This blog has fallen into a state of disuse over the past few months. No, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. My life is full, very full, these days and, in the mad rush toward a number of things, this blog fell by the wayside. I wish I could say that this was me returning to pick it up, brush it off, and get back in touch with everyone, but I’m afraid that would be misleading. Give me a month or two.

In the meantime, I’ve started a separate blog for a school project that some of you might find interesting. The blog is called Speaking Gringlish and I will be posting in both English and Spanish. The blog’s main purpose is to discuss how estadounidense (U.S.) culture has infiltrated Latin America and how the English language is involved in this infiltration (for good in some instances, for bad in others). I’d love your thoughts on all of this, so please stop by.

God is good. I am three weeks away from being married to the most wonderful, delightful, beautiful, sweet, darling woman on this planet. What more could one ask for? I covet your prayers for the next two years as I finish school, prepare for the mission field, and settle into married life. That’s all for now. More (hopefully) soon.

They came along the road as if out of some other world, and the muddy clay and leafy trees and even the mottled sky above seemed transported to another time, when the continent had yet to be civilized and man first confronted the wilderness. Two distinct realities, we crossed paths. Had it been a crowded street downtown, or had we been sealed off from each other in our own miniature eco-systems on wheels, it would have been easier to avoid the difficulty of the meeting.

And yet there was no awkwardness. Awkwardness comes from a shared discomfort, but here there was only wonder, on both sides. Wonder on my part at the possibility of there still being wild things in the world. Wonder on their part at my walking their path, a path partly formed, I believe, by their own feet, walking it day after day, all the years of their lives. Their eyes were clear and light and contrasted alarmingly with their dark faces and spoke what their mouths would not. The eyes bore into mine, and I thought about a neighbor’s dog when I was a kid. I believed it to be half wolf, and was told that if I stared into its eyes, it would go wild with rage.

They carried a brace of rabbits, tied tightly together, dead and dangling from their shoulders, and rifles as well. Their breeches (honest-to-goodness breeches) were tucked pragmatically into rough boots and their shirts were buttoned down to their dark wrists and up to their dark throats against the elements that had railed against the lowlands all morning. On their heads, they wore, completely within their rights, berets battered and beaten and glazed with time. There is a distinct difference between the wild man’s hat and the domesticated man’s hat: one bears the stains of the outdoors and hard use, the other still has the manufacturer’s label sewn into the lining. I later looked at my hat. SQUASHY SUEDE: WATERPROOF, it said. MADE IN AUSTRALIA, it said. I am sure their hats had no such words pressed inside; I felt somehow that there was something out there I could not reach, that eluded me like a wary coney in the tall, tall waving grasses of the Pampas, and I yearned for it.

We nodded, or at least, I remember nodding at them, a good-afternoon sort of nod, quick, friendly and to-the-point, and perhaps a humble acknowledgment that I had trespassed their territory, that I did not belong there, and that I had intruded upon the satisfaction of tired feet tramping homeward as the declining day shook hands with the evening. I remember the way their heads turned as we passed, and how much I wanted to know, for example, how they had shot the rabbits in the tall grass, and how long they’d been out, and where they were going home to, and whether or not they had any names and what those names were.

But I said nothing.

We passed, and continued on our ways. My friends and I were going back to Buenos Aires, and the gaping avenues, dark corners and worrisome sameness of one concrete block stacked upon another. The hunters were headed for home lights on the outskirts of San Antonio de Areco, but I could not see those dwellings.
***

The snake did not seem to notice the fingerlings as they played raucously about his tail. He was the prince of the creek, and they were beneath his notice. I watched his sleek form move regally, then stop, then move again in the glistening water. Perched safely above on the boardwalk, I could watch without fear. So the catch in my breath as I turned to continue my walk was not a product of terror, but something else. It was the startling realization that safety is too steep a price to pay for a life spent “indoors.” And safety, after all, is not what we are called to, is it?

Arnaldo (not his real name), leans forward, hands clasped and elbows resting on the arms of his chair. His knees rock slowly back and forth as he talks. He is probably in his thirties, with a broad face, anxious eyes and a military-style haircut. Under the corner of his left eye, where mottled skin creases untidily, rests a tiny blue star, perhaps a souvenir from days as a gang member. On his neck, a squat cartoon man with baggy pants and t-shirt makes an unfamiliar symbol with his hand. There are other tattoos, but I pretend not to notice them.

Arnaldo begins to update Pastor D., then turns and asks me if I speak English. He appears to be more comfortable speaking English than Spanish, and the musicality of his story, now told in the Spanglish of his native Texas, is enhanced by the repetition of phrases like know what I’m sayin’?

A few days earlier, Arnaldo had gone to court to hear his sentencing.

“I had this really bad feeling, you know, like I was gonna throw up or something. So I told the guards ‘hey, I don’t feel good. I’m serious.’ But I started breathing good, you know what I’m saying, and I felt better. And I was like, you know God, whatever happens it’s okay. So then, even the guy from the [place where it happened], he told the judge like five or six years was enough…but the judge was like fifteen years…and it was over…nothin’…just like that.”

Just like that. After the sentencing, Arnaldo had got depressed, started fighting again, and was locked in maximum security.

This is not my first visit to the jail, a waiting room for people headed in one of two directions: home or state prison. While they wait, they ruminate on the past, which, in all but the worse cases, offers more hope than the future. Perhaps this is why jail ministries are so important—the distractions and false hopes of life are stripped away, baring the soul to the rawness of its insufficiency and sinfulness.

I have not met specifically with Hispanic inmates until tonight. Pastor D. has been working with these inmates for a year and a half. He is a small, understated man, and wears a button-up shirt and acid wash jeans that don’t quite reach the tops of comfortable-looking tennis shoes. His hair is neatly combed and parted, and I guess by his persistent interjection of the words anyway and so that he is Puerto Rican. Pastor D. leads men’s Bible studies in Spanish every Wednesday night; I am accompanying him tonight to learn about the ministry and hopefully find a way to get involved. As we stand in the meeting room, waiting for the first study to begin, he tells me about the men.

“The muchachos are mostly from Mexico, yes, but we also have a lot from the Honduras.”

“Why are they here?” I ask.

“Oh, mostly immigration. The police get them for whatever reason and ask to see their papers. When they don’t have any, they bring them here and wait for immigrations to take care of them. A lot of them end up getting deported.”

“What about their family life? Are they married, single?”

“Most of them have families—most of them are married.”

The inmates arrive and come forward to the front of the room to greet us. They are wearing the orange jump suits and flip flops I remember from before, and I think about the construction teams and field workers and how, in the past, they all seemed to me to be the same person. All Mexican, a comfortable part of our landscape. Here in jail, even this shared identity seems to be taken from them—they aren’t all the same person; they seem like nobody at all.

I say hello, shake their hands, and we take seats. Time is limited, and Pastor D. doesn’t allow much for conversation before the lesson begins. As he talks about compassion, fasting, and love, I find my mind wandering. Behind me are seated eight men, each of them with names and, perhaps more importantly, memories. And all of these memories compiled together tell stories, and these stories compiled together become a history. It is a history that haunts each of them, and because it haunts them, it haunts America, too.

After the first study, one of the men talks with Pastor D. about a visit to his family. When the inmates leave, I ask Pastor D. about meeting with the prisoners’ families, relaying messages, that sort of thing.

“Most of these guys, their families don’t have telephones,” he says, “And because the families are also illegal, they’re afraid to come to the jail to visit the prisoners. So the only way to communicate is to get someone to take a message.”

Later that evening, after the Bible studies, is when we meet with Arnaldo. And when ten o’clock approaches, Pastor D. says it’s time to go. The three of us stand and bid each other good night. I am going home and Pastor D. (I assume) is doing the same. Arnaldo is going back to maximum security.

Wanting to get to the bottom of all this, I asked myself to have a cup of coffee with me. We chose a corner booth so that we could keep all exits in clear view (a tactic a friend had taught me years ago).  I had prepared a list of questions to ask myself, scribbled in red ink on a yellow legal pad. But the blank stare across the table made them all seem somehow irrelevant.

Sorry?

I didn’t say anything.

Oh, I thought you said something.

No.

I Wonder as I Wander floated eerily through the still air. Aside from our waitress and a very large man who seemed intent on devouring the entire counter, we were alone. The weather channel played on the single television, and the woman on the screen moved and shifted from side to side before a computer-generated United States of America. She waved her arms maniacally across the regions. So this was it, I thought to myself. A cold front descending upon the southeast.

So, how are you adjusting? It’s been a nearly two months now.

Oh, there are little things that take a while getting used to. I keep wanting to show up late for things, I find lines inconvenient, and is it just me, or is it really quiet around here?

Yes, but I mean how are you really adjusting?

I’d like another cup of coffee, please.

Just then a bird flew into the diner. He took one look at us, shook his head, and flew back out. The waitress mumbled something about varmin and took windex over to the window and I noticed for the first time a gentleman in a fedora. He was eating pie and reading Le Monde Diplomatique with a sneer. What he found in that publication to sneer about I guess I’ll never know. But I did believe for a moment that he had appeared out of nowhere and then realized that that was something we had in common. I asked for the check and tidied my legal pad. The interview was officially over and I had places to go and people to see. The fedora looked up at me inquisitively as I passed by but I paid him no mind.

***

The grand house rose from the Georgia clay as if it had grown up side by side with the magnolia tree that shaded its porch. Perhaps it had, and they had played together as children, a clapboard cabin and sapling romping between the cotton fields long into the summer nights. The distant singing had kissed the shifting bolls and sent the hardwoods shivering. Now, the house’s boards creaked with arthritis, and the old magnolia was gnarled and weary.

We walked from room to room playing ghostly tricks on each other, sending laughter ringing through the halls. The sense of guilt I ought to have had at so shamelessly tramping through the old rooms and listening to my raucous voice echoing off the old walls was exchanged for a feeling of entitlement, as if I, too, belonged there.

There was a large gilded mirror on the landing and it watched our every movement like a shimmering eye. I stopped before it for a moment and stared into its depths, wondering what scenes had unfolded before this glass, and when we would see clearly, face to face. But the mirror surrendered none of its secrets aside from a memory so covered in dust and mildew that I could barely make it out. A woman, it seemed, had stood on that very landing and looked down into the darkness of the midnight house below, so still she seemed to be made of porcelain. The beating of her heart echoed that of the clock. And then her head tilted downward and she sighed milkily into the shadows and retraced her steps bedward. The vision faded, and the mirror motioned me to silence.

Every reader will know the feeling. You spend a week or two getting to know them. Mere shades at first, translucent guazy shapes, they slowly take on human form, walk around with you a bit, weep when sad, dance when not, invite, resist, confide. You know their names, their passions, their desires and longings. You know their joy, and you know their despair. You, alone in your corner, curled or sprawled or in some other state of repose, silently and secretely invest your soul in them. And so, when you turn that very last page, where the words only come partway down the white expanse, you feel satisfied, sleepy and mournful. The last period, a black speck of finality, mocks you. That’s all there is, there isn’t anymore.

When this happens, you can’t just hop out of your reverie, slide the book into the thin space for it on the shelf and just as quickly select a new one. You wait awhile, afraid even to move less the sweetness of the experience be shaken off like sleep, forcing you to confront the reality that bounces eagerly around you like a puppy eager for play. Even the pleasures of daylight seem empty, and the assurances of a golden afternoon impossible to satisfy.

My character and personality have been enhanced and altered by the book that now rests on my knee. I am not the same man I was when I performed that sacred ritual, when I ran my hand over the roughness of the cover, wondering what adventures lay within, what lands to be concquered, what hopes to be inspired, what loves to be nurtured. Then, prayerfully and with all the energy a man of twenty something can muster in his soul, I turned those bare prefunctory pages to where Chapter One began and embarked on a journey. With the expanse of Roosevelt’s badlands, Cortez’s Mexico or Pizarro’s Andes before me, I could hardly have imagined then that the day would arrive when I, too, would reach the end of my pilgrimage. And yet I did. 

It is open now to the last page, but no majestic heroine against scarlet evening, fist clenched at cruel destiny, rises from its words. Neither does the all-knowing narrator stand dockside pulling in the wandering painters as he hums contentedly to himself. The cottage door does not close on cozy fire, the rain does not fall steadily on windblown hills, and Horatio makes no speech. But there are well-known faces, warm touch of hand on back, honey spoken with hope and vigorous resign.

I will stay my hands a while yet, reverie feigning patience, committing this book to memory until the hand of God leads me back to the shelf and I pull out the second volume, new and fresh and promising. I have every reason to believe that the sequel will rival the first, and I anticipate its wonders with pleasure.

Have you never felt the gnawing call of home? Standing on a pier overlooking the wrong ocean, you can feel it in the breeze blowing in from childhood’s towns, where gulls dived and hats fluttered. When sky’s curtain, yet undrawn by the hand of dawn, plays screen to the films of yesterday, you will know the voice. Loneliness obligingly opens wide the door to memory, and in tiptoes the cunning messenger: Return to nest and hole, to kitchen table and cotton field, to dancing dune and thunderous cloud; return, return, return.

The Mole felt it. “Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!…The call was clear, the summons was plain. He must obey it instantly, and go.” Dante felt it, too. Estranged from his fair Florence, he spoke these words: “Thou shalt prove how salty tastes another’s bread, and how hard a path it is to go up and down another’s stairs.” And I feel it, strong and steady as a draft horse, pulling me closer and closer to that place which has existed always a few steps beyond the realm of possibility, but now lies but a few days away.

The man who believes he can never go home will learn to deal with this voice. He will attempt to drown it out any way that he can, spending his days clanging together pot lids. By and by, he will learn to suppress it through more subtle means. And in the end, he might even kill it. But add a little hope, and that voice will grow. Hope is the fuel that makes the fire of desire burn bright and glorious. A man can grow warm by such a fire, no matter how distant the shore on which he dwells.

The little girl does not run; she flutters like a fledgling parrot across the court. Ribbons dance behind her, and her cheeks flush with unspeakable delight as she kicks the ball. She and her playmates chatter and dance. At eight years old, the season of joy will soon come to an end. Childhood in Inkawasi is an Arctic summer, a blast of warmth gone so quickly that one dares not blink so as not to miss a second of it. When it is gone, it is gone forever.

¿Imataq shutinki? What is your name?

I can’t remember my name.

¿Imataq shutinki?

I lost it! The spirit of the mountain took it from me as I led my sheep by his shadow. Mama told me never to wait until dark, but I fell asleep beneath the quina bush. I will never find my name again.

Edilberto tries to explain, but he is a frustrated man, thwarted by life itself, and there is so much he wants to say. He has a kind face and behind his sad eyes lie stories left untold. A cajamarquino by birth, he has only partially adopted the local dress and wears a colorful woven poncho, synthetic workout pants and tennis shoes. For years he has worked with the women and children of Inkawasi, victims of domestic violence and abuse. The children are his hope: “We have to start with the children. Adults don’t change.” In Spanish, the word for despair is desesperar. It means to unhope. It is a common theme in Inkawasi.

¿Imapaqtaq waqayanki? Why are you crying?

I do not even know.

Rosa weaves with the rainbow for inspiration. In her hands, the colors reach out to each other in love, bringing communion to her shawls and sacrifice to her pullus. She is thirty three years old and has five children. As she walks, the smallest of them clings to her skirt. He does not speak, only stares with very large eyes. At night he has colorful dreams that astonish him, but he says nothing. One day the dreams will change and he will become like his father. His desires: to play with his bigger sisters, to be held in his mother’s arms, to eat, to sleep when he has eaten, to be smiled at.

Allip tuldyawlla syiluqa. The sky is cloudy. It has been this way for days. The potatoes will be ruined if it hails again.

José, a primary school teacher in Inkawasi, feels a rush of relief as he boards the bus to Chiclayo. Another week survived. Did I leave anything behind? The window is stuck. There. I´ll get there at two and have lunch with Carlota. I wonder what Carlota has been up to this week. Car-lo-ta. The sun is very bright today. Good thing I brought my sunglasses. I can’t wait to tell Carlota about my week, especially about that one kid. I’ll be so glad when it’s all over. Let’s see…March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October…that makes eight months. Two to go. That’s not so bad. I can put up with anything for two months. Why did I say yes? José, what were you thinking? Driver’s taking the turns fast today. Maybe we’ll get there a little early. I could run home and get cleaned up, that should only take a few minutes anyway. I wonder where the guys will want to go out tonight?

They lived in the house with the blue porch railing and the scripture painted on the side for fifteen years. They were there for fifteen sowings and fifteen harvests, fifteen birthdays and fifteen Christmases, fifteen wet seasons and fifteen dry seasons. They came from America to give the most precious gift they could give: the word of God, a New Testament in Lambayeque Quechua. It was the strangest thing, but all the townspeople knew it to be true: anyone walking by the house with the blue porch railing and the scripture painted on the side would smell something that reached into their souls and lifted their feet off the ground so that they could only drift of an exterior inertia. It was the aroma of sacrifice, an aroma that had not been smelled in Inkawasi for as long as the oldest matron could remember, and over the years, it would change everything. Little churches began to spring from the cool soil like the mushrooms of Marayhuaca. They are there now, small and struggling, but there. They have been planted, now they must be watered.

Every story has a beginning and an end, I thought as the bus slowed to a stop along the main stretch in Mancora, a beach town on the northern Pacific coast of Peru. I’d poured over lush photographs of swaying palm trees and white sands and, like a director seeking location, location, location, ultimately decided that no landscape would better serve as backdrop for a time of reflection on the events of the months before.

“You need time alone to process your experiences,” said a friend while we talked at a cafe downtown in Trujillo. I inhaled the soothing scent of chamomile while I tried to explain what was going on in my crowded brain. I knew that my experiences were valuable, that I had grown and learned in ways visible to others. Hadn’t my mother remarked, “you seem more serene somehow”? How could these experiences not have shaped and changed me? But I turned back and the faces seemed to peer expressionless from beneath a dark, rushing current. Words spoken in love, in wisdom and in jealousy that once shattered my world seemed now silent. To whom did these strange and dear faces belong? Whose jokes shared and whose heart wounded? But to summon them was to summon shadows, and I had enough shadows for companions already.

“I think you should go away somewhere for a few days, to pray and read scripture. I think you need that.” The words were refreshing. Yes, I thought gratefully. You’re right, that’s exactly what I need.

That was how weeks later found me on the shore, with a thousand tiny grains of sand pressing against the soles of my feet and the sunshine drenching my skin like rain. But the clarity I sought was not in the persistent breeze or the age-old push-and-shove of wave upon shore. “I’ve looked forward to this moment for so long,” I told myself. “Why isn’t it all clear now?” Silence. The ocean, always nudging my soul to its brink, shivered unobliging before me. It was the same ocean the grizzled ancients had gazed upon, and now I, too, rested my eyes on its dynamic surface seeking its wisdom. It offered none.

The shoreline along the Mancora hotel district is bordered by majestic palms and weekend getaway villas owned by wealthy limeños and used two weeks out of the year. In September, they are shuttered and curtained and quiet, while further up the shore a diminished community of backpackers and surfers revel in their loneliness and toast their sadness from bitter cups. I saw them when we went into the village, observed them as one observes seals on a far-off jut of rock, with uncommitted curiosity. No man is an island, I remembered, but perhaps what we are is a bumper car, swirling around frenetically, charged by some invisible current, fighting and struggling against each other amid smiles and other less benign gestures. A woman tanned to the color of a candied apple snuffs a cigarette while her companion struggles to keep his head. It rolls back, curling strands of a dark, angry color shaking in the breeze as he tries to remember his name. Surely it wasn’t always this way. It started when they couldn’t remember each other’s names…now they couldn’t remember their own. No matter, another quarter in the slot and the world would go on as it always had before. Poor, wounded souls. Whisky is clearest when still in the glass.

The little horse was sturdy and shaggy; my bare feet barely touched the worn, wooden stirrups and the hard, grainy texture of a rein felt good in my hand again. The sand gave way begrudgingly beneath us as we trodded along the shore. I remember I used to talk to horses when riding, but this one was not in the mood for conversation. Perhaps he was a seeker, so I let him be. To our right, men and boys pried clinging crustaceans from the slimy rock with violent, knocking knives. To our left, the deserted villas and a few, isolated bodies glistening in the sun. What next, God? I asked. The question startled me. I’d come to find my past, not my future, in the persistence of the ocean. The poets had told me that the ocean was time itself, that the answers lie buried in its deeps. These were the mysteries that plagued Job, that the Psalmist could only wonder at. And yet I had come not to seek clarity, but to peer into my future. No mortal should be permitted this gift, I told myself (you see, I’d forgotten that I was no mere mortal) and so I turned the horse to go back up the beach. The animal arched his neck and then tossed his head and shook it vigorously. Perhaps he, too, had realized his mistake. Encouraged, I nudged him first into a trot, and then into a gallop.

I’d forgotten the feel of a fast-moving horse beneath me, the liquid cooperation between horse and rider as a watercolor landscape rushed by. I’d forgotten the wind and the snorting and the heat as both beings stretching eagerly forward, racing against time itself. When we slowed to a halt I felt as winded as the horse beneath me. What now? I can’t see backward or forward. I’ve lost my vision and it all looks the same.

The color of the ocean reached into my soul and played a chord of nostalgia. It was the color of the sky in Florida when a storm is about to hammer and rail. I believe it to be the deepest, grayest, bluest color on earth, the color of fury and power. The white caps danced gleefully on the water’s surface and the sun bore down upon us all with shocking strength. I could be roused to no new anger, for the greatness of the ocean quieted me…how could I speak in this presence? Then it happened. The years flew by in the vortex of my memory and I became once again the skinny child of six sitting beside the Gulf of Mexico, straining to find that foreign land and dreaming of all foreign lands while my feet felt cool beneath the sugar sand. I was a dreamer at six and I’d lived those dreams, I suppose. I’d heeded the voice of the poet:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Had I come to the place where all dreams ceased to be dreamed? I was afraid to ask such a question, but there was Someone not afraid to answer it. In the midst of my reverie, something rose between the horizon and the shore. It was the sleek, dark outline of a great creature, shimmering in the sunlight. My heart felt hushed as it rose and fell, time and again, in the surf. In moments it had disappeared completely and I, solemn and hushed, dismounted.

Sitting minutes later in the shade of the porch, I sought the ocean’s depths for the sign to reappear. My life, my past, present and future, are held in another’s hands. I am swallowed into His greatness, and no harm can reach me.

So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.

There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein. (Psalm 104:25-26)

It was a hot morning, but the heat I felt came not from the sun but from that invisible, urgent tide that rises within us and sears our eyes with joy or grief. Mine was the joy, His the glory. The dream continued deferred, but now I was hungrily content to wait for it. All things would be revealed, all things made clear, in His perfect time.

“I was watching a report,” she began. The words transported me back to late evening conversations over hot lemonade in a cold kitchen. Amelia has never been very pleased with the way things are going in the world, a sentiment she shares with many in her generation (and increasingly with many in my generation). Those nights we would talk about politics, the economy, neighbors, education…and whenever a topic grew stale she would introduce another with the words “I was watching a report this afternoon…”

Now the topic was time. Time flies. Time is money. Time is the one thing there is never enough of. It was an appropriate topic. I’d been ruminating over it as I’d walked the mile or so to my old neighborhood that afternoon. The leafy patterns from the trees of San Andres agitated my thoughts as I walked beneath them. I’d walked these sidewalks before, nodded good morning to the security guard on the plastic stool near the gym, seen the old women doing thai chi in the park. Could it have been so long ago? The math added up to two and a half years, gone in a second, it seemed.

A visit to Amelia had not been the purpose of my return, but as I passed the old arched wrought iron gateway on my way back from seeing another friend, I knew I owed her a visit. I rang the bell.

Moments later, I was sitting on the old sofa in the wall-papered living room. Van Gogh’s sunflowers above me continued in their eternal search for sunlight, the heavy dining room table still bore its fussy lace table cloth, and beyond it the patio was still crowded with its ferns, violets and bougainvillia just letting in the soothing afternoon rays. I could see the frosted glass of the kitchen door and the familiar china dolls, cross-stitching, and souvenirs gifted by a sea-faring son on the shelves near the windows. The house hadn’t changed much, and neither had its mistress. The lady of the house sat as she always sat, legs daintily crossed, perfectly composed in her armchair, content to be goodhumoredly discontent.

We reminisced. I’d lived in her house for nearly two years as a boarder. Those were strange, fast-flowing times, I think. A circus had moved past her as people came, put on dazzling performances and then exited stage left. It was an odd premise, a middle-aged Peruvian woman playing hostess to a crowd of young, American men with ideas no single continent could hold. They were acrobats and clowns, philosophers and poets. She observed them, taught them Spanish, fed them from a frying pan, made their beds every single day of the week (I remember arriving one evening to find my room unchanged from the morning’s disarray and thinking that the entire world had collapsed), and simply welcomed them. And they, one by one, had taken bows and flown away into the far territories.

“You know how the planets are all accelerating in the universe.” She spoke the commonplace with arched eyebrows and lifted her mottled hand to illustrate with a casual wave the celestial movements. I sipped the orange juice she’d given me and nodded enthusiastically. I tried to picture the television panel presenting their credentials by laying a pile of tabloids on the glossy surface of the studio desk.

“Well, the experts on the television were saying that, because the earth is rotating so much faster these days, we’ve actually been losing hours over the centuries.”

“Really?”

“Yes. That’s why people are always complaining about how fast the time is passing. Here we are and it is almost Christmas! The truth is that each day now only has 16 hours in it.”

“But the clocks haven’t changed,” I mentioned quietly.

“Of course it seems that way,” she said impressively.

I held my tongue. How could I blame her for trying to come to terms with watching her life flashing past her? The auburn light crept through the window and settled warmly over my face and hands and the sunflowers arched their backs eagerly. In a handful of weeks I would be leaving this place. For me, this meant nothing more than a page turned in a book whose ending, Lord-willing, was still decades in the future. It was true that there would be no more friendly evening chats in Amelia’s living room, or afternoon walks through San Andres. And yet, the years stretch before me like the Pacific, gleaming and promising. Things were different for Amelia. For her, soon there would be no more performances to behold, and the acrobats and clowns, shoes in hand, would softly pad to other, brighter rings as she sat placidly watching the planets spin out of control on her television.

An hour had passed (or, by her estimation, forty minutes) and I bid her farewell with a promise not to be the stranger I’d up to that point been. We stepped out of the house, crossed the well-waxed courtyard and she unlatched the gate for me. “It was good to be home again,” I said as she offered her cheek for a goodbye kiss. “Yes,” she said with an absent smile, “stop by and see me again, you ungrateful man.” Then she waved me down the street, past the Engineer’s bodega and the basketball court, away from Vista Hermosa and the house with the wrought iron gate.

As I made my way down the avenue and back toward the Institute, the buildings were sweeping the pavement with their six-o’clock shadows and the rush hour traffic blasted its way through the streets. I realized that the very thing that rushed this lady and myself headlong into loneliness was also the very thing that rushed us headlong into blessed reunion. I would see Amelia again, perhaps in this life, perhaps in the next. Until then, there was “world enough, and time” for the both of us in God’s perfect arrangement.

Walking back from a solitary lunch today, I fell deep into a state of introspection. The polished concrete pavement of the plaza glared up at me accusingly, and the groupings of people about the place on polished concrete benches seemed perplexed by my existence. Then, a little girl in a marshmallow blouse and navy skirt jumped nervously into my view like a little bird. She was crying Mamá! Mamá! ecstatically and her mother, several yards ahead, was pulling that mysterious invisible line that connects children to their mothers.  The little girl bouncing along and laughing distracted me from myself and a warm, swelling feeling inside announced the presence of joy and the goodness of the Creator. All was well.

Joy, it seems, is the appreciation of who God is and what He has done. And the difficulty of joy is this very same thing, appreciating God with thanksgiving when the heart clamors after the Baals of this age. This is how I can explain the dissatisfaction that gnaws at the heart of the wealthiest of men, and why our deepest cravings in our quiet, most honest moments are so at odds with the outward signs of prosperity and the self-realization the World calls happiness. The absence of true joy can never be filled by the offerings of Mammon.

Surveying the roaring reach of a magnificent waterfall, or an evening sun being liquefied by a hungry tide, the presence of God is so close that humanity has no choice but to listen to His song. A well-known atheist once said that Beethoven’s 5th symphony proved to his heart the existence of God, despite the efforts of his elegant philosophies to drown out the overpowering message. In these moments, it is as if the grandeur of God is so bright that it distracts us from ourselves long enough to give us a peek into eternity and glory. We are thrown on our backs and must either cower or rejoice.

But what about the still, small voice of God? What when the waterfall ceases to crash so magnificently or the sun to set so beautifully?

Last night I was sitting in an old movie theater in a very small town about an hour outside of Trujillo. The orchestra was playing a true criollo festival, complete with walzes and marineras and tonderos. You may wonder whether it is appropriate to write about Beethoven and popular band tunes in the same post. But there is a connection here, I believe. The sensation the atheist felt at hearing Beethoven’s symphony brought him, momentarily at least and perhaps in a very small way, to his knees. It is also probably, judging by his ultimate rejection, that his power to experience joy at hearing the symphony might even have proved food for the demon Pride in him. I myself certainly did not expect what I was to find in Casa Grande. In the dimly lit theater with the stains on the walls and the straight-backed, waxed wooden benches, I turned to look at the audience. This is what I saw:

Farmers and farmers’ sons, their wives, sisters and daughters, too. Men in their best suits, unkempt children still in their school uniforms, ladies with hair and sweaters neatly arranged. These were people from the provincias of La Libertad, the hearty, untamed and lively. Here they all were, gathered to hear the visiting orchestra from the City. I did not have to interview a one to ask how they felt. It was on the wrinkled, leathery faces of the men and on the made-up faces of the women. It was in the toothless grinning of a little boy and in the tapping toe of an elderly woman. It was in the boisterous standing ovations. It was  exuberant, unrestrained joy!

In one of my favorite books, The Wind in the Willows, the carolers sing Joy shall be yours in the morning! It shall be, every morning in the light of the rising Sun.