Mañana Por La Mañana
A lovely birthday, homecoming, Jazz Fest, and overall perfectly imperfect day yesterday – best summed up by this little ditty:
Mañana por la mañana, llena tu casa de flores, que seguro te visita la Virgen de los Dolores.
My interpretation was fill your house with flowers and sure enough you’ll get a visit from the virgin of pain, but T’s interpretation was that you welcome the virgin with the flowers, and A, a Puerto Rican, said you make an offering to the virgin of pain because she comes to take it away.
Or maybe that wasn’t the point of what I was trying to say which is that yesterday for my 49th birthday, we could not find a cake so we bought one with a slice missing. And that for me was perfect – it was an Italian wedding cake thick with white frosting and inside were coconuts and nuts and it was delicious. And then mom arrived an hour late to have pasta bolognese with us but she brought me stamps from Scriptura and she said she envisioned me stamping everything in the house. And I read her a letter from my brother in prison, who after three letters is toning down his religious moral highground to reconnect. And then T went to take a nap and mom opened her box of Turkish Delights that T had brought her from Istanbul and ate one with relish and leaned in and with furrowed brow, whispered, “Honey, I have looked and looked but I simply cannot find Croatia on the map.” So I brought the Atlas and showed her the new boundaries of Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro….and I thought about how different our mothers are – and how imperfectly perfect.
Later, when we were finally walking out to go to Jazz Fest it started raining and when the rain paused and we made our way to see Stevie Wonder, we had found a little pod of grass to stand on in the midst of a huge crowd and it started pouring buckets.
Then, I guess what I was trying to say is that when we were leaving the Acura stage, we had to jump over a mote to get to the outside track, and it was mud soup from the rain and in this trough were three little boys (about six years old) who were slipping and sliding and rooting like pigs – coated with mud – laughing like hyenas – and for some reason that might have been the indelible image from yesterday – the imperfectly perfect – muddy children, a cake too good to wait to be eaten, Jazz Fest goers who weather any weather to hear music, a woman who hates to travel who flies back for my birthday, a city that will always be left of center, friends who are flawed but generous, and wow, what a great day to be alive and celebrating your life.