Aca y Alla

I almost don't know where to begin. As Eli said tonight, life progresses slowly, slowly, slowly, then wham! All of a sudden everything changes. You're walking along, maybe humming softly, when a piano falls on your head, and like a cartoon character, you pop back up and keep on going, only paying a bit more attention now to the windows of buildings above you. She's been through quite a lot lately, and today was the worst of it. Oddly, I'm grateful to have been here for it all, and we three roommates have grown much closer because of the experiences of the past week.

Between Friday at noon when we got the news and Saturday afternoon when the other Mauricio's mom met us at her door with fresh juice, 24 hours passed in which we packed up our lives into boxes and borrowed suitcases, and left our comfortable and much-loved apartment for the roving lifestyle of apartment hunters. Saturday morning after breakfast we rented a truck, left a note and money for the internet bill, tossed everything in the back, crammed into the cab, and finally took a breath.


The truck's owner was a gnome of a man, 80 if he was a day, who spoke with such a strange tongue even our native Spanish speaker could hardly understand him. His helper was a middle-aged beer bellied type, garrulous and friendly, with dreams of buying the 30-odd year old truck himself one day soon.

Karen, Cielo's little girl (she of the 4-yr-old reggaeton birthday party fame) insisted on helping us. She carried down three of my smaller bags, incredibly. I had to pull out all the stops to convince her to run back upstairs to give a final wave so that we could leave - she is at the age where you hate being left behind, and was adamantly clinging to my legs once the last load was on the truck. I stalled until she made it to the window, and her tiny hand was the last thing I saw as we pulled away.

After we dropped off the lighter items at Tom and Porter's place, where they had generously agreed to let us keep some things, I switched places with Mauro so he and Eli could sit in the front and give directions to our next destination. I was certain the assistant and I were going to fall out of the back of the truck on the highway - somehow when things go awry you get the feeling they could get much worse before they get better - but we all arrived intact. It didn't even rain, not a drop all day, nor the next.

Sunday woke up gorgeous and sunny. We walked for five hours, stopping for delicious croissants and coffees, getting sunburnt and content with our results - four pages of phone numbers. One thing at least - I know the city better than I did before all of this. Today was another long day of walking and considering. Tonight, a long night of talking and listening. I'm so happy with the family I've made here, much as I miss my family and my Home there. We all have a function within the small group, some role to perform or space to fill. It's quite beautiful, really. It's what I was trying to create in Atlanta. Now I wonder if I was just in the wrong place.

Lately, we speak in terms of "aca y alla," or "here and there." There is only one here and only one there, we all know which is which, and the comparisons are endless.

[To clarify what I meant by this, we tend to speak in terms of here and there in making the perhaps inevitable comparisons between life here in Colombia and life in the states. For whatever reason, people feel no need to clarify any further. Maybe it's also a measure of how centered this place feels. For all of its crazy and maddening problems, Bogota is a real place. Willie Colon's "Plastic City" may find some expression in parts of the North, but in general Bogota feels like Bogota and only like Bogota. There's no mistaking it, and I love that.]