The sweetest of days

Each morning begins the same way. Celia begins rubbing my back until she coaxes me awake. She knows I will never tell her to cease a backrub no matter how tired I am. I’ve been studying a book about teaching children Spanish. It is full of monologues meant for parents to deliver to their kids. The page entitled, “Levantarse” has the parent gently coaxing their sleeping child with, “Time to get up. The day is here. Good Morning, sleepy. It is time to get up.” It occurs to me that would rarely use these words in my home. Ed is up hours before me and Celia generally beats me out of bed. Why doesn’t the book offer a page for, “Va! No me gusta levantarse.” The monologue would be something like this: “Cut it out. Go away, Mama is [insert appropriate state: sleeping, hung-over, menstrual, hiding from the responsibility of adult life.] Go find your father.” Now, this is Spanish I could use.

But today I was coaxed out of bed by Celia’s gentle touch. We started the day on a quest for glue for a still half-baked shell project. I truly believe that shell art is the lowest form of crafting. It is perpetuated by mid-westerners vacationing in Florida with hot-glue guns in hand. Yet, if it will entertain Celia, I’m in. It is still cool in the streets of town. There is a school graduation going on in the community center and, for the first time, we see Federalis dressed in their black uniforms with AK47s strapped to their sides. The food stalls are starting to fill up with people – even the taco de cabeza vendor is busily serving up cow brain tacos to a perplexing crowd.

As I search the store signs for a papeleria, I see that we are approaching a candy store. If you’ve never been in a Mexican dulceria, it’s worth the border crossing. Sure, we have candy shops lining the thoroughfares of our major tourist destinations and gracing the halls of our fluorescently lit great malls of America but, to my knowledge the U.S. has nothing that rivals the copious dulcerias of Mexico. Stepping off the street into the dark of the store front, the scent makes my teeth ache. Inside the perfectly rectangular room are walls lined from floor to ceiling with every imaginable variation of sugar. Manipulated and hybridized with corn syrup, hydrogenated yadda and monosodium-such-and-such, the alchemists of all things sweet have produced a dizzying array of colors, textures, smells and shapes. Above our heads the ceiling is littered with eye-popping piñatas. Barney, Dora, and the usual suspects hover in the center of the room like empty pods awaiting the life force trapped out of reach in the plastic membranes below.

Little do they know the bittersweet fate stretched out before them. Suspended in a state of expectation, the hallowed out characters dream of the day they too are lowered into the hands of a life-giving human. They will at last be fulfilled – with enough sugar to feed a small non-Hispanic nation – only to be taken home to have their paper mache skulls bashed in by candy-crazed children wanting only to spill their new life upon the ground. I feel compelled to leap for their feet, tear them down one by one, pry open their hatches and fill them with marshmallows, gum drops, suckers and even the tamarind candies no gringo will eat. Brought to life with a jolt of glucose, I’ll shoo the pinatas from the confectionary cage toward their freedom. I am reaching my hand upward to gauge how far I would have to leap for the power ranger’s foot when Celia snaps me out of it. She’s standing on the sidewalk pointing at something and saying, “Come see, mama.” I step out of the store under the watchful eye of the shopkeeper. I glance back over my shoulder at a Dora eyeing a shelf of foamy circus peanuts with heartbreaking desperation. Just then the storekeeper steps in between Dora and I with a long stick tipped with a bent nail like something you might use to spear fish. It may have been that she intended to get a piñata down for me but something in her eyes and the way she gripped the weapon told me otherwise.