Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Time

"I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we--so incontrovertibly--are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die."
--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Time is short. And long. It's expandable and shrinkable. Today I slept until 8 am, deliciously, dreaming that I was back in one of my high school musical productions and that I had to buy slippers from a Peruvian-style clothing stand, two different types of blue slipper so that I could take the little flowers off one and sew them onto the other and have them match. I said, in Spanish, That's ridiculous, I'm going to complain to the director, I'm not spending twenty soles on two different types of slippers. Then my cell phone alarm went off. I got up and got dressed in a rush to get up to the school by 9--and discovered that there were no students there. Jornada pedagógica: teachers' training day. No Liliana, Evelyn, Liz, José Luis, or Gerald in the morning, and no choirs in the afternoon. I felt my day ooze out of its structure, a bit repulsively, like an expanding waistline spilling over jeans. I have nothing to do and time is going slowly.

Since my last post, the first half of October has flown. I spend the first half of the week recovering from my weekend, the second half getting ready for the next weekend, and then do it again; I've almost started counting weeks from Thursday to Wednesday. Last Thursday I went with the Salud ladies to visit Agusto in his shack. Agusto is an older man who lives alone with his dog, Ferpudo, and a cat or two, in a house that's a couple of board walls imperfectly covered over with tin. There are three "rooms" more or less and a sort of foyer area that's open to the air, with laundry lines strung across it but no laundry, because Agusto has gotten sick lately and I doubt he can wash clothes right now. Instead of laundry there are things like plastic bags or dirty rags pinned up on the lines. There is cardboard underfoot and Ferpudo's bowl is on the floor with raw chicken parts in it--the dog eats better than his owner and is strong and frisky. He's got curly strawberry-blonde hair and his nickname is gringo. My compatriot.

Agusto normally receives us in his foyer, where there are a couple of chairs and a bench, but this time he was in bed. He's got some sort of infection that makes it difficult to urinate, and from what I understand, he's been to the medical post in Tupac and they've put a catheter in, but he still isn't feeling better because (Luisa says) he hasn't taken his antibiotic when he should have, because he had no appetite, so he doesn't eat, and then the medicine hurts his empty stomach. He has a brother and some nieces and nephews, but they don't come very often. I gather that they live far away. There's no one there to cook for him or make him take his medicine or go to the market for food; I don't know what he does on the days when Luisa can't go bring him some bread and milk and fruit or some chicken broth from the market. I think he gets up and goes himself. But the thing that shocked me most was, he had only one medium-weight blanket over him. He'd doubled it up and draped it over his legs, and from the waist up he was using a jacket as a blanket. I was bowled over. It's basically like he's sleeping outside, in the chilly, breezy, damp Lima winter, with only one blanket. I use two or three blankets, and my room has actual walls and a roof well attached to them.

I came home that day and slammed a chair on the floor and kicked my walls. It's all about time. Am I going to go to Agusto's house twice a day to make sure he eats something, drinks something, and takes his pills? He needs someone there to take care of him and there's no one. I've already committed my time to going to the market for the sisters, cooking lunch once or twice a week, running my choirs in the school, helping the kids (except when there's no school!)... How many nights has Agusto spent with his one blanket in the cold? So many that they've run together for him and the time since he was last warm at night seems short? And yet the thought of leaving him for one more night blanket-less like that killed me. I resolved to buy him blankets; it's the least I could do. I'll hardly notice the 35 soles. But I didn't go Friday. I was busy. I didn't go Saturday: I'd made plans with a friend to go to the market and cook together. And we did, we met and talked and cooked and laughed and ate and the whole afternoon flew by. Saturday evening was my Confirmation group, which, little did I know, had been cancelled by the coordinator that week, they just didn't tell us that beforehand. So the group showed up like normal and we had to invent things to do with them on the spot. Then when we finished I realized that we were scheduled to clean the church that day, but I'd invited my friends over for a movie-and-pancake night, it'd been so long since we'd gotten everyone together!... They all came over for pancakes and we had a great time.

On Sunday morning after Mass I finally went with Luisa to bring Agusto his blankets. And he blessed me. He took my hands and said, Hermanita, may it always go well for you wherever you go! And I almost cried, because it was so little I'd done for him. So little and so late. An afterthought to my happy, comfortable times with my friends that had been my priority that weekend. Unlike the widow in the Gospel, I give from what I have left over. But now, after adding three more interminable cold nights to his already infinite tally, Agusto has two new blankets. I hope he'll be a little warmer. He's still poor and sick, and the doctors in the public hospital are on strike and they're only seeing emergency cases.

Time can go on and on for ages without anything changing, an eternity, a lifetime--and then one day just like any other, everything changes. The earth existed without humans for billions (I think?) of years, and then one day, like Tolkien's elves, we woke up and started doing our human things, and literally changed the face of the planet. I lived and studied comfortably in the US for 22 years, and then one year I got a crazy idea to go live in Peru, and everything was different. I feel like I've spent much more time being bored as an NDMV than I ever did at home, and yet the number of things that have happened to me in my almost two years in this country seems exponentially greater than its counterpart for all of my previous life in Maryland.

My prayer right now is for more time. for the ability to live in the present moment. January 20th seems like tomorrow.



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