Final Draft

Lorena Lizarralde
September 23, 2009
ENC 1101
Professor Moody

Memoir

We were all fidgeting. It was our last day of kindergarten and we all wanted to start our summer. The clock read 1:55 p.m. Only five minutes remained. I looked around the room and saw all the familiar faces of my friends. Ashley, my neighbor and best friend of all time, had an amazing birthday party planned in late June. Peter, he was so cute, I had admired him from afar all year and was hoping to get a chance to talk to him at Ashley’s party. Then there was Ms. Geiger, our teacher. She was tall for a woman and always walked with a sort of elegance you only see on the runway. She was pulling back strands of her dirty blonde hair that somehow always looked beautiful while sniffling. She was sad we were leaving and was touched by the presents we all had brought her. I was going to miss all of this, the playtime, the naptime, and the special lunchroom for us younger kids. Yet, a whole new life was waiting for me, a life of a big kid, a 1st grader, and a 7 year old. In first grade we would be allowed to enter the big fields outside with the tall monkey bars during recess. Summer was the perfect time to practice my skills at the local parks and it was only 1 minute away. The bell rang just then and I ran out as quickly as I could and jumped on my mom who was always waiting outside. “I have great news honey! Get strapped in the back seat so I can tell you all about it!” my mother said to me. I hopped in, buckled up and waited for her to continue. As I waited, I looked at her face. She was so beautiful. She had creases on the side of her eyes that to me represented experience and wisdom. Her hair was cut short at her shoulders dyed a dark red color. Her red hair was always my favorite; it reminded me of my own Hispanic Little Mermaid Princess. She was smiling from ear to ear, one of her best characteristics. She went on to say, “I bought you a ticket to go see your family in Colombia for the whole summer!” I was shocked. What was this? In one instant, she had gone from The Little Mermaid Princess to the evil Sea witch Ursula herself, a traitor and backstabber. My summer was ruined and all she did was grin. I was to leave the day after tomorrow for three full months to meet this group of strangers I was to call family.
Two days and a short flight later I was getting off the plane in Cali, Colombia and was to greet the people that were to torture me for the next three months. I was getting my last bag when I saw an old woman holding a sign that read my name. I may have only been six at the time but I could at least read my name. I approached her slowly. Her face was worn, as if she had had a hard life; she seemed to have a permanent hunch and was dressed in the tackiest floral print dress I had ever laid my eyes on. She recognized me and lunged at me with her arms wide open. I hugged her back softly thinking to myself this must be grandma. After I escaped her death grip I got my grandfather, my aunt Patricia, my uncle Chacho, my cousin Christian and my cousin Federico introduced to me. They all stared for a while and began to ask how I had been doing. I would only respond good over and over again to be polite, but really did these people believe that this is how I wanted to spend my summer?
To get to the house we all rode in a van that reminded me a lot of the private bus that takes me to school. The first thing I learned here was that I had a loud family! Miami has always been known for having loud people but my family was as loud as the NASA shuttles taking off into space. They all talked over each other and no one listened to what the other was saying. It was all getting to be too much when we finally arrived at the house. It was a bland, beat up white house. I had heard wonders from my mother for so many years and I was standing staring at a house that looked a lot like the portable buildings in the back of my school. There was a garden area out front, but gardens mean bugs and bugs and I have never gotten along. There was a gate to get in the driveway, then a gate over the door and then 5 locks on the door before you were allowed entrance. I felt as if I was going into a top-secret threshold. Contrary to my initial impression, the inside was the completely opposite; it was radiant. The antique record player in the corner, the box TV set and the sparkling chandelier hanging above caught my eyes right away. It all had a royal feel to it. I must have shown the awe on my face because my cousins began to laugh when my jaw dropped to the floor. “Didn’t expect this huh?” my older cousin Federico asked with a grin on his face. He was going to be a tall kid, he was almost his father’s height, or should I say my uncle’s height. When was I ever going to get used to this “family?” Federico had curly black hair like mine, and a slim figure for a 12-year-old boy. Christian was awkward. His figure was chubbier around the waist area and he stuttered a bit too much for me to stand. He was one year older than me, yet acted like the toddlers in preschool. Earlier I had caught him playing with ants, who plays with ants?
The next couple of days flew by as I settled in. I was sleeping in my grandmother’s room for the first 2 nights until I shyly confessed to my aunt that since my grandmother snores like a dragon, I could not sleep well at night. Thankfully, I was allowed to sleep in Christian’s room for the remainder of my stay. The first week I watched a lot of TV in Spanish, slept and ate. Once I was tired of that I began to play with my cousin Christian. He showed me how he played soccer outside in the driveway area and how the goal was to hit either the gate leading to the street or the garage door on the opposite end. We would play one on one and I would of course always lose. The game quickly became our favorite pastime as we began a tournament to see who would win the most games by the end of the summer. The loud racket we caused with that soccer ball will never leave my memory as I can still to this day hear my Aunt Patricia yelling “Stop hitting the garage door before you break it!” We never broke it but got to hear what would happen if we did numerous times. I later also came to find that the ants he played with were super entertaining in a house with no toys. We would get a couple together and race them or put them on the wall and see if we could follow them. Eventually they would escape in any crook or cranny and leave our sight. I was suddenly exposed to a different form of entertainment and joy with a new set of eyes.
As we visited various family members around town, I was struck by the poverty level that was considered the normal way of life here. It was incomprehensible. Everyday my aunt donated a plate of food to the family that slept on the sidewalk across from her house. If we got lucky the mother would let us play with her daughter while she helped my aunt clean around the house. The immense level of poverty was without a doubt, higher than what I was used to back home. At the time I never realized that it was caused by the Guerilla warfare going on all over Colombia. The Colombian people were scared for their lives at all hours. This explained the process to enter our household and why we never left the house completely alone. My grandfather and grandmother usually volunteered to stay behind and take care of the house while we went out. Many times I would stay just to have a competitive game of Parcheesi with my grandmother. I’ll never forget that she was a cheater; she would move her pieces to her advantage when I would look away, but never did she confess her sins. The game suddenly had become a game of strategy, a game of who was the sneakier person, and that person would always win.
Although the neighborhood looked old, the people seemed worn, and the “fun” activities you would think of doing weren’t available to us, I was having the time of my life by the end of that summer. Christian had become a brother and my Aunt another mother figure I could count on. They made me laugh and experience what it was to have a big loud joyous family for the first time in my life. My mother had always spoken of the importance of knowing and loving everyone in your family and this trip taught me just that. My life had changed permanently; my eyes were opened to another world, another culture. I improved my Spanish, which was a key to many of my successes later on in life, and walked away with a dozen new loving relationships I would never let go of. That September, I entered the first grade with a more mature attitude that far exceeded that of my classmates. Also, I had stories that surpassed any pool party memory my friends could reminisce on. The next summer was already planned in my head, three months with the most eccentric and admiring family a person could ask for.