The Postscript

“We have a tradition in Mexico,” Jorge told us, in English. “When you are given a plate with food, you must return it with a gift. This is what we do with our family and our friends.”

“What was that?” Peter asked. Peter sleeps with earplugs when we are in Mexico, but the noise outside our bedroom woke him. I went to investigate. It appeared there had been some small-scale vandalism in the night. The garbage can had been mysteriously overturned and bits of crumbled bread were all over the floor.

I explained to the baker (to the best of my ability) that I had a meeting at 2:00 and I would love to bring “sweets” to the meeting. The meeting, I added, was with Americans. (There will also be several Canadians, but I decided not to complicate things.) I could tell he sensed the problem. This man looked as if he’d been baking things long enough to have heard of the eccentricities of Americans.

Getting a piece of cake in the middle of the day adds some unexpected sweetness to the day. Peter and I don’t speak enough Spanish to know how to tell these people how grateful we are, how at home we feel, and how much their everyday kindness means to us.

We’ll be staying in our little one-bedroom apartment, and I’ll be writing at my little green Formica desk. It’s not the fanciest place. It’s nowhere near as nice as the homes of most of our friends. But every night our landlord, Jorge, will greet us and the colorful suns hanging from the walls around us will smile at us and we will know we have everything we need.

Right outside the elevator doors, they started singing the Frank Sinatra tune, “Don’t Blame Me.” The setting might not have been the most romantic, but the acoustics were perfect. Those barbershop singers brought tears to my eyes.

It turns out that no one cares if I stay up too late eating toffee. There is no editorial committee reviewing my statements from the previous day, informing me of how they might have been more clever or less embarrassing.

When I see typewriters, rather than experiencing a pleasant nostalgia, I feel something closer to dread.

I wondered how much we could ever know about a little red squirrel. We pretend he thinks just like us and we know, of course, this is not true. But I know he was watching, and I was glad he was there, on this day my mom was not feeling her best. I don’t know what he was pondering as he sat there, his fingers knit together, looking earnestly into the window. But he seemed very intent, as if he was contemplating something.

The biggest change I would like to make in the new year is to stop behaving as if I have all the time in the world. While I don’t know how much time I have, (and I hope it is still considerable), none of us knows. I’d like to be a little gentler on myself in this new year. I’d like to treat myself like a person who is not going to live forever—simply because I am not.