Las Canciones Folklóricas

 Venezuela truly is a dangerous country. I have avoided the more news worthy incidents (murder, theft, kidknapping) but I have suffered three days of compounding sunburns from which my back is shedding skin like a fast-growing arthropod. I suspect I have a hernia from sliding across the lawn on a giant sheet of plastic with the Stagno family’s little youngest members, which, as it turns out, is a very efficient way to find the rocks hiding in the grass below (thus the hernia and countless bruises that make all uncushioned seats impossible to sit upon). To Boot!, my knee, weakened by daily walks with Pietro, the younger brother of Laura and Lea, has left me incapacitated and unable to more than eat, whine and wait for breakfast to be served at 12:00 p.m. And still I dance; still I climb trees and am called el mono; still I teach little cousins how to fence in the hope that the physical activity will exhaust their language function to the point where they have little interest in talking and asking me questions I am likely not to understand.

Thus my survival is maintained by nothing short of a myriad of miracles. They are moments that last for hours on end, like the giant bonfires (fugatas) and fireworks from New Years Eve whose abundance gave me nightmares of a burning countryside, or wandering the Mercado Principal, buying fruits, sugar, flour and various other items without cringing in shame. There is the music we played on the first day of the year on a Cuatro (traditional Venezuelan instrument that is half guitar, half ukulele) and I was able to play violin. The long stints of cooking that keep me occupied or reading a wonderful translation of Leaves of Grass (Hojas de Hierbas) by Jorge Luis Borges. The small moments too are my aliments, where an image of the landscape is fixed in my mind as if taken from the lens of my camera: The dead tree atop a hill with a shaggy mane of Spanish mass and the giant epiphyte, perched atop the smallest branch that left me wondering in which century I live (for there are no houses in sight).

No regular schedule defines my merits, and a small cauldron of bubbling words must be drawn from carefully to string together any semblance of effective communication. But taking store of 22 years, and nearly 8000 days of waking everyday without exception to the same problems of expression and defining my direction and always finding such moments, give me, as I sit on a cushion licking my wounds, hope in perpetuity.

Frase Del Día: Salud, Amor, y Dinero

Every New Years, as El Muñeco del Año Nuevo burns sadly alone on the ground, emitting the bursts of firecrackers, three paper balloons propelled by a kerosene soaked rags are released into the air. The first represents salud or good health and ours rose happily towards Tabay. The second amor, was not so promisig and fell on the roof some few feet away. The third, Dinero (cash-money), fell very like love before. Thus we watched the silhouettes of our hopes for love and money descend through the night sky. I will assume that the health we can expect in the year to come from the first balloons success pertains only to physical health and willnegate mental health altogether.