A Hint of Vanilla  

6/20/15

Maíz, cocoa and vanilla: Teclo had learned to farm from his seven older brothers. His paternal great grandparents had come from the South, far, far distances where they harvested only cocoa. His maternal great grandparents were builders having labored on a temple to the Sun.

Escuela was what the Spaniards called it... Teclo was curious. Unlike the older members of his extended family, he was restless.

The Aztec culture was not forgiving of men who did not work. Late one night, Teclo escaped- that's how it felt to him. A month later he was a temple keeper at a school attached to a Spanish fortress near Mexico City.

His great great-grand-children became teachers...

****

Juanita decided... She had a plan. She was sixteen and she was going to colegio. She put her hair up in a bun, put on loose clothes and told her parents she had accepted her aunt's invitation to live with her in Mexico City. She was getting on a bus in an hour with money she earned from baby-sitting. Her parents and six bothers and four sisters were only mildly surprised. Juanita had been doing her own thing since she was born - and being that she was the youngest, the family remembered her adventures. ‘Send us a postcard from Mexico City,’ they all embraced her lovingly. A few tears later she was on her way.

Juanita had to get off the farm her great, great, great grandfather had built in Quaxalca.

Not that her family was poor - the spacious house and barns were always whitewashed; the harvest was well managed. There was always plenty to eat and most importantly, there was always an interesting book her uncle Francisco, the sacerdote loaned her from his parish library. Then there were the books she borrowed from everyone she met- everyone who owned a book that is. And that was not everyone.

Juanita read late into the night, every night. Her hunger to know the bigger world of Shakespeare, of Milton of Einstein of Freud and Jung of Freda Kahlo kept growing like a fierce and famished beast.  Her parents had been good to her. They gave her a healthy sense of herself and of her ability to do whatever it was she put her mind to doing.

Life in Mexico City led to challenges Juanita only half expected. Such is life, she thought. You could plan and study and then caramba! life could turn on a peso.

After two years at an all-girls preparatory school where she had gotten a scholarship, Juanita was off to New York University on a full work -study scholarship.

That was fifty-five years ago.

‘Maria, rub my back.’ Por que mi abuela no me pregunta en Español? I have told my grandmother, Abuelita Juanita, over and over I am trying to keep up my Spanish.

When I have kids, they will be bilingual. Maybe they will even learn French and Italian. Language acquisition is crucial to brain development. The more languages, the stronger the thinking. The more thinking ability, the easier this crazy life would be.

Or maybe not.

It bothered Maria on some semiconscious level that there might be a flaw in her logic - she ignored it because her work was built on this concept.

That ignoring created more and more of a nagging feeling in her gut.

Raised by her abuela since her mother disappeared when she was four years old, Maria was a hard-working, caring, young women...

How many countless hours did she spend imagining her mother would reappear?!

A couple of times her abuela got a postcard from Maria's mother from Mexico: No promise of return to the family in New York.

When she was younger, Maria had imaginary fights with her mom. At the end she always forgave and welcomed her mother back.

Maria was up late last night working on her master’s thesis: Early Childhood Educational Intervention for the Inner-City Latina.

She worked through exhaustion after her boyfriend left close to midnight. Now she had to get to work as a waitress.

******

Frank was pissed off. His wife had just left him. She took the kids and said she wanted a divorce. Yeah, he drank a little. OK maybe a little too much. He never hit her. What the hell did she want? A saint? Yeah... That's what she wanted... a fucking saint... Jesus!

Frank loved to cook. It was not that it was just his job. He lived for making each plate look like a work of art. That was more his thing than flavor. He called this his love of cooking.

When he put the wilted vegetables into the salad, the first order of the morning – ‘who the hell eats a salad at 7 am?!’ He almost re-did the order.  That customer will never notice. I'll mix them in so it will look all nice - beautiful. Hey, a I'm an artist - that guy is lucky to have food prepared by someone like me.

His anger colored his thinking.

Frank forgot that if his manager saw the rotten vegetables, Frank could lose his job. And Frank - as much as he hated to admit it - really, really needed this job. It wasn't easy for an ex-con to go straight.

******

The speck in the water glass annoyed Joe. Maria had seen it, but she was too preoccupied to bother to replace it. The customer will ask for a fresh one if it bothers him enough. She was usually a much better Maria. Today, right now she was another Maria, the harried, over- worked, under-appreciated heir of a rich legacy of adventure and discovery. All Maria wanted to discover right now was a quiet place to rest.

Joe asked for a fresh glass of water. The wilted vegetables- should he complain? When Joe walked into the restaurant he was already off balance- unsettled by... You name it.

Joe knew - whatever the situation was- it was at least half his fault. The angrier he felt the more he knew in his gut it was mostly his fault - his doing. Usually that made him guilty and angrier still. He made no progress with it. In fact he often felt he made no progress with anything: his cholesterol, his weight, smoking... He had quit and has been smokeless for a year. OK so he did have one little success. He knew he was in the habit of all or nothing thinking. Cognitive distortion. He had read about it at the suggestion of his court-ordered shrink. He knew he also overvalued the negative and undervalued the positive. This filtering prevented him from seeing the way things are. He knew about Cognitive Therapy, but the knowledge was in his head, not in his awareness. Maybe someday, if he could just notice things sooner before he did and said things, he wished later that he had not.

While he was lost in these self-analytics he often tripped on the street or made some other careless mistake. Or did not pay attention to his wife.

Once, it surprised Joe: he was furious about someone having disrespected him. He remembered that he usually got the most angry when it was his fault.

Poof... the anger was gone, evaporated.

Wow. If it happened once it could happy again.

But not... now:

Before going to the restaurant, Joe was reading about beheadings, crucifixions and other horrific crimes perpetrated by ISIS. Was there something to be learned from the insane sociopathic focus of zealots and martyrs? Without being cynical, angry, frightened or intimidated?

At his usual 5 am, Joe awoke anxious about not having defended himself with a parent at the school where he teaches. He was letting himself be bullied; was afraid to give the daughter the low marks she had earned. He decided he will talk to the class about their need to ask and answer questions. Did he really believe that or was he just kowtowing to DOE bureaucratic dogma? Joe was uncomfortable requiring very quiet children to verbally participate. ‘Is it not my job to stretch them out of their comfort zones? Yes and I want to do this in a gentle way, not by making them uncomfortable: lecturing them, giving them low grades, being angry. There must be more caring ways. I already encourage discussions between neighboring students at least once per period. It is my hope that as very quiet students become more comfortable speaking with their peers, they will participate in full class discussions. This feels compassionate - and right and simple. "Best to take the simplest path when more than one path is available." Where did I hear that? Seems like a good idea. Oh yeah: Ockham’s razor.

"Now what about the overly high grades? After today's Pop Quiz that may not be an issue." Was that revenge? - an ugly emotion. 

Joe was anxious about having said too much to his boss, not having been firm enough with his students who test his boundaries. Joe was feeling guilty about having taken out his bad moods on people who had nothing to do with his internal landscape.  He was upset by an article about teachers who were convicted of improper contact with students- the woman had sex with five boys... One made a video - which he put online - of her giving him oral sex. The male teacher gave alcohol and cigarettes to seven girls with whom he had sex. The article said the students saw them as friends instead of teachers because they taught easy classes and gave everyone an A. This all made him very, very uneasy. ‘I've got to stop giving the kids cigars. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...Just kidding.’ The humor did little to soften his agitation and insecurity.

Of course he was still carrying around self-esteem problems he got from his parents. He was carrying around fifty years of bad feeling. He tended to focus on the negative and undervalue the positive... Oh he had been thinking of that today already. He had an awareness of this but did not understand why he kept up this counter-productive habit. Maybe that was it - just habit.

****

Maria was in a worse mood. She had just had a fight with Frank over orders two other customers had sent back. She could feel bad Karma multiplying around her.

Then... the roof started to leak. As he felt the first drops on his head, Joe was surprised that unlike in years past when he would have felt that it was the last straw and lost his cool... what he did, what happened spontaneously was...Joe laughed.

After my delighted surprise passed, I thought about the monk more than a century ago who having spent years working on a Buddhist treatise and then gave it to the translator- back and forth between languages as revisions and corrections were made - until finally it was ready to go to press. Except that on the way to the post office with that final perfect copy, the translator lost the package. He was frantic; spent days retracing his steps. Eventually he had to tell the monk. The monk simply laughed. 

I wonder, Joe thought, if after a life spent trying to understand oneself and others and working for peace, compassion and helping those in need - at the very last moment when you think you finally understand something and are about to die, if you are living an enlightened life, if your last utterance would be a simple, spontaneous laugh.

Joe smiled. Maria caught the smile. She smiled at Frank who thought lovingly of his kids.

Joe ordered the special of the day:

Tocos de Maíz filled with rice, beans and avocado. To drink, cocoa with a hint of vanilla.