puede caminar sin esas.” And now you can walk without those.
Okay, now that’s too climactic. “¿En serio?”
“Sí.” He remembers who he’s talking to. “Pero… despacio, Ally.” But…slowly.
After two weeks of crutches in the tropics, my instinct is to bound up the closest palmed monte. But I resist now.
…………..
The fateful fall was a Saturday morning, during my usual running laps around the perimeter of the Finca property. The fourth stretch of every lap is my favorite one, where the ocean is steady beside you the whole time. When it’s early like this, its amazonite water is served gently on one infinite platter, hushing onto sand and horizontal tree trunks.
I should be honest about how I know that.Though I say the fourth stretch is my favorite—and it’s true, I’m quite certain something Caribbean runs through these veins despite my pasty appearance—I’m often running right past it, headphones blaring, thinking too seriously about something temporary, or, more immediately, trying to drown out the desire to stop running so fast. Sometimes the sunrise makes me notice. But truly I can only describe the stretch in poetry because of the fact that recently I’ve done a lot of sitting, crutching, and now, thank God, walking.
It had been a misstep in some loose sand. The force of a stride only the ball of the foot is equipped to receive was suddenly lumbered onto the outer ankle. And, down goes Profa. If you must know, there had been Michael Bublé Christmas music playing in the headphones—in September, into the ear of a volunteer who’s heading back to her home country in December.
…………..
Back in July I started to walk a long lap in between my Kindergarten day and my first grade English class, instead of heading directly back to the classroom and drilling out as much prepwork as possible. It had been the natural routine of Amanda, a summer volunteer, unfazed by the fact that no other teacher did so during their free period. The rhythm made sense to me, my brain and limbs begged for it like restless puppy paws scratching the front door. And so I was emboldened to follow suit.
During one of my first prep-period caminatas, I saw Yoselin again. I had met Yoselin before when I had lunch with a student’s family, Yoselin being said student’s neighbor and aunt. Now she was sitting on a bench outside of our clinic.
My first inclination is a polite ‘Hola – ¿Cómo está? – ¡Que vaya bien! ‘type of exchange, that I may keep going to some abstract destination that suddenly felt particularly urgent.
It starts that way. She smiles, tells me she’s doing well. Just waiting for her twin sister. Yoselin’s a sixteen year-old girl radically gentle and free of pretense, which allows a Force beyond herself to place a firm-but-loving “complete and total BS” label on my urgency.
So I pause, go against my uglier impulses and invite the ringleted guru to join me on my walk in between classes. She nods and smiles and walks beside me. I ask questions. I hear in few details about how three of her brothers are now in South Carolina, Michigan, and Texas. I hear that her favorite class is science. I hear birds during natural pauses I’m always tempted to stuff or remove myself from but can’t this time, because we’re walking together, and because Yoselin is poor and that means there are less superficial buffers to ‘connect’ on, and I hear about how she too, above all else, loves the beach.
…………..
“Intenté seguir corriendo, pero me callí.
Casí lloré, pero no lloré.
Y yo saltaba y saltaba y saltaba a mi casa en solo un pie…”
I tried to keep running, but I fell. I almost cried, but I did not cry. And I hopped and hopped and hopped home on one foot…
These three lines of the story were the class favorites when I explained to the Kínder nuggets what happened, why my ankle was fat and purple and wrapped. Why I needed to use my “extra legs” to walk around now.
“Profa … se calló… y casí lloró,” (Profa… fell... and almost cried) Felipe reminds no one in particular as he sits on the step during recess, eating his way to probable future discomfort via a bag of spicy fried corn puffs. He isn’t laughing about my fall, like he’s done to his classmates who have bitten the dust, and not pitying of it, but moreso processing the whole happening rather reverently. Nothing will be cuter than the cool kid mask abandoned as he sees Profa a bit more clearly.
“Have you ever fallen, Felipe?” I ask him.
“…sí.” He looks at the ankle once more, and says, “¡Bueno, me voy!” and runs to the playground. Ah, youth. Eventually I crutch over as well.
Carla visits recess soon after with her infant daughter. The mother of my student Francisco, Carla is one of those people so sure of herself you can’t help but feel validated and pleasantly surprised every time she says your name, moreso if she says “Profa.” You almost forget you’re a flailing foreigner who has the togetherness of one of the five year-olds. After we chat a bit, Carla heads off to talk with the sixth grade teacher about something to do with hamburgers.
Meanwhile, the infant, Alexandra, remains in the playground–in the arms of brother Francisco, the 5 year-old personification of Curious George. Lil Georgie quickly tells me to take the her, praise the good Lord, as the tiny lifeform is already eating sand as her head hangs at a concerning distance from the soon-to-be-loaded seesaw. We do a wobbly handoff, the weight being mostly on my one foot, my crutches leaning against a nearby tree if I need them.
Correction: my crutches now helping Francisco pole vault to the swingset.
Leaving us here, the baby and the invalid me. Together planted in the middle of this crazy playground we won’t be leaving anytime soon.
And from here she looks at me, late morning skimming deep dark eyes as she just keeps looking at me. She’s beautiful. She doesn’t know what an ankle is or think that I am any less behold-able for it. I don’t feel repulsed by her inability to hold up her own head or control her bowels. “Today love smiled on me,” as the Chili Peppers song goes, and we’re complete, Alexandra and me. If this playground is a place subject to consequences of time and bodily woes, we are somewhere else right now now. Somewhere with beams for the bearing.
…………..
I have seen Yoselin a number of times since that July prep-period caminata, and I have unsuccessfully cancelled plans to hang out at the beach with her twice.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon. We decide on a time, I put it in my planner and everything, and then the day arrives and I suddenly am very overwhelmed and busy and ill and really clearly it’s the first thing that needs to go. So I walk over to the office, send her a message on WhatsApp apologizing for the last minuteness, but lamentablemente I’m not going to be able to go to the beach today after all.
Perhaps you’re a merciful reader. Plans can change! You’re human! You’re allowed to change your mind sometimes! Thank you, merciful reader. These truths certainly have their place. But in these instances I had made the right decision when I made the plans. Not from a place of pity or pride or obligation, but from the Place beyond me that knows what’s pointed toward our untouchable happiness. It’s beyond me, so me likes to convince me to run from it. Run for me life. No no, merciful reader, trust me when was I say I was just fine.
Yoselin lives from that Place, way more often that I do. I see meself validly running for me life, and she sees nothingness. Nothing to react to, nothing to hold against me. Pure nothing. Exhibit A: Both times that I cancelled the beach plans, someone knocked on my closed door thirty minutes later.
“Uh, Ally? Melvin just stopped by. He said Yoselin is waiting for you by the portón (front gate).”
…………..
Two weeks after the great fall of Profa, an hour after a baby enlightened me, I am sitting by the front gate with some of the Finca’s maintenance crew, waiting for the straggler parents to retrieve the Kínders. Since the fall, I had crutched up church aisles, through the streets and markets of Trujillo, around a remote mountain village clinic to translate for a medical brigade from Houston, around the kitchen to pat tortillas and fry plantains. I was transported from our house to our chapel two times in a wheelbarrow, one with the entire audience of a soccer game watching me instead, and the other with an entire Garifuna choir cheering me on.
And in every context, without fail, I was asked if someone had sobar-ed me yet. Having received the question approximately eighty times–and also after reading a few too many children’s books–I feel fit to state that “If you give a Honduran a girl on crutches, they will insist she be sobared” as anthropological truth.
Similar to massage therapy, sobar-ing involves any knowledgable someone rubbing, pushing, bending, kneading, pulling an injured area to stimulate healing. It’s also used for stomach issues to unblock sickly buildups. Our nurse told me she thought it could be dangerous, so I kindly sidestepped the question the first seventy-six times. Biomedicine, as you know, is contrary: Stabilize.Take ibuprofen. Ice the hot blood.
But the maintenance crew was tired of seeing the redhead still on crutches on account of her own stubborn head. You’d be already off of those by now! says the eighteen year-old José. Mario–who, since discovering my fascination with his fishing stories and with his willingness to scale enormous fruit trees for the sake of good juice, has become a trusted comrade–proves that his perpetual good-natured face is in fact freely chosen and not muscularly inevitable, as he frowns and says: Ally, I’m not joking with you this time. And Carlo, a mere handful of sentences between us in all of our days before, testifies, with the charisma of Obama, to the way his friend sobared his soccer-casualtied ankle back to normal in a matter of a few days. Security guard Melvin mentions that Hey Carlo, isn’t your friend Ever, the guys who’s coming to pick up this straggler Kínder kid?
A man named Ever walks forty minutes in the sun to pick up his five year-old from school, only to be bombarded by four Honduran men telling him he ought to massage the dirty mass of my ankle. And he says sure, why not.
Professional, careful, scared me says, “Thank you, but I need to think about this some more.” I pray on it. I call the next morning.
…………..
The next morning a man named Ever walks forty minutes in the sun to pick up his five year-old from school and sobar the dirty mass of my ankle. Kínder ends halfway through the normal schoolday, meaning the majority of schoolchildren are still in session, many pooling all around our stump-legged bench to see the grand show. I offer sheepish waves, and silent prayers the little urchins promptly skedaddle. A lot of people scream during sobaring sessions, I’ve been told, and I don’t want to lose any semblance of professional credibility I might’ve managed to keep despite everything. You see, I’m very professional.
Profa Daniela, the school principal, shoos away the urchins with a gust of authority, leaving us with our little gang of: Tomas the security guard who has a kid in my class, Lina who lives just around the corner who has a kid in my class, Ever the sobador who of course has a kid in my class, and Daniela, my boss. As I said, very professional.
Ever sits down in a chair across from me, has me put my foot (which I’ve just scrubbed down with a WetWipe with about 40% success) on his knee. And now I’m very uncomfortable, but I can hardly bail now.
So scar tissue meets unafraid, attentive hands. My ankle’s like yeast and flour and water, kneaded by some instinctual dance into its vocation. I look up at the cell phone towers on top of the mountain, hours away from this bench, the ones we climbed to on the day Ruthie’s friends became people I knew. I scan the horizon of the bay and distant ports, concentrate enough to actually hear the waves, ask a question when I think of one.
“Cómo aprendió como sobar?” How did you learn how to sobar?
“Pues, por mirando.” Well, by watching.
I watch, too. Lina and Daniela express incredulity that I’m barely flinching. Truthfully, somewhere along the way I forgot that it was supposed to be uncomfortable at all. The caffeinated hamster in my head stepped off the wheel and discovered mediation, or therapy, or God.
At the end of the session, I try to pass Ever some payment for this grand service, but he chuckles and shakes his head in resolute refusal. I don’t like this. I realize this is how Grandma feels each time she discovers my dad once again has stealthily covered her check at Olive Garden, the simultaneous gratitude and “But… but…What deceit! How dare you!” when being taken care of feels too squirmy to surrender to. Later upon giving a temple massage to one of the Finca’s migrained housemothers I’ll understand the mutual healing of these things, but right now I resignedly thank Ever, and scheme to bring a Coca Cola next time instead of cash.
We decide on a time when he’ll come back the next morning, as the process must be three days long, like any good archetypal storyline. In the meantime, he adds, I ought to keep walking with crutches.
And two days later, he tells me to walk without them.
Two weeks later, Ever walks forty minutes in the sun to bring his entire family to my birthday party on the beach. I cut him an extra large chunk of chocolate cake and pour an extra large vaso of Coca Cola and still silently marvel at whatever Goodness moved him to get his hands all foot-dirty for my sake.
There’s a Garifuna man in Trujillo who’s legendary for his sobaring mastery, who has a nearly impeccable history of recoveries. His secret, they say, is that he sobars the opposite ankle, shoulder, cheek, intestine, brain, political party, etc. in order to heal the sick one. And it works. Now I had been trying in various ways to scientifically explain this whole sobar-ing business, in terms of circulation or mobility or something, until I heard this particular nonsense and remembered science was never my forte anyway.
Thus, I stick with my initial suspicion: that sobaring heals by the “we’re okay”-ness of pure human touch, and by the helpful constraint of not being able to run away for once.
………
Both times I cancelled beach plans with Yoselin and she showed up anyways, I have been immediately, ungracefully, rattled– “Wait…what… I don’t understand…”–and then I have been driven to prayer. And the soft still voice from the Place beyond me responded, more or less: Go to the damn beach, Ally.
In the most recent instance of said phenomenon, I meet Yoselin at the portón and we hug as if the WhatsApp message never happened. We walk in steady rhythm along dirt roads to Mojagway’s tiny oceanfront swingset, swing a bit and talk about boys and motorcycles, then meander toward the more rugged and open part of the beach I’d always wanted to explore but didn’t.
As usual, I’m transfixed by the water. This turquoise expanse always looks happy to meet me, like Captain Von Tripp’s edelweiss. I watch it, and breathe with it. And I’m struck that right now I cannot imagine a more glorious circumstance: two feet in the ocean with the easy company of a true friend. A friend who could’ve certainly justified judging me an asshole by now, but didn’t, and showed up anyways. And I remember how hard I tried to run away from this.
Meanwhile Yoselin searches among the litter piles left behind by higher tides.
She comes up with a complete oyster shell and hands it to me.
“¿Piensa que hay una perla?” I ask. You think there’s a pearl?
“A ver.” We see. There isn’t.
We wander over to a freshwater pond not far from the shore, and find within it hundreds of tadpoles leaping around each other in some tranquil mayhem. We put our toes in, and I watch the half-baked froggies, wondering what they look like up close.
“Quiero poner uno…en la concha,” I voice after a bit. I want to put one… in the shell. “¿Como una perla negra, verdad?” Like a black pearl, am I right?
Yoselin nods, laughs in amusement. (She’s growing accustomed to the strange poetic antics of this giant Gringa, you see.) I give it a go, and all the targeted tadpoles very promptly dart away, sensing some danger instead of someone who is simply moved to appreciate them.
“¿Puedo?” chimes Yoselin. May I? I hand her the shell.
Almost immediately, one tadpole swims too far into the shallows. Stuck in the sand, physically unable to dart, lil homie’s embraced by the marble throne of an oyster shell and passed to my care, held closely to my eyes to behold.
In this oyster shell, this dark living pearl becomes a pocket mirror. And I laugh, caught in this beam I’m learning to bear.