Préstame tu maquina del tiempo

Mañanas: I love the calm of mornings, which usually begin with a plate of fruit, a bit of yogurt, a small cup of coffee, or the occasional sweet chocolate milk or banana licuado. Renato usually puts loud music on while he gets ready for school and when he leaves, I go through his hundreds of cds. On a recent tranquil morning, I listened to the discography of Rodrigo Gonzalez (imagine a Mexican version of Bob Dylan), while reading Octavio Paz´s El Laberinto de la Soledad, along with my trusty diccionario. I think I actually spent more time looking through my dictionary, fascinated by how meanings connect to other words and expand into more meanings and create a whole web of ideas, sensations and possibilities. While I was looking at the multiple meanings of "extraviado," Rodrigo, in his gruff Chilango voice, sings "ha perdido su camino"- which fit perfectly into Paz's sentiment.

Familia: Renato´s family is amazing. They let us stay in their home for 2 weeks without ever asking for anything or seeming to be bothered at all. His mother, Marcela, cooked us ample and delicious breakfasts on the weekends, filled the table with fruit, tortillas, yogurt, honey, soup, quesadillas and homemade salsa for lunch, made us warm chocolate milk before bed and made us toast and tea in bed when our stomachs were hurting. Gaby, the youngest sister, sings loudly for most of the time she is in the house, practicing for the rock group she sings with. Martin, dad, usually keeps to himself but when his favorite futbol team, America, wins he´s in a good mood for days and will tell jokes and talk with everyone. On the weekends, Martin´s family gathers at his mother´s house and Marcela gets together with her beautiful group of sisters for a day-long lunch. The entire family is lovely and friendly, and they always make me feel like part of the family when I visit. When I asked Renato if it was any problem for them, he assured me that though they are a humble family, they were happy to take care of us because simply, that´s what people do. Ah, Mexico, who would want to leave you?

Things we take for granted: We are driving down the dimly-let, wet, Calle San Diego, looking for a birthday party for the sister of a friend of a friend (in Mexico, if there´s a party, everyone is invited) after losing the car that we were following. We know the address: 109. On the right side of the street we see 175 and the numbers appear to be lowering. Ok, so we know which side of the street it´s on, at least. Driving further along, we pass through all of the 100s and never see 109. So, we keep on driving and low and behold the numbers start back at 200 and are lowering again, but this time the odds and evens have switched sides of the street. Then the numbers jump erratically: 205, 147, 212, 27. We decide looking for the address is no longer a good idea and decide to go back to where we heard loud music coming from a house. Tony runs into the house because it´s too dark to see if its the right place from outside and of course we should have trusted our first instinct- go where the music´s the loudest and forget numbers.