Xocoatl – Part 1 and 2 Revised

When I was 14, my mother insisted that I move to Mexico for 3 months instead of going to summer camp with my friends. I tried to convince her that it would put stress on my social life if I couldn’t make friends at camp the summer before high school, but she was firm in her decision. I needed to know my roots.
As I remembered, my Grandmother was a plump woman with dark skin and nearly half my height. She believed that family and culture were the most important things in life and my mother never should have left Mexico. At my twelfth birthday party, when she had come up for reasons I’ll never fully understand, she insisted that we had Aztec ancestry and that I was denying it. A skinny young girl with olive skin in a room full of white, blond cheerleaders, I felt like I fit right in. But my Grandmother saw it differently. She asked me about Mexico, screaming at me in Spanish as I pretended not to understand, my friends staring, puzzled. I told them later that grandma had Turetts and that she was complimenting Gina’s hair when grandma had been pointing violently at her with her stubby, fat fingers. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that in fact my sweet old grandma from Mexico had been calling her the spawn of Cortes and promising to laugh at her family’s burning corpses in the afterlife. After that, vowed to disown her, and I’m sure she had been thinking the same thing.
On June 4th, I arrived in Cozumel and took a bus three hours to Tulum, where my grandparents lived. I was shocked when I was greeted with loving kissing and hugs from both grandparents, as if they were welcoming me back home. Grandma looked the same as I had remembered; the only clue that I was at the right house.
The first week at my grandmother’s house was spent investigating the nearby town and trying to understand the Spanish words that I hadn’t learned growing up in Chicago. I had never been to Mexico before, despite the fact that most of my family lived here. My Dad was 100% Irish and his family lived less than a mile from our house. I had a wonderfully normal grandmother who spoke English and made Christmas cookies just down the street, leaving no reason to travel 10,000 miles to be chastised for speaking English.
With three months perpetually ahead of me, I would walk into town at noon on a dirt road that ended after two blocks. I would buy a few bags of chips and a can of coke from a grocery the size of a gas station and sit on the side of the road, watching people busily walking out of a house and into another, out of that one and into a store, repeating. The houses all seemed to be pretty much the same, including the one I was living in. They were all one story with flat roofs. The outsides were white, or had been at one time, but were now beige from the road’s dry dust or wet mud, depending on the weather. I did this for almost an hour everyday. In the after noon my grandma would make me stand in the kitchen with her while she made dinner. Somehow everything was made up of sour cheese and corn. Corn tortillas, corn flour in everything, and sometimes just plain corn.
One night, while I watched her mixing things with her hands and adding strange ingredients from various bags of dried vegetables, she called me over to “help.” I could tell she needed no help at all, but that this was an excuse to grind some culture into me. In the corner was a large stone platform with a wide curve in the middle. I pulled it over to the center of the floor and she showed me how to get down on my knees, kneeling in front of the curve. Then she grabbed something heavy from the table next to us and began grinding the two together in an exaggerated scraping motion. It looked almost like she was washing clothes.

“This is how you make tortillas” She said, proudly. She poured dried corn kernels on the platform and began grinding them with the small stone pestle in a large graceful motion. Then she handed the stone to me and left me with the job of grinding. I watched the kernels turn from yellow to white and become powdery and starchy. I kept adding corn until I had ground about 2 cups and stopped. Grandma looked down at my work and motioned to keep going. I ground for another 10 minutes until she decided I was done. Then she showed me how to mix the flour with water and knead the dough with my hands. I was awkward but she was patient. Grandpa walked in just as we set the tortillas in oil and we ate soon after. I was proud of my work for the day, even though grandpa only ate one tortilla instead of his usual 3.
By the second week, my grandmother began forcing me to learn about my family as well. She didn’t work, so while my grandfather was gone during the day, we would walk around the town and have soda’s with every surrounding neighbor.

Grandma: This is my granddaughter, Isabel
Me: Hello
Mrs. Someone: Hello, Isabel. Have you met your cousin ‘ blank’?
Me: I have a cousin?
Mrs. Someone: Um…

My grandmother always seemed embarrassed by my familial ignorance. I hoped she would eventually stop dragging me around and I could just sit on the side of the road and wait for august. Unfortunately, her vivacious desire to educate me was matched only by my reluctance. I was given tortilla duty every night at dinner. Starting at 7:30 she’d walk into my room, where I was usually writing letters home, push the door wide open, and walk away. This meant it was tortilla time. I would silently walk into the kitchen gather my pestle, corn, and a blanket to kneel on, and grind corn for 15 minutes. After 3 days I began having cramps in my arms, but soon that passed, along with the abraisions on my hands and my quiet complaining. Three more weeks and she didn’t even come and get me anymore. At 7:30 I’d get up, even without looking at the clock, and prepare the tortillas. One night I spotted grandma looking down at me and smiling before she quickly turned to face the stove. I pretended not to notice, but that was the night when I realized grandpa was eating my tortillas.
6 weeks into the summer, grandma and I began speaking. Not often, but the thick resentment between us was starting to thin. Not long after I noticed this, she came into my at 5:50 in the morning whispering softly something I didn’t understand. I slowly got up to get dressed while she ran out of the room. After about ten minutes, I was dressed and mostly awake. She was packing lunches it seemed, a tortilla with pure white cheese melted inside, a bowl of black beans and white farmers cheese. Roughly the same thing we had eaten for dinner last night and every night before. I’m not sure if she new how to make anything else. She grabbed a few dried tomato slices from a wooden shelf protruding from the window and thrust a bag in my direction. Then she walked towards the car as I followed her.
We didn’t talk as she drove into the sunlight ahead of us. Soon the cold dew on the window was gone and dust slowly began to grow under our tires. A comfortable silence continued between us as I watched her focus on the road, then the trees around us, and when the trees around the road thickened, the sky. An hour or more passed like this before she pulled over on the side of the road and turned off the car.
“Come with me.” She said.
We walked through a wood unlike any I had seen in Chicago. The tops of the trees were no higher than 10 feet and each one touched every tree around it. Yet, the trunks were far enough apart that it felt as it I was in a green box. The sun hit the ground is strangely shaped spots which I examined thoroughly as I followed grandma deeper among the trees. She stopped at the foot of a tree that was about twice as tall as I. Large green pods hung from the tree like independent bananas, though they were nearly as long as my forearm and more than twice as thick. She grabbed one and twisted it off with a yanking motion.
“A thousand years ago, our people picked these. This is the Cacao tree and the beans in this pod make a sacred drink.”
I took the pod from her with concentrated diligence and turned it in my hand to examine it’s other sides. One long streak was pale yellow while the rest remained vibrant lime green.
Together we walked on the doughy ground as she pointed out the cacao trees and I marveled at the increasing sizes of their seedpods. At some point during the day we sat on a dead tree trunk that was rotting on the ground and ate the food we had packed. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I smelled the food we had packed and excitedly devoured everything. The white, sour cheese was cool in my mouth and the tortilla was sweet and hard. I craved the tomato, and when I mixed the flavors together, they seemed to combine and create a new food different from them all.
After lunch, grandma took my hand placed it on one of the three pods we had picked. With a swift jerk, she struck the tree trunk so that the pod exploded into the air, but all I felt on my hand was the soft, even pressure of hers. When I turned my hand over, I saw five tan seeds with velvety, smooth sides.
“These are cacao seeds. This is what people make chocolate from, but they mean more than that, and I will show you. When I was young, my grandmother showed me how to make Xocoatl and now I’ll show you. All you need is the seeds from these pods. When they dry, I will show you the next step. Gather a few more pods and put the seeds in your bag. When you have more than you can hold in two hands, we’ll drive home.”
For the first time in my memory, I noticed a distinct feeling of pride blooming in my stomach. No one in Chicago had ever seen these foreign-looking green pods; it was if they were created solely for me. Together we gathered 8 more pods and extracted the seeds with increasingly efficient whacks. Every movement was accompanied by a laugh and glance.
We drove home again in silence, but not a hollow silence like before. The air around us was filled with newness and experience. We had both experienced something for the first time, and took comfort in knowing it was only possible with each other.
At home, we cleared the tomatoes from the window and placed seeds all along the sill and in the sunniest places of the brief front stoop. Together we ventured outside every morning, anxiously awaiting the day when the smooth, tan skin of the husks would become shriveled and brown.

Goodtimes

Rain falling on a grassy field at midnight

Inhaling white smoke kills you faster than just being alive

Pull out sparky, lets walk to the trees over there, where the ground is dry

Where the sun is covered by clouds, a warm breeze is a like a finger dragging up my spine

Why shouldn’t i make the best of what i have?

Milli Vanilli

Why did Milli Vanilli lie for so long?
Delaware, New york, Wednesday nights in Kuwait, Paris, my living room.
They traveled from stage to stage singing, “Blame it on the Rain”, fooling the crowd like a fake moustache.
Shalamar remained honest in their red cheetah skirts, so did Michael Jackson, through depression and war.
Hip Hop or Disco, it shouldn’t matter, when even Fred Astaire didn’t chew his nails back stage praying that the record wouldn’t skip.
Milli stepped on stage. Bam! He sang a line that wasn’t there, stomach dropped to the floor like lead.
Eternal darkness surrounded their careers like city smog; they’ll be taking the bus from now until March.
Happiness, I’d say, is a silk teapot.
Tea spills onto the table and you’re left with bareness, aloneness.
Ever wonder why mom said, “eat carrots” instead of, “eat star fruit”?
The same reason a Jay eats beetles instead of chocolate.
Go to Asia and they’ll tell you the same thing.
Ask a question that matters.
Like, “who shot Biggie”?

Ode To Gingko Berries

I walked among the Gingko leaves
Smirking with green fall weight
Falling, with a smirk on green grass
Like a carpet over wet ground
I stepped on leaves and smelled an aroma
Overpowering and not of a fall mind

Seeing round yellow fruits I picked one up
Soft in my hand, wet
I stepped on sour smell, which followed me home and lived on my skin
Until I walked past the Gingko Berries without stopping
Holding my breath
Waiting for winter to dismantle their putrid stench

Jasmine

I was in the kitchen of a house in which I did not live and I decided upon having a cup of tea. I had recalled, on earlier visits to this same place, a glass vase no bigger than a closed fist that housed a meager amount of jasmine tea pearls. At about 2/3 the rotation of a rotating cupboard stood the object of my desire. It was a clear glass container with a large stopper for a lid. The tea pearls sat together like a litter of dogs or some other animal that one might rarely be seen singular. I pulled out the jar and removed the stopper in order to remind myself of the sickeningly cloy fragrance of jasmine tea. Just as I had remembered the scent flooded into my head and overpowered my senses as if I had just inhaled a spritz of perfume into my nasal passages directly from the bottle. I set the jar on the counter and preceded to examine the neighboring cupboards for another, more desirable, leaf. I came across four lidded cups sitting directly in front of me on the counter. They were all different colors except for two that were red. I opened the green one first. Inside I found 4 or 5 large tea pearls easily the size of a thumb or perhaps the size of a yearly cicada, the kind with large green eyes and speckled black bodies. I identified the pearls as green tea and though I knew I was in favor of it, moved on to the next cup. The blue cup had a smaller number of what seemed to be the same balls of tea. Without hesitation, I applied the lid to the blue cup and immediately took hold of a red cup. Both red cups, I discovered, were scarcely containing more than a few tablespoons of black tea scented with a disgusting hue of jasmine. I eagerly applied the lids to both cups to minimize the amount of jasmine wafting through the air I had to breath. Perhaps, I thought, the jasmine tea wouldn’t be as bad as the jasmine scent. I poured myself a mug of the water I had been boiling a dropped in a few of the pearls. They floated on the top of the water like dry leaves fallen from a tree branch. They resisted the water’s soft baptism and refused to allow the moist weight and heat of the water to breath life into they’re sleeping cocoons. The air became sticky with jasmine the way poison spreads through the body and sticks to the cells it will affect. I picked up the mug and dumped the vile leaves down the sink, listening to their hollow bodies hit the pipes as they met their well-earned fate. I poured another mug of hot water and a dropped in a large pearl of the green tea. It too resisted the waters touch, but in an insistent air I propped my spoon against it in an attempt to keep the ball submerged. A few minutes had passed when I decided the water perhaps wasn’t hot enough. I had more faith in this tea and knew greater measures had to be taken to ensure its superiority over it’s ill-flavored foe. I poured the water and the tea pearl into a clear glass pitcher not much larger than a mug and placed it in the microwave. I heated the water for one minute and hoped to find, open my return to the microwave, a free-for-all of green tea leaves in a dark cup of hot water. Instead I found something even more curious. The tea was not green, I found, which was why it did not stain the water like I had expected; it was white. Additionally, the tea pearl did not break up into a thousand enlightened leaves; it bloomed. The needles of white tea had been tied at the bottom so that It opened on the top and from the center sprouted a yellow ribbon that appeared to be some sort of flower which floated all the way to the top of the water. In awe of this strange and beautiful surprise, I stared at it from every angle so that I could fully understand it’s existence. I thought about how I might acquire it or what it might be called. I thought about the person who made this and how they knew it would bloom in this way. It was truly the sweetest cup of tea I had ever tasted.

Where Has My Black Been Hiding?

Where has my black been hiding?
Sometimes she peaks out from behind the church podium
when the choir sings, “We Shall Overcome”.
My soul swelled when the crowd clapped
to the natural beat of the 50 untrained voices
And my black touched my hands that lay motionless on my lap, before disappearing behind the full pews.

Where has my black been hiding?
Perhaps underneath the golden dashiki
draped over that young boys shoulders.
His skin is lighter than mine
But his voice is high above the rest.
What allegiance do I feel to that sacred cloth he wears?
The ancient spirit of humanity is in him.
My black lifted up a corner of the green and yellow patterned cotton
And looked at my mouth, quiet, my eyes, unmoved.

Where has my black been hiding?
I think I felt her warm breath on my back
When the man’s sweet music eased my anxieties and melted every worry.
She wiped away the tear that I fought to hold back
When “Letter from Birmingham Prison” was read
She placed a warm hand on my cheek to chase away
The shiver that covered my skin
When I looked at all the bodies, swaying in unison.

I know where my black has been hiding.
My black is in the ever-churning souls of the men and women around me
My black is dancing in the corner with my white, my red, and my yellow
My green, blue, purple, and brown.
I saw her there and she came to me and spoke in my ear
And told me to sing.
And when I lifted my voice she jumped inside
I have found where my black was hiding

The Clementine

The Clementine became ripe in winter and every child wanted a box of their own.
I held one as it melted into the concave recesses of my hand.
Mother pierced the pores of the giant orange with a clove and the sharp edges cut her hands until they bled.
What clove would break at the weakling skin of a Clementine? Not a clove that made fingers bleed like the skin of the mighty orange.
Mother peeled the weakling skin away and handed the Clementine to me.
What else is there to do but eat this frail imitation?
It has no seeds.

Goodtimes

Rain falling on a grassy field at midnight
Inhaling white smoke kills you faster than just being alive
Pull out sparky, lets walk to the trees over there, where the ground is dry
Where the sun is covered by clouds, a warm breeze is a like a finger dragging up my spine
Why shouldn’t i make the best of what i have?

Hunger

Before the genus homo and before dark-skinned wiry-haired apes considered climbing down from the trees, they scoured the branches for fruits and insects. Our earliest ancestors killed weaker animals and searched daily for fruits and nuts as food, I’m sure of it. An immortal fullness hung just beyond their reach like an apple at the end of a pole that was tied to their head. We were always running towards fullness but it will always escape us with the passage of time. I assume this is why my own hunger perplexes me. An acute awareness of my sickening desire for food perpetually devours my self. First comes the appetite for something specific which becomes broader in its absence. And beyond this, a deep hunger, like an illness that becomes more unrecognizable. I’m sure there’s another stage, a stage of peacefulness and fullness that comes just before death, but I’ve never made it to this stage. Following the stages closely are my increasingly desperate actions to acquire food. At stage one I might gaze longingly at an apple Danish that sat on the other side of the room. At stage two I might begin to consider more drastic options to get food. More likely than not, I imagine, that by stage three I’ll close my eyes, accept my defeat, and walk towards the light.
Is it evolution that’s caused this? I’m sure if Lucy was alive today from the bowels of Ethiopia, she was gladly have killed a small child by stage three and devoured every edible piece. Admittedly, it might never come to this, as stealing is a readily available option, but does this mean her desires were greater than mine? The culture I’ve earned over thousands of years has only succeeded in a greater and more unrelenting hunger. Would I die before I stole the apple Danish from the hands of a child? I don’t know. Would Lucy?

Xocoatl – Part 1

When I was 14, my mother insisted that I move to Mexico for 3 months instead of going to summer camp with my friends. I tried to convince her that it would put stress on my social life if I couldn’t make friends at camp the summer before high school, but she was firm in her decision. I needed to know my roots.
On June 4th, I arrived in Cozumel and drove 3 hours by bus to Tulum where my grandparents lived. As I remembered, my Grandmother was a plump woman with dark skin and nearly half my size. She had insisted, at my twelfth birthday party when she had come up for reasons I’ll never fully understand, that we had Aztec ancestry and I was denying it. A skinny young girl with olive skin in a room full of white, blond cheerleaders I felt like I fit right in, but my Grandmother saw it differently. She asked me about Mexico, screaming at me in Spanish as I pretended not to understand, my friends staring, puzzled. I told them later that she had turrets and that she was complimenting Gina’s hair when grandma had been pointing violently at her with her youthful fat fingers. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that in fact my sweet old grandma from Mexico had been calling her the spawn of Cortes and promising to laugh at her family’s burning corpses in the afterlife. I guess that why I was shocked when I was greeted with loving kissing and hugs from both grandparents, as if they were welcoming me back home. Grandma looked the same as I had remembered; the only clue that I was at the right house.
The first week at my grandmother’s house was spent investigating the nearby town and trying to understand the Spanish words that I hadn’t learned growing up in Chicago. I had never been to Mexico before, despite the fact that most of my family lived here. My Dad was 100% Irish and his family lived less than a mile from our house. I had a wonderfully normal grandmother who spoke English and made Christmas cookies just down the street, leaving no reason to travel 10,000 miles to be chastised for speaking English. At noon, I would walk into town on a dirt road that ended after two blocks. I would buy a few bags of chips and a can of coke from a grocery the size of a gas station and sit on the side of the road, watching people busily walking out of a house and into another, out of that one and into a store, repeating. The houses all seemed to be pretty much the same, including the one I was living it. They were all one story with flat roofs. The outsides were white, or had been at one time, but were now beige from the road’s dry dust or wet mud, depending on the weather. I did this for almost an hour everyday. In the after nood my grandma would make me stand in the kitchen with her while she made dinner. Somehow everything was made up of sour cheese and corn. Corn tortillas, corn flour in everything, and sometimes just plain corn.
One night while I watched her mixing things with her hands and adding strange ingredients from various bags of dried vegetables i, she called me over to “help”. In the corner was a large stone platform with a wide curve in the middle. I pulled it over to the center of the floor and she showed me how to get down on my knees, knealing in front of the curve. Then she grabbed something heavy from the table next to us and began grinding the two together in an exaggerated scraping motion. It looked almost like she was washed clothes or something.

“This is how you make tortillas” She said, proudly. She poured dried corn kernels on the platform and began grinding them with the small stone pestle in a large graceful motion. Then she handed the stone to me and left me with the job of grinding. I watched the kernals turn from yellow to white and become powedery and starchy. I kept adding corn until I had ground about 2 cups and stopped. Grandma looked down at my work and motioned to keep going. I ground for another 10 minutes until she decided I was done. Then she showed me how to mix the flour with water and knead the dough with my hands. I was awkward but she was patient. Grandpa walked in just as we set the tortillas in oil and we ate soon after. I was proud of my work for the day even though grandpa only ate one tortilla instead of his usual 3.
By the second week, my grandmother began forcing me to learn about my family as well. She didn’t work, so while my grandfather was gone during the day ( I never knew where he had gone, and still don’t) we would walk around the town and have soda’s with every surrounding neighbor.

Grandma: This is my granddaughter, Isabel
Me: Hello
Mrs. Someone: Hello, Isabel. Have you met your cousin ‘ blank’?
Me: I have a cousin?
Mrs. Someone: Um…

My grandmother always seemed embarrassed by my familial ignorance. I hoped she would eventually stop dragging me around and I could just sit on the side of the road and wait for august. By July she did stop dragging me around, but on the night of July 18th, everything began to change.
At 5:50 in the morning, I awoke to warm hands shaking me shoulders and whispering softly something I didn’t understand. I slowly got up to get dressed while she ran out of the room. After about ten minutes I was dressed and mostly awake. She was packing lunches it seemed, a tortilla with pure white cheese melted inside, a bowl of black beans and white farmers cheese. Roughly the same thing we had eaten for dinner last night and every night before. I’m not sure if she new how to make anything else. She grabbed a few dried tomato slices from a wooden shelf protruding from the window and thrust a bag in my direction. Then she walked towards the car as I followed her.