Banana Leaves

Fourteen packages of them. Four days left before Christmas. You Latinas know what that means.

I am going into the kitchen early tomorrow morning with the family recipe my tía L gave me when I was eighteen. And we will have tamales for dinner on Nochebuena!

[The banana leaves are conveniently pre-washed and even pre-steamed. It totally feels like I'm cheating.]

Button Bellies and Pound Cakes

My entire life, it seems, people have made fun of my accent.

When I was growing up in Costa Rica, the kids in school made fun of my little gringuita accent. And as a Costa Rican, I can’t roll my r’s to save my life and I am teased mercilessly by other Latin Americans. I lived and worked in France, and the French had plenty to say about my accent there. Then I joined the Peace Corps and lived in a French-speaking African country, which made my French accent so wacky that the French didn’t know what to make of it. So yes, I know what it’s like to have an accent. Even though I’m used to the teasing and am pretty good-humored about it (or try to be), in principle I think that making fun of someone’s accent is not very nice.

But the thing is, my mom’s accent is so frickin’ cute. It matches her personality: She’s a native Spanish speaker, a (maybe) five-foot-tall Latina who talks a million miles a minute, always excitedly, never without using her hands, and she taught me all the swear words I know (at an early age, too). More than the accent, though, the word combinations she has been known to use in English have become part of our family’s lexicon. I blame my dad; even though he was mad as hell whenever someone made fun of his very gringo accent, he found my mom’s quirks so endearing that he never corrected her and in fact, encouraged her.

She was convinced the word for navel was button belly.

She used to ask for her leftovers in a baggie dog.

She was sure my dad suffered from rage road.

She refuses to say the word turtle anymore because it’s hard for her to say and we’ve all given her such a hard time about it (not that the word turtle comes up very often in casual conversation).

Last night, we were using a calling card to call Costa Rica, which involved punching in a long string of numbers and symbols. The call wasn’t going through, my mom had had enough and began yelling, “Pound cake! Pound cake! Are you sure you pressed the pound cake?” When I looked at her and started laughing, her response was, “Well, don’t you think it should be called the pound cake?”

Well, now I do.

Such a sad, sad comment

The U.S. invaded Iraq on my sister-in-law's birthday. I called her that night and we joked about it. Ha, ha, now I'll always remember your birthday!

This year, I did forget all about her birthday. Until I heard about the anti-war protests that will be going on to mark the 5-year anniversary of the war, and then I turned to my mother and said, "Hey, we have to call SIL tomorrow."

It's not so funny anymore.

Homecoming

It’s such a mental transition for me, coming home after a trip to Costa Rica. I get so comfortable there, settle back into the language, the comfort food, the music, the places I knew growing up. I can slip into speaking Spanish the way I grew up speaking it, rough and slangy, instead of using the more polished, neutral version I’ve learned to use as an interpreter.

There is last-minute shopping so I can stock up on tons of coffee, rum and Salsa Lizano. Packing is always an ordeal. Then there are the tearful goodbyes, which make me sad because I never know when I’m going back. It just feels so far away, even though my trip to LA was longer than my trip to Costa Rica. Maybe everyone feels this way about where they grew up, maybe it’s not just me. Maybe I just feel like the cultural and emotional factors make it different. I don’t know. I can’t quite explain it, but it gets me at a gut level

I get to the airport, check in, and feel myself starting to break away. I’m on the plane watching the in-flight movie, and part of me is still not quite there. Then I invariably land in Miami. Maybe that’s one reason I hate that airport so much—to me, it’s that no-man’s-land, always halfway between one of my homes and the other.

And then we staggered home at 1:00 a.m., and the transition was complete, though a little bumpy. Primo has been waking up at 4:00 for the past week and has been inconsolable and then just wakeful. And yesterday I had such an awful allergic reaction to something that I dragged myself to Urgent Care, mostly because my eye was just about swollen shut and I had a translation due at five. Now I’m happily doped up on steroids.

Today is much better. Primo slept until 7:00. I feel much better. I have a large cup of coffee in front of me. I’m ready to rejoin the world, I think.

The Evils of Free Trade (Or: Why I Have No Internet Access)

So, I really have no interest in writing a manifesto on the pros and cons of free trade. This isn’t that kind of blog. And God knows, I’m certainly no expert, and I know it’s a complicated issue. But this is more of a personal anecdote. It’s 9:00 p.m. and the boys are in bed. I’m at my brother’s house. P just arrived, on no sleep for the last 24 hours, so he’s in bed. My brother has been working early morning shifts, so he’s in bed. My SIL is at the beach on a work retreat for a couple of nights. My mom’s reading the paper. So it’s just me and my computer--no Internet--in a very quiet house. It’s lovely, actually, and though I’d normally probably be online, I’m just sitting here writing this, which I will post later, and drinking my rum and Coke. I have no translations to do, so I’ll read for a little while and go to bed early.

In Costa Rica, there is one large state-owned company (read: monopoly) that provides all telephone, cell phone and DSL service. You need it, they’re it. They’re also the power company. Since my brother lives in a remote enough area that he can’t get cable, DSL is his only choice for Internet service, which means going through them. No choice. He’s called and been told he’s not close enough to one of their sites. He’s pointed out that his next-door neighbors have DSL. They’ve told him they’ll look into it. Repeat those last three sentences on an endless loop for a couple of years.

So if you Google CAFTA, you’ll get much better information than I could give you. My simplified version is, Costa Rica was the last holdout in the region, and a couple of months ago the country held a referendum on free trade. This was an incredibly contentious issue and it was all people could talk about for a long time. You were either really, really for it, or really, really against it. According to my family, it was the kind of thing you couldn’t bring up at dinner with your friends if they held the opposite view and you wanted to remain friends. Opening up the telecommunications market is a big part of the deal, and although the phone/power company is a dinosaur and hideously inefficient, they’ve managed to convince a good segment of the population that the company is our “national heritage.” Don’t let the foreigners in, or sell off the country. Patrimonio nacional. I first learned that phrase in that context, which kind of cracks me up. Anyway, the referendum passed, by a very narrow margin. Both my brother and SIL voted for it.

My SIL works at a local hospital, and after the referendum, one of her patients—who also has an important position in the phone/power company—brought it up with her. He couldn’t believe she had voted for it and started joking with her. “How could you vote for that? I can’t believe you would do that. Bad for the country.” After a little while, she’d had enough and told him, “Do you really, really know why I voted for it? Because I’m not sure that you do.” So she told him about the years of calling and calling and trying to get DSL, and apparently, he was contrite and kind of mortified. He told her to bring in the paperwork and give it to him. She said, no, really, you don’t have to do that. He insisted that he would personally take care of things and promised her they would have DSL the following week. Finally, she agreed and took him all the paperwork.

I laughed when I heard that story. But that was a couple of months ago, and obviously, my brother and SIL still don’t have DSL. So last night I asked my SIL to tell me the rest of the story.

Nothing ever came of it, she said. She heard him complaining in the hall one day recently about how all people ever do is ask him for favors. She snarked back something about how maybe people shouldn’t make promises they don’t intend to keep. Now he avoids her like the plague.

Next up: No, Really, You’re Next On the Waiting List
(Or: Trying to Get a Cell Phone—A Two-Year Adventure. My mother’s story. But hey, she has DSL, so maybe she should just shut up already.)

ETA: Obviously, I'm now online. And I do have to admit that those four days without access to the Internet or my cell phone were pure bliss. I took a quick break and ran to an Internet cafe for a quick look at my e-mail, and it was back to reality, which I didn't really want.

Thanksgiving

When I was growing up, Thanksgiving Day meant nothing to me. We lived in Costa Rica, so it was just another Thursday. Although my brother and I were on summer vacation, my parents worked, so there was no celebrating in November. I don't really remember our Thanksgivings in the U.S. before that.

However, that's not to say that we didn't celebrate Thanksgiving. On some random day in March, my dad would randomly announce, "We're having Thanksgiving on Sunday!" Just because he felt like it. In the beginning, turkeys were not easy to come by in Costa Rica. My dad had to ask for leads about farmers who might possibly raise turkeys and would be willing to sell us one. The two of us drove all over Creation trying to find them. It was always the two of us, because I loved running errands with him. Later on, an American meat market started selling them. (Along with pastrami and corned beef.) Now you can get them at any grocery store, but in the beginning it was a challenge, which made it all the more special.

We would invite my mom's side of the family, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, anyone who just wanted to come have a good meal and celebrate this Gringo holiday. We did it enough times that everyone started really looking forward to it, and people would ask when the next Thanksgiving would be. Sometimes we would do it twice a year, maybe more.

My dad's mother had taught my mother how to prepare a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner years earlier. She made everything but the turkey and the mashed potatoes. Those were my dad's domain, his Aunt Mary's family recipe. It involved adding a whole stick of butter and making them nice and fluffy with the mixer. And we would hoard cans of cranberry sauce family or friends would bring down from the U.S., until it became available in Costa Rica.

Things change. The celebration expanded to include my Costa Rican sister-in-law's family. My dad is no longer with us. It is now celebrated at my brother's house (the house we grew up in) and my mother has passed the baton to my sister-in-law, who now cooks a mean Thanksgiving dinner. I remember the day my mom pulled out all of my grandmother's old recipes and "trained" her. She was so nervous the first time, writing everything down in her little notebook, and now she's a pro. Heck, I've never been in charge of an entire Thanksgiving dinner, and I feel slightly guilty that I never took my mom up on her offer to teach me. I make some great side dishes, but they all come from those gourmet magazines and include ingredients like ginger and orange zest (though I can't stand stuffing that includes any weird ingredients, like oysters, nuts or raisins). My family, who still like their cranberry sauce straight from the can, would be appalled.

We're hosting Thanksgiving for the second time this year. No traveling, just some good friends who I can't wait to see. There will be eight of us at the table. We've decided to host Thanksgiving at home as often as we can. The Thanksgivings we've had since we moved here have been awesome, and memorable. There was our first Thanksgiving, which P and I celebrated alone in a rented apartment. The Thanksgiving we spent in the Midwest with his family. The Thanksgiving we celebrated with friends just four days before I gave birth, when I decided to have a glass of wine and someone got a great picture of me balancing my wine glass on my massive belly.

But every Thanksgiving I think about the old days, and miss them just a little. The days of celebrating Thanksgiving just because we felt like it.