A Place That Felt Familiar
We made the trip to Costa Rica but stayed only three days because Jim's best friend's mother had died. Though the emotions we would be facing as we tried to comfort his friend would be painful, the entry in my writer's notebook the morning before we returned to the states illustrated that anything at that moment would have been better than more time in Puerto Limon:
The rain is steady; steady is the rain. The pain is ready; ready is the pain.
It was the time of year in Chattanooga when fog would often mute the morning light and I felt like a jewel ensconced in a pretty box filled with cottony cushioning. Like snow, the fogbanks made everything so beautifully quiet and I forced myself to grow as still as humanly possible, to cease the rattling that would normally occur as I tried to dash my self against the sides of the box of my life that was emotionally small enough to keep me safe, which meant it was no where near large enough to allow me to grow. The "stolen" time, as I saw it, that I'd enjoyed with our return from Costa Rica to attend the funeral had brought me some satisfying movement in my writing, but a question was nagging at me: How could I speak more softly in my work and let the words do all the talking? I wasn't even close to having an answer, but I was taking notes as fast as I could!
This delicious time for writing ended abruptly with our return to Central America one week after we'd winger our way home. We drove to Atlanta to fly south, leaving the house at 4:30 a.m. one cold, damp morning, the cruel early hours the point in time I realized that a subculture exists among Homo sapiens—one which stays under the radar during daylight hours, making night's lusty minutes its own. This dawned on me when we stopped at a Waffle Shop on the outskirts of town to have breakfast. The waitresses were putting on a show and you could tell that many of the people lounging around the counter were regulars. There was an unusual mix of clientele: many of them looked to be blue-collar workers who ate breakfast there more mornings than not, while others seemed of the drifter variety.
One guy could have passed for an extra in "Easy Rider," while another would have been the perfect fit as a cover model for Jethro Tull's Aqualung album. He wore a long denim coat that flared from the waist, a pair of dirty jeans and dilapidated cowboy boots. His hair was a tawdry shade of blonde that seemed laminated to his scalp by a wax-like layer of grease that caught the dull light, subdued as it was by the grime-covered globes on the light fixtures. His gold hoop earring in his left ear was about the size of a nickel and he walked like he'd been born astride a hog—not of the pig family but of the Harley variety.
It was about 30 degrees outside so the most surprising guy wore a pair of white cotton pants, a thin khaki cotton jacket over a pink cotton shirt and a white linen beret. I fully expected to see sandals on the feet of this sales-manager-trying-too-hard-to-look-like-he's-on-vacation type, and was relieved to find that he'd at least put on sneakers. I thought about this odd mix of humanity all the way to the Atlanta airport and enjoyed getting their descriptions down on paper during the plane ride to Miami.
The Miami airport was always chaotic and we barely made our connecting flight. Once on the plane, I tried to settle in with James Michener's Alaska but I couldn't concentrate. As I stared out the airplane window, I saw how the shadow of our plane sprawled on Biscayne Bay like the tin man were he to decide he'd like to spread his arms and fly. There were five colors of metal riveted to the spot we momentarily held on the water, then our shadowy imprint sifted from the choppy bay to a series of well-dressed tennis courts, each of which quickly vaporized with our passing as our downburst of energy fueled our glide toward Costa Rica. What would I do with all of the anxiety I was accumulating for this, one of our last trips to finish the church in Zent? I wondered, realizing the answer would only come when it was ready to present itself.
A church service was held in our honor during our first Sunday back at work. It was a sweet but modest affair by our standards in the Episcopal Church in Tennessee. The collection plate was a plastic washtub, and the parishioners fanned out in what would be the sanctuary of the church, which would likely be furnished with beat-up folding chairs, their hands clasped in front of them as they stood. Father Wilson spoke of the excitement the village would know with the completion of the church, sentiments that were echoed by the villagers who had prepared lunch for us after the service. We arrived in Limon that day just in time to see the parishioners of St. Marks leaving a luncheon of their own. I sat on the top step of the center next door and played a game à la Dorothea Brande as I watched people I knew exit the building. Brande advocated contrasting different people faced by the same dilemma as a way to build characterization skills:
Gus would laugh at most anything; Gertrude would say, "Oh my!" or "Aye, yae, yae!" then ask Gus what to do; Mr. Green would have a whisper of a smile on his lips, then say "Yes?" and play the victim; Mr. Plummer would say, "Yes, man; it's a cruel world," then take to his drink; Mr. Douglas would scratch his head and look confused; I would mull and mull and mull before daring to breathe; Jim would grab the bull by the horns, then assume my mulling was weakness while I continued to mull, terrified that if I acted too spontaneously I'd make a mistake.
I'd been feeling particularly homesick since we'd arrived so I made myself feel more connected to home by recording the beauty I'd seen when the sun illuminated the water of the lake the afternoon before we'd left Chattanooga. The effusive light was sparkling as if someone took chips of glass and tossed them onto the choppy surface. Only an intense enough sun could have enticed them to stay afloat, bidding them to dance on the peaks of the ripples as they twinkled, setting the entire lake aglow. As they winked, I imagined their glee would have resulted in high-pitched squeals, their merriment-making with the wind all the rush they needed to breathe the steamy puffs of anima billowing forth in the crisp air. I shivered as I closed my writer's notebook and headed into the center, the chill not a circumstance of the ever-present dampness of the tropical air through which I moved but of my longing to be shunted into the briskness of winter in a place that felt familiar.
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