|
|
The unwired AIDS Ride Journal
Journeys Journals September 2001 October 2001 November 2001 December 2001 January 2002 February 2002 March 2002 April 2002 May 2002 June 2002 July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 May 2004 October 2004 November 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 July 2005 September 2005 November 2005 December 2005 April 2006 July 2006 October 2006 Chafing and irritation Musings and such Para los letrados Liaisons The mandatory page with links. Only stuff I read. Sufficiently critical. Contact me |
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Christmas in Colombia
21:27:
It's been a Christmas, full of all the things that make Christmas in Colombia what it is--endless repetitions of traditional Colombian Christmas songs, lots of masses on TV, churches bellowing endless repetitions of traditional Colombian Christmas songs from the steeples, nativity scenes, and did I mention the endless repetitions of traditional Colombian Christmas songs?Unfortunately, most of the week I've spent worrying about my parents' health... first few days, my dad's eye --the doctors say it'll recover but the process will be slow. For the last three or four days, mom has had some nasty combination flu and urinary infection that has pretty much wiped her out and has put her in bed all day... i knew that when I woke up one morning at my usual 9AM wakeup time and she was still in bed--my mom never does that unless she's really feeling sick. Even when we were at my cousin's farm house, she had been feeling like crap and hadn't said anything about it for two days...
So really a surprising amount of the time I've been here I've spent indoors, mostly here in the apartment, trying to be helpful but not knowing what to do to help and not knowing what to do with myself. No real reading material (I've read pretty much every book in my dad's library that I'd have any interest in reading by this age), a very slow dial-up connection, cable tv dubbed in spanish, and both mom and dad somewhat out of commission, a city I don't know well and in which I still don't feel completely safe (even though what I have seen hasn't given me any reason to feel anything but safe), and not really being able to do anything to help...
Since mom's been out of commission for the last couple of days, I've been focusing on trying to scramble up lunches and dinners for dad out of leftovers. His diet is particularly fussy--between what he can't eat and what he won't eat, it doesn't leave room for much. I've also had so many meals that have consisted of arepas (corn meal griddle cakes) and queso fresco that I'm sick to think about it. I was so out of sorts and bothered by the situation that on the 23rd, the day of reheated pea soup for lunch, I ended up going down to the mall a few blocks away and committed the cardinal sin of eating a hamburger just to eat something non-boiled, non-arepa-ish...
I feel pretty stupid even complaining about this stuff--I'm just coming to grips with the fact that my parents are getting to that age where health complications will continue to emerge. I suppose that if I look at it differently, it's better that I be in the position of caring for their health than they caring for mine--it's the way it
should be. I just had hoped that this second trip to Colombia wouldn't be about illness but about health and family. And I'd hoped that I wouldn't have spent the balance of the last four days indoors in the apartment trying to figure out what to do with myself...not like I know the city well enough to venture out on my own to go do something... when I do go out with my parents, some of the little habits they have that I've always known about (like trying to constantly bring in strangers into our conversations) make me tense for some weird reason--not sure why, since that's the way things are here.
Christmas eve was fun--a good 6 hours' worth of family fun. We went to aunt Gladys' house, where all of her clan gathered (her three kids, their spouses, her grandkids, her husband, my grandma (Gladys' mom), my great-aunt-and-godmother Guillermina, uncle Juan Carlos (the one who I always got the sense didn't want me to grow up as some kind of non-drinking sissy) and his wife and kid, uncle Norman (the one who did bookbinding, played the guitar and always took me around town to see cool places, the soft-spoken intellectual) and his two kids (the eldest of whom I last saw when she was 2), aunt Stella (who has mellowed out a lot in her latter years) my parents and yours truly...lots of food, about an hour's worth of gift distribution for all the
munchkins... got to dance with my cousin Marcela, who is a violist with the Antioquia Philharmonic and who's a lot of fun--we got to laugh about how bossy all our aunts are and how stepped-on our uncles are--and tried to dodge Juan Carlos' serving me more aguardiente (the colombian hard liquor of choice, name translates to "water that's on fire")... all in all, very traditional and just as I remember it...
Today we went to aunt Betty's house for some ajiaco (remember that chicken soup we had at the colombian restaurant?). on the way there, dad decided we needed to take a detour from the metro to get on the "metro cable", a mass-transit aerial tram in the best Swiss style. They built it to connect some of the poorest parts of the city, up on the top of the hills, to the main metroline, and it seems to have had good results. the trip to Betty's house also takes you to the narrower part of the valley, and the mountains around here are so green and lush and beautiful... I do want my guy to see this someday. It's a lovely place. It really is.
We had trouble catching a cab back from Betty's house to the metro (it's X-mas day after all, and she lives in the waybeyond), and mom was carrying a fever... we still had to do a pit-stop at grandma's house for coffee... good thing we were outside today, but hard to do so when I knew my mom was feeling like crap and is unlikely to say anything because she doesn't want to inconvenience...
Now it's 9 PM, both parents are asleep, and I'm sitting here spilling out what's eating at me and feeling like a bad son for moaning and bitching about stupid stuff, and worrying about more important stuff that's still not very productive to stress about over email (the fact that my brother and sisters are missed, the fact that i worry about what mom would do if I'm not around, the fact that my parents' finances aren't very solid...)...
Argh. I need to stop moaning and focus on lovely things like arepas with queso fresco and pretty displays of lights. That's the ticket...