I had planned to go to the center, have a quick meeting with Keeley about building the school, and then return to the house to listen to Coldplay and Travis while I fabricated journals out of the remaining leather I have. My quick meeting with Keeley about the school was really quick, but instead of leading me back home, it led into a discussion about God and life that lasted for four and a half hours. I arrived at his house in the morning around nine and left after eating a tasty bean and rice meal with him and his wife around one. I walked out of the carport door that faces the dusty street just beyond the guard wall of stone and barbed wire full of good Honduran food that I had not expected to eat. I stopped into the Bamer bank on the corner of central park to pick up some medicine Rina had bought for her ill uncle. After that I headed to the bus that would take me home. In Cortes I have two choices of buses to take me home; Coptul, which is the whore of all buses, making every stop at every barrio in the city along a large loop that eventually leads to my house, or an Amoa bus. The Amoa buses go direct to the next town up the coast, Amoa, and happen to pass by my neighborhood. It also takes about 15 minutes less time to arrive at my street. Content to find that one was on the edge of leaving, I crossed the boulevard behind the bank where it sat waiting in the middle of the road for passengers and climbed aboard.
The driver was sitting farther away than normal. The engine cover bulbously sat in the middle of the front of the bus, making it difficult to walk towards the seats, and impossible to talk to the driver without shouting. I had wanted to ask if he could drop me off at my neighborhood, Palermo, but did not want to make a scene. So saying nothing, I sidestepped my way around the engine block in the floor and took the closest broken seat available. While waiting I took it all in. This bus was crappy. The seats were that green fo-leather that all the buses had in elementary school, but with a bit more holes and graffiti, and loosely strung on rusty metal frames that dug into your back when you reclined. It smelled faintly like fish, which is completely normal for Amoa buses that carry village fisherman into town accompanied by their dripping goods in a plastic bag. When the driver closed the door, only one part slid closed and the other stayed open like a flag braced against the wind. What wind? We didn’t have any wind. Once again I got on the slowest bus on earth. Even with the 15 minute shortcut, I did not reach my barrio for another 40 minutes. Realizing that I now had only a few hours to make books before I would be heading to Karen and Rina’s house for dinner anyway, I decided to march up to their place then instead of making books. Two hours is not enough time and besides, I had tio’s medication in my pocket, six perfectly round pink pills.
Walking past my little trail from the main street of my neighborhood that leads to my house, I continued in the direction of Karen and Rina’s house. Mouda was standing in the window of her corner store as always and waved as she saw me pass. Margery and Joseph, my neighbor’s kids and Karen and Rina’s niece and nephew, were just leaving Mouda’s store with their little hands stuffed and spilling with bubble gum balls too big to fit in their grasp. Joseph had already tried to eat all of them at once and the now wet balls were staining his hands and cheeks a variety of colors. His small toothed grin was completely blue to match his purple lips. After getting my sticky hugs I continued on. Past the internet café three blocks up, the cobble stone ends and I continued down the dirt part of my colony. Cesilia, who lives at the break, was just leaving with her daughter and grinned a big broken tooth grin. With her hair pulled back and a summer dress on, her eyes glowed with recognition of me. We had talked a few months back about black pepper and how I would bring her some from the states to try. She joked with me in that familiar Honduran way and continued on. From this point, I walked mostly in silence for the next ten minutes. The houses only line the left side of this part of the street. The right side is all private, undeveloped jungle that still looks as virgin as it did when Columbus came. At the corner of the Catholic church I turned left to go down the hill to the house. In the corner store opposite the church, the sisters called out to me as they always do, no matter if I pass at 2 in the afternoon or 10 at night. They are always in their store or sitting outside.
When I arrive at the house, Karen and her sister-in-law Gizel, are watching tv and fixing each others hair, hardly exciting for me as I could care less about fixing hair or watching tv. I decide that it is better to go visit Tio Jaime and drop off his medicine.
Tio Jaime lives in the house just below the girls. He is the brother of their mother. She left them to live in the states when they were only three and Tio Jaime is the one who looked after them when they were young. He had the chance to go to the states way back then, had the Coyote paid and waiting, but decided to stay with the girls. They needed him. Now, twenty years later, he needs them and they take good care of him. Tio is about six foot one with frizzy un-kept afro-hair that puts at least another inch on his height. It is graying in parts like squiggly silver lines running in space. He has soft eyes and is soft spoken, maybe for the obvious gap between his two front teeth big enough to fit another tooth, that make him look kiddish when he grins despite the wrinkles of life all around. For the last two years, Tio Jaime has been sick. No one really knows what he has except for pain in his side and pain in his back. For a few months he was vomiting blood but the doctors found nothing. Tio has never been big on doctors and so self-medicates with an array of pills, potions, and tonics that he swears work, but everyday leave him looking more feeble, like a broomstick standing on end about to fall over.
“Tio.” I call. “Soy Brian. Tengo tus pastillas.” I am answered by the thick stillness like nothing had moved in the house all day. I wonder if he is even home, though I have never heard of him leaving.
The living room where I stand is a large space containing the kitchen sink, full of dirty dishes, a large wooden table piled with the guts of old electronics and a large tv screen I assumed he once meant to work on ten years ago. Beyond that table is another table, maybe for eating because it is clean. The motorcycle is parked to the left the second table, between it and an old sofa that sits against the wall. Everything looks like it hasn’t had any love since Karen and Rina’s grandmother lived there 20 years ago. The roof is the worst, a puzzle of old and new tin laminate rusted and broken, checkered together to form a roof and nailed to the rotten wooden trusses that held the original roof 50 years ago. Everything is very dusty.
“Tio,” I call again to the back of the house. I can faintly hear the hum and jitter of a tv playing a novela from the room beyond the door to my right. I have never been in Tio’s house and enter shyly. I open the door and repeat my previous introduction. “Tio, I have your pills from Rina.” I hear a grunt that sounds like “enter,” so by easing the old wooden door forward, I do just that. The room is littered. Bits of electronics and sewing machines, cloth, and anything else that could be in a room is strewn across the floor and old shelves, almost ransacked. I look to the left and see Tio sitting on a bed in yet another room, his bedroom. He seems to have just sat up as he fidgets to put his shirt straight. His clothes hang from his bony frame like the loose disorganized sheets hang from the old mattress. When he lies down his body probably disappears in the mess of fabric. The only light in the room filters in from the broken window panes above his dresser and from the hazy glow of the television sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed.
“Como estas Tio?” I ask how he is. As expected, he begins to describe the pain he has and the problems he has to get up and how he cannot move. We talk about the medicines he is taking, which ones work and which ones don’t, the dumb doctors that couldn’t tell him what was wrong, and how he is going to make himself better. After listening to his medical record for a while, I change the subject to the house and how I had no idea his room existed. The house is a lot bigger than it looks. He tells me of the problems he has with water coming through the window of the bedroom and soaking his floor and clothes. He used to have carpet, something no one has in Honduras, but the water destroyed it and he had to throw it away. He talks slow and rhythmic, staring off at an imaginary point in the wall, only making glancing eye contact with me when he wants to know I understand something. His bony hands stay cupped in his lap, his bony feet set perfectly together, a praying mantis position perhaps to conserve energy. Even at six-two, he looks so small sitting next to me.
“You’re lucky you’re still young,” he tells me. “I was dumb when I was young. I never got me a wife and now I am old and alone with no one to take care of me. Rina takes care of me, but she is the only one who seems to care. If I don’t get up, no one will get me up.” I listen to every word, feeling his strife, knowing his pain is more than just his body, it’s in his loneliness. I have nothing to say, so I just sit in the silence with him.
Then, slowly standing on his stilts and slipping their ends into his now boatish shoes, he motions for us to go to the living room. We leave the forgotten bedroom that has not had a new piece of decoration in 30 years, and return to the clutter of the main room. Tio sits in one of the two plastic chairs that many Hondurans use as furniture. I precariously recline against the kitchen sink after getting him a glass of warm tap water from its faucet. He fumbles with the foil on the back of the pills before punching one through. In a manner I have only seen in the movies, he places the pink orb on his delicate tongue and pushes it to his throat with his index finger, then drinks. As he sits helplessly in the chair trying to recline enough to make breathing comfortable, he tells me how he wants to stay positive.
“I have never thought about suicide,” he tells me. “ I have never wanted to kill myself. God gave me this life and I got too many things I want to do to end it early. No sir. I can’t do that. In the mornings, I get up because if I stay in bed I may not get up the next day. Yes sir, I need to keep moving. I used to go to town on the motor mike but now I haven’t ridden it in three weeks. No sir. I want to leave this house, but I don’t leave.”
I echo an agreement that suicide never solves anything. Life is short enough.
“Mire Brian,” He starts again. “When I was healthy, I had this place clean, neat. I made sure there was nothing out of place…. Yes sir, everything was clean.” He makes eye contact to make sure I understand clean. Looking around the room I hardly can imagine it. “I was going to clean the stove. I hate nothing more than a dirty stove. When you want to cook. It should be clean… But I run out of energy… I will show you how to cook… Mire Brian, for Christmas, they make these tamales, but so delicious they melt in your hand, with chicken, pork—and so good!” He motions with his fingers like twigs as if holding one of these tamales in my presence. He can almost taste it and smell its aroma as he stares at his hands.
After taking in the flavors of the imaginary tamale, he relaxes, slouching against the plastic backing of the chair once again. I listen quietly to his words, knowing they come from a need to have someone who listens, someone who cares and I wonder what I can do.
“I wanted to put my tree up for Christmas,” he confesses. “But I cannot get it straight. It’s hard to get the leaves right. I pulled it out yesterday but could not get further. I get tired…”
I look over in the direction of where he indicates and see a hump of a fake tree sitting by the clean table. It looks as sad and hopeless as Tio. Its limbs are all curled and the top part, the crown, has yet to be attached. It sits in the dingy part of the room, just in front of the broken fridge in the far corner. Tio gazes at it with his glassy eyes above his sunken cheeks that are outlined by his underlying teeth. He looks longing at it as I would have looked at a new camera.
Thinking only for a moment in the other things I need to do and dismissing them for the short time being I suggest, “Tio, let’s put your tree. I will help you.”
I was thinking he would just tell me where the decorations were and I would dress the tree and leave to go nap up in Karen’s house. I already felt tired from my whole day in the center. But something happened. At the thought of putting up the tree, Tio’s eyes warm, and his gapped smile breaks open as he gets up with force and moves toward the tree. His feet drag his boat size shoes instead of lifting them and he shuffles across the concrete floor. I follow behind as he explains how each branch needed to be ordered. I go round to the back side of the tree and begin organizing the branches as I do back home.
“No, No, not like that. Each branch has a level and you need to put them at the level.” His hands sweep the air in an imaginary line.
I understand now that he wants, not a tree that looks full, without gaps, but all the branches flat and in levels so that the tree almost looks like green saucers floating in space. I begin organizing the saucers of branches as he moves about to find ornaments.
As he opens plastic bag after plastic bag, he pulls out items and tells me what they are.
“This is garland,” he tells me, reverent of the plastic rope of gold and red glittering in the haze of the room. “My mother sent me this and it is beautiful... These are ornaments. These are other ornaments. These are apple ornaments. There is an angel for the top…I just don’t know where it is.”
He pulls out red and gold plastic ornaments like we buy at Walmart for a dollar a dozen as if they were made of real gold. He cups each of them in his lanky fingers momentarily before he arranges them on the table beside. Meanwhile I finish with the branches and grab the top half of the tree to attach. Putting it in place, I fan out its branches as well and put the tip straight. Tio continues with his treasures. Impatiently I grab the lights to start wrapping the tree.
“No, no not like that.” He slowly corrects again. He breathes long. “The lights are last,” and he moves them from my hand to the table. “We need to do this right. Look at these, these are beautiful to put in the tree.” He pulls out from the plastic bag in his hand, several plastic birds with wired feet that reminded me of my grandmothers crafts and having to go into Michael’s to buy cheap décor. Again with care he shows me how wire feet work to attach birds to a tree. One bird is florescent pink, and the others brown and dusty. He arranges them on the table beside the ornaments.
“Mire Brian, you have to handle these with care because if you don’t, prack!” He signs an explosion happening from within his hand as he imaginatively crushes an ornament. Then just as if I had never seen a Christmas tree before, he instructs me on how each ornament has a loop of thread on it and with that we are able to hang them on the tree branches, carefully. He shows me how he wants me to hang one from the top of the tree and then a little lower, place another one, and a little lower place one more. Then when I finish that, I can move a little to the side and make another row of ornaments hanging all the way down. Satisfied that I understand the art of hanging ornaments, he then begins arranging a wreath on the top where the angel should go.
I slowly start making rows of ornaments, trying to get it all right for Tio and smiling inside at the situation. Whether he knows or not that I have dressed a tree before does not matter. He is alive and in his own creation. He is moving and instructing, sharing a lifetime of Christmas knowledge with me, knowledge that is extremely important to pass on.
I open a bag of decorations on my side of the table and remove a gold star ornament.
Tio lights up. “That’s the star my mommy bought. That needs to go on top,” and without a seconds hesitation, Tio takes the wreath and replaces it with the star. I continue hanging and notice that unbeknownst to Tio, the back contains three more stars just like the one he hung that probably came from the same package at the store. I don’t say anything. He is already remembering his mother.
As I place my rows below the star, Tio keeps finding more ornaments and putting them on the table ready for hanging. I try to keep them as orderly possible but the tree is now getting crowded and it is a balancing act. Tio removes all fifty or so ornaments along with two small Santas, and then sits to watch. I place most of the wire-feet birds in the uppermost limbs, around the star that Tio placed as the crown of the tree, thinking that they are nesting under it. The pink one I hide in the depths of the branches. As I work, the lights go out, another black out like we have daily. We continue working in the dark by the fading sun barely reflecting on the concrete floor in front of the door.
After a while the ornaments are finished and Tio describes to me tinsel and garland. He has two strips, one a bright, beautiful red and gold, and another the same shade of green as the tree. He holds them out so that we may admire them again. He tells me to look at them. He stares in wonder of their beauty. I say nothing as I now understand he will tell me what he wants.
“ How can we do these?” Tio asks to himself, more than to me and then answers just as fast. “Mire Brian, we take these and we wrap them around the tree.
You want to lay it on the branches but not knock off the ornaments.
In this way it looks really nice.”
Patiently along with him, We begin to wrap the garland from the top of the tree down. When the red and gold runs out, we continue with the green that immediately blends in with the tree. Tio stands back admiringly. “Beautiful,” He says. He sits. I look around for something to do. I reach for the lights again.
“No, no. We can do the lights later. Just wait for the power to come back. We cannot do lights until there is power.”
Thinking I’ll wait a bit and then excuse myself, I kill time asking Tio about his classic Honda motorcycle. I recognize a sticker on the gas can and wonder if he bought it like that.
“Do you know what this sticker is Tio?”
"Of course I do,” He drawls, “That’s the Tunder-gats”
“Yeah! Its Thundercats! You know that cartoon? I didn’t know anyone watched that here in Honduras. That was my favorite cartoon growing up.”
“I love the Tunder-gats. I watch all that stuff. He-Man, Superman… That is good stuff.” He waves his hand as if dismissing me as he calls out the names of programs.
“Yeah!” I add in.
“There was one other too… I cannot remember, but I watched another also. That was good drawing.” He starts to reminisce. “Today they all look real like no one wants to draw anymore and I hate that. Why do they make it so real? It was fun when they looked cool like somebody draw them— The Tunder-gats!—That was a good show. That’s why I like the cable. With the cable there are stations that still show the old cartoons and I like that.”
He grins big and his gap makes his face look as young as his childlike heart. I grin too. How great that we love the same cartoons. I remember when my dad helped my brother and I dress up as He-Man and Skeletor for Holloween one year and how cool I felt.
We fall back into silence, perhaps each of us thinking in our own precious memories. Tio is again sitting in the plastic chair, peacefully waiting. Finishing my reminiscing, I start thinking of how late it now is and about heading up to the other house. Just as I am about to share these plans, the light comes back. With a hum, the bulbs on wires overhead warm back to life; the tv in the far room restarts with a new movie playing.
“Hey! We got light. Let’s finish this tree Tio!”
Tio gets up and we move into the last phase of decoration. We test the lights. He shows me how one strand is normal, the lights just turn on, and how the other strand is very special because they blink. He explains connections to me—how they connect one to another. After the detailed debriefing, He gives me the connection end of the first string of bulbs and tells me to attach it to a branch at the bottom of the tree. I follow the instructions precisely. He shows me how we need to hang the lights vertically with them running top to bottom on the tree. We get to work, passing the cord back and forth depending on where we were hanging. When the strand finishes the connection is up at the top. It is at this point that I realize Tio has made a mistake and hung the strand backwards. The connection to the wall is the one hanging up by the star and the connection to the next strand is the one he has had me put at the bottom. He realizes it too, but has no solution. I quickly see the youthful energy he has found, begin to flicker and fade. He looks like he is on the verge of sitting again.
“Wait Tio.” I quickly try to problem solve. “If we move the strand like this then we can make the connection reach the floor. Don’t worry.” And before he can say anything I whip up the slack in the cord and adjust it so the connection by the star falls to the floor. “There now it all works.” Relief plays across Tios face and again the gap reappears from under his wide lips. He hands me the other strand to connect to the bottom. I think we are ready to start hanging but Tio is thinking.
In a stroke of creativity and love of the moment Tio says, “What say you if we go round with these lights like the garland? We can do them the other way and have lights criss-crossing.” He is really proud of his idea and looks to me to see what I say.
“Sounds really good Tio,” —Gap—
Excitedly we begin wrapping the tree with the last strand of special blinking lights so that they run in a spiral from the bottom to the top, Tio making sure that the last light comes to rest behind the gold star at the top.
“There. Now you can plug them in and we can see what it looks like.” Tio says, moving back and sitting in the plastic chair. He moves the plastic chair back toward the door as if trying to find the best viewpoint for the lighting ceremony.
I run the extension cord over and plug in the strand of lights and whoosh….the tree comes to life! Tio is radiant in the glow of the bulbs as I come out from behind the tree. I am happy to be done but worried that it doesn’t look exactly right since Tio is just sitting there without a word. I stand looking at him and then the tree. He finally notices me again after a few moments
“Come look at this.” Tio says. “It’s beautiful…”
I join him on the other side of the room and stand behind the plastic chair.
“That is a really beautiful tree,” He assures me. “A really beautiful tree. It is like Christmas.”
After a few moments, I think we may be finished with the tree and am trying to think of something else to say. It feels too awkward to leave. But Tio crosses his arms and settles himself in the chair to gaze at the splendid artistic creation.
For Tio the tree really is beautiful, more beautiful than I could see. It is not just a tree, but all the years, memories, and love wrapped into it. Tio sees something warm and friendly in the tree, something he has not had all year long. As I stand in his house looking around I see why. In the midst of a falling roof, a muddy concrete floor, broken windows, dirty dishes, and electronic guts from unfinished jobs long ago contracted, Tio has a beautiful neat, carefully organized Christmas tree, a symbol of love in the midst of all his loneliness.
“It will be even more beautiful in the night time when all the lights are out but its lights.” He assures me, as if I might be wondering.
It was then that I really began to appreciate our afternoon together. It was the three hours we spent together that made the tree so special. For three hours we worked together to make something beautiful and Tio had forgotten how sick he was. I imagine Tio was bursting with pride and love at this moment. In fact, I know he was—because his gap was showing…
I left Tio minutes later sitting in his chair and was told that later that night Rina found him there still enjoying the tree hours later. He later visited the girls house and told them that their tree was not right, that maybe it was a bit ugly and they needed to come see his tree. They all went down to his house and he told them about putting it up with me. He ended with how beautiful the tree was and once again settled into his chair. The girls said they waited a while and finally left him enjoying his tree for the night. At hearing that I smiled for Tio and the day we had together, knowing that it was what Christmas is all about, knowing that during that afternoon, we connected and we shared some love.
Merry Christmas Everyone…
