We Will Remember

NO ONE skateboards here. I did see a punk girl cradling a longboard on the bus the other day. That bus was crammed. I felt like a marshmallow in the middle of one of those airtight new marshmallow bags. The ones that inflate with a breath of campfire smoke for smores. Smores. That's another thing Argentines don't have. Skateboards and smores. I had eggs mixed into my zucinni for dinner tongiht. Also in what my madre called a salad, which was carrots and hardboiled eggs. It's like finding a peanut in the middle of that air tight bag of marshmallows. You feel confused, like you don't know if you should be worried or delighted about it. Punk Girl was cradling her way-too-long stick like a date at a high school dance. I didn't see her ride it when she got off at her stop. Maybe she thought it was some kind of accessory, like an alligator purse or a pair of those John Lennon glasses.

I'm not much better though. The moment I start to feel relatively stable on these God forsaken sidewalks I eat another piece of humble pie. I seriously think that some of the cracks are going to  break open and a block or two will crumble into Middle Earth. People stare at me like they haven't seen a skateboard or a blonde before. Old men crinkle amused smiles into the wrinkles around their eyes, mothers hug their children closer, elderly ladies look at me like their eyes are shooting high beam lazers, children gape like I'm a Grecian godess and guys cat call... like how you would actually call your cat. Sometimes I sail by feeling like Tony Hawk and sometimes I feel like a bowl of spaghetti in the dishwasher.

But today was September 11th. In Argentina it's a holiday celebrating teachers so the schools get the day off. We had an asado, which is like a BBQ on steriods. But I had to stop, and remember, and cherish my life in the U.S. and the pain we still suffer through together today. I talked about it at dinner with my Madre tonight. She looked into her carrot egg hybred coleslaw and shook her head. "Que triste... que triste..." She told me that she visited the 9/11 memorial in New York and she told that she watched it on her television in her room with the floral curtains and the dark wooden headboard. Little did I know three years ago when my eyes froze on the flickering shadows under a cherry blossom tree and while I watched men collapsed in with clawed hands caught on a name on that memorial wall that I would be talking about it with my homestay madre and that she would feel it too. I'm a nine-teen-year-old from California and she's an eldery lady from Buenos Aires. We've only known each other a week but we can morn together. We can share life together. We can't always understand each other's words but we can give each other pieces of things we've felt deeply. It's all so beautiful in such a broken, humble way.

"Now, we have inscribed a new memory alongside those others. It’s a memory of tragedy and shock, of loss and mourning. But not only of loss and mourning. It’s also a memory of bravery and self-sacrifice, and the love that lays down its life for a friend–even a friend whose name it never knew."     - President George W. Bush