Authors: Kristina Shook
“Here you are. Have a good day. Thank you for being a nice customer,” he said, as he pulled up to the curb in downtown Panama. The city was packed with color, noise, people, and almost every American fast food joint you could name. Ugh. Love my country, but I’m not sure about the food it promotes everywhere else. I mean, I came to visit and experience Panama for Panama, not Panama for America. Oh, well.
“Pedro, your English is good, keep speaking every chance you get,” I said and I got out.
I was facing the white stone building, as I paid him adding a handsome tip. I entered the community school and walked along the terra cotta tile hallway until I found the third classroom. It was filled with adults. She was in the middle of the room, wearing a loose, knee length brown cotton dress with large flowers printed all over it, and black cowboy boots. Her light brown hair hung in a braid down her back. She was thinner, and her face was makeup free. She seemed older, but that was natural. What really struck me about her was how much happier she appeared—and I couldn’t bullshit my mind about that.
“Mi hija,” she said, and everyone in the class clapped.
“My?” she asked them in a teacher’s voice.
“Daughter,” they all said.
And then one-by-one they introduced themselves to me, and told me using their new English words what a nice mother I had, how blessed I was. I headed up to her and she hugged me. It had been years and years and years. I hugged her, but I felt a mix of sadness—and a lot of stored up anger. She excused her class and instead of talking to me, she walked me around the community school building telling me about the cooperative group that ran it and what was taught in each room. Go figure!
Then we headed out into the Panama sunshine, jumped into her dark red jeep, and headed for the Darien Jungle, where she lived with Santiago, her coffee bean man. Right away I noticed the wedding band on her finger. It was silver, interlaced with turquoise, not the gold ring my father had bought her. He hadn’t mentioned their divorce; I guess I just assumed it and this now confirmed it. She smiled, laughed and chatted about Panama, as if she had spent her entire life there. And as if I was any old friend coming to visit. I think she was nervous. I was furious.
The Darien Jungle was like a movie set. The farther we drove, the dustier the unpaved roads became, transforming into farmland with a few scattered tabego shops along the way.
“Your Aunt Helen was my good friend. We never lost our connection,” she said.
I thought of her ashes in my Louis Vuitton carry-on suitcase, it felt so surreal.
“I don’t think she ever gave up on a friendship,” I said, trying to imagine anyone dumping her as a friend. I had lost a bunch of friends from high school, and later after college, but auspiciously Paloma and Laurel had remained, my best, best friends.
The dirt road zigzagged up to their plain one-story wood house, sans paint, and to the left and right coffee bean fields spread out for miles. The aroma of coffee was pungent and robust.
“Do you drink coffee?” she asked.
“You’d know the answer, if you knew me,” I said. It just slipped out of my mouth, but I wasn’t sorry.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she countered.
“Are you fluent in Spanish?” I asked, since I didn’t really know her.
“Oh, yes, and Santiago has gotten stronger in English as well, but we speak Spanish all the time,” she said.
“Great,” I said, since I wasn’t bilingual.
“We won’t speak Spanish, while you’re here,” she added.
She parked behind the house, next to a small dairy cow pasture with a cabin in back of it. We got out of the jeep and walked around to the front door, which was wide open—and there stood Santiago. He was in worn blue jeans, a blue jean shirt, and black cowboy boots, and his black hair was short, his eyes dark, and his teeth white. He didn’t remind me of any actor. He wasn’t handsome like my father, or as tall.
“Welcome to Panama,” he said, extending his right hand to me, and I thought about how he had stolen my mother away from my father, without so much as a second thought. Still I shook his strong coarse hand and then watched as he kissed and hugged my mother. They acted like they hadn’t seen each other in weeks.
“Your mother has waited a long time for this moment, and I am honored,” he said. I could hear Carol back in Los Feliz at Yoga Vibe saying, “Exhale the bad energy out, inhale calmness” so I inhaled, “Nice to meet you,” I said, as I let a deep breath out.
“Come, let me show you your own cabin,” she said, and we left Santiago by the front door. I had to laugh as she unlatched the gate to the dairy cow pasture. Six light brown dairy cows were grazing near the unpainted one-room cabin. That looked like a shack. She opened the door and we stepped into a potter’s studio with pottery stacked up on wall-to-wall shelves. In the left corner near a single window was a twin bed with a mosquito net over it. There were three hanging lamps and wire hooks for my clothes, and a wooden milk-carton as a night table. The floor around the bed was made from colorful handmade tiles.
“I made the tiles. I started with bowls and cups, but then I just found tile making more enjoyable,” she said.
I put my LV suitcase down and hung up my white linen jacket, which I didn’t need because of the Panama heat. I looked at my Smartphone—it had no signal.
“My cell phone’s dead. Where should I charge it?” I asked anxiously.
“We don’t have internet, cable, or TV access, just a landline phone,” she said, like it was something she was proud of.
“What?” I asked, suddenly feeling like my oxygen supply was being cut off—and I didn’t have anything to save me.
“If you need the phone, just help yourself. We only use the internet when we’re in the city during the week,” she said.
Oh, God, she wasn’t a cell phone or online woman; it was like she had gone back in time.
“No worries,” I said, trying to sound as if I could make it through the weekend.
“I’ll show you the outhouse, and then our house,” she said.
“Outhouse?” I asked full of panic.
“We’re used to it. And we’ve got an outdoor shower, too. But we bathe in the stream behind the coffee fields,” she said.
“That’s different,” I said.
The outhouse was an outhouse—if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, even with the colorful tiles. Even with the smell of coffee wafting though the circular window—it was still an outhouse.
Their unpainted house had only two rooms: a kitchen with a round table (like the one on the Charlie Rose show), and a bedroom.
“Do you make enough money?” I asked, because I really wanted to know.
“We sell our coffee to one major company in the U.S. and they sell it under their own label. We own the land on both sides,” Santiago said, defensively.
“It’s the outhouse,” my mother said, winking at him.
“Claro que si!” he said and they both laughed.
“Let’s go for our walk. We always go for one around this time,” she said, and the three of us headed out to walk the coffee bean fields.
We walked for over an hour from one end of the field to the other. This was how they stayed fit and trim. I acted like it was fun—but this over the Charles River, over Central Park, over walking along Malibu Beach—no thanks!
After that she and I sat in brown corduroy upholstered armchairs while Santiago cooked us a vegetarian meal. They ate no meat; they hadn’t since re-locating to Panama. She talked about teaching English once a week and selling her pottery twice a month—the two jobs she did just for extra enjoyment. The main job and bliss was their coffee beans. We ate at the round table.
And then she walked me back through the dairy cow pasture to my cabin.
“I’m fine,” I said, not wanting her to come in.
“I’ll just set the lights for you,” she said, and entered to turn on the lights, which ran on a battery timer, all except the one nearest to the bed.
“You look wonderful,” she said.
“This is really what you wanted?” I asked, because I was done deep breathing. I was ready to fight for my father.
“It might not seem glamorous, like a movie to you, but yes this is all I want,” she said.
“You broke my father’s heart; you left him to question his ability to love anyone besides me.”
“It wasn’t out of spite.”
“You came back, after meeting Santiago in a burrito joint in Porter Square, and you started packing. You told my father, ‘I’m not in love with you anymore and I’m leaving,’ and that was it. I was there,” I said, finally telling her the story from my point of view.
“I can hear your pain, but I chose my beating heart over obligation,” she said.
“Obligation? That’s what we were to you?” I asked, my hands clenched.
“Not you, but my marriage to your father. Only your Aunt Helen understood, and she told me to go, to follow my heart. I wanted to bring you.”
“Go with you? Huh! I wouldn’t have left my father for this. For that guy,” I said.
I was fuming with rage because she was like a lovesick puppy.
“I knew nothing when I met your father. I was inexperienced, undeveloped; I was just following what people of my generation did. Santiago made my heart beat. I left your father for him; it was my first grown-up choice. I’m sorry I hurt you, I’m sorry I hurt your dad. I never planned on it, but I don’t regret my choice,” she said.
“You’re the most selfish woman I know. I’m nothing like you. You’ve never come back to the States to check on me once, not for college graduation, not to see my Hollywood life, not for anything,” I said.
“I’ve been too scared to return,” she said. Like that was an excuse.
“You’re an American, in case you forgot. You should visit your own country.”
“I’ve wanted to see you.”
“Action speaks volumes. My father hasn’t moved on. How do you feel about that?”
“He’s a slow learner—”
“My God, how can you criticize him? While you’ve been happy here, he’s been ALONE,” I shouted, interrupting her, hoping for once that she’d get it.
“I’m sorry I missed out on your high school graduation, your college, Los Angeles. Your first time at everything,” she said.
“I’m talking about my father,” I said, like she didn’t understand English.
“I’m sorry I missed out on your life experiences.”
“I’m talking about him!”
“No, you,” she said.
“You’re heartless, and you’re wrong,” I screamed.
“You’ve got two choices: forgive me, or hate me forever,” she said, as if my aunt had told her to say that to me, and she walked out. I pulled Aunt Helen’s box of ashes out of my LV suitcase and I threw it onto the tiled floor.
“You’re wrong, you’re wrong,” I shouted. Then I rushed over to the box (that was now crushed) and I picked it up. I held it and I cried so hard.
The next morning, I didn’t get up. When my mother came to see if I wanted breakfast, I told her I was too tired to eat. For most of the day I stayed in bed, I felt so depressed that I just didn’t want to get up. How could I forgive her for this? How could I? How could my Aunt Helen want her ashes spread in a circle around my mother’s two-room, unpainted house? How could she want to be left far from my father and me? And why near my mother? Why her?
Toward the late, late afternoon, I got up and walked barefoot all over the colorful handmade-tiles my mother had made over the years. I couldn’t figure anything out and I was too angry to eat.
Okay, so then I had a
Star
Wars
movie moment: I thought about the scene where Luke Skywalker (what a fantastic last name) was being trained by Yoda. And Luke’s not certain about the ‘Force’ so he asks,
“But how do I know the good side from the bad?”
And Yoda says to him,
“You will know when you are calm, at peace, passive. A Jedi uses the force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.”
That scene just kept playing in my mind over and over—and then I knew I was about to fully understand it.
I walked over to my LV suitcase figuring I should at least put on clean underwear. And that’s when I saw it: the orange post-it. It said
I love you, Tristan
. I smiled. It was so sweet, and so needed. Wow, I had him; I wasn’t in the past anymore. I had an old house, and love—that was what I wanted. I was sorry my father hadn’t gotten a happily-ever- after, but there was still time for a sequel. I marched over to the potter’s wheel and noticed the drawings next to it, designs for future tiles. There were photos of Panama (the coffee beans, flowers, and fruit), and then I spotted a photo of me as a baby sleeping, and one of me standing on a chair with no clothes on at age six. And then there was a photo of me and my father, posing in front of the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park when I was twelve. My father’s hair was long and he had the beginnings of a professor’s beard, and I had my hair in pigtails and was wearing a pink and white dress with white clogs. My mother had a photo of us—not what I expected.
Okay, okay, so my Aunt Helen had wanted me to let go of my past, my disappointment with my mother; she had wanted me to know that life is imperfect most of the time. I looked down at the post-it from Tristan in my right hand. I knew I would frame it. I sighed out loud, a deep sigh, like a breath waiting to get out of me.
After that, I got dressed and headed out to greet the six dairy cows, happy knowing that they wouldn’t get slaughtered for a hamburger. I went up to each one and said, “I’m letting go of my past, I’m no longer allowing myself to fill up with rage, or regret, or sadness. I am at peace with my past. I feel goodness all around me.”
Then I found my mother lying in a natural twine hammock near her unpainted two room house.
“Did you rest?” she asked, eagerly.
“I did more than rest, I feel 100 percent better!”
“Try the other one,” she said, pointing to Santiago’s hammock.
“Okay,” I said, and I lay in it.
“I made them, sometimes we sleep in them,” she said proudly.
“You never knew you were an artist, did you?” I asked.
“I didn’t.”
“You’re who you always wanted to be” I said, and she grinned at me.
After a few minutes of swinging in her handmade hammock, I said, “I’d like to do the ash ceremony right now.”