THE MUSINGS OF THE WHITE STORK

The best way to start my story about is: Once upon a time…. My father worked for Union Pacific Railroad in Sacramento, California and every year for three summers, Mr. Gomez came up from .  They were both engineers and worked on a joint construction project.

When I was 12, my parents thought it was a great idea that I spend two weeks in Guadalajara with the Gomez family. I was excited, yet a little nervous traveling to a foreign land so far from home. I had never been out of California and was as mysterious to me as Constantinople .

On the drive to the airport my mother tried to instill the fear of God in me. I was to say, please and thank you and eat everything put before me. However, I was not to eat…I can still hear my mother’s words… “Like a horde of Huns.”   Finally she said if I acted up…this was her most dire consequence… I would be left in to die in the desert, kidnapped by banditos or forced to become a priest.

When I arrived in Guadalajara I was met by the Gomez family and whisked away in their station wagon. Mrs. Gomez, in all due respect to Mexican women, was short, round and brown. She spoke English with an accent so bizarre to my ears that I understood one word in seven.  The Gomez family had two children. Their son Paco was ten and, like his mother, a small ball of Mexican fire. Felize, their daughter, was 14 and almost as tall as I was. She had long black hair, chocolate skin, wore pink lipstick and very large, hoop earrings, the kind that Mexican girls to this day still wear. She called her brother “pip squeak” and he called her “the Mayan Princess.”

The next day there was a fiesta for me A piñata was hung and I was blind folded and laughed at for my failure to hit the piñata with a baseball bat. When time came to dance, Felize played her records. Most of Felize’s girlfriends took turns dancing with me all the time holding their mouths laughing. The other girls just stared at me. Paco said the girls called me “la ciguena blanca”---the white stork.

The next day was Sunday and after church, Mr. Gomez announced we were driving to Lake Chapala for the day. Along with half a dozen other kids we piled into his station wagon and drove to Lake Chapala . When we got there, Paco and I swam in Lake Chapala . Then we all went to a restaurant and the action really started. Friends of Mr. Gomez arrived with more kids and the fiesta at the restaurant was indeed a horde of Huns. Felize again huddled with her girlfriends and stared at the gringo boy, the girls whispered into each other’s ears.

The day before I was to leave, Paco said his parents had to drive him to school for matriculation. I didn’t know what the word meant and thought he was sick. is sister Felize was there to answer the door and if I wanted anything to ask her. After they left I sat in their library and looked at picture books. A short while later Felize wandered in and asked if I wanted to come to her room to talk. She told me that I was the first boy ever to be in her room. When I asked hadn’t her brother ever been in her room, she waved her hand and then she made a cutting gesture across her throat. We talked some more, then she asked me if I cared to dance. I immediately thought she wanted to see the white stork one more time so she could laugh with her girlfriends later. A record dropped and it was a slow, Mexican song. She asked if I knew how to slow dance. It just so happened that my parents in their infinite wisdom had made me take ballroom dancing lessons.  So I took her hand, put her arm on my shoulder, my arm around her waist, maintained a fist distance between our bodies and did the two step forward, two step to the left, two step backwards. Suddenly, Felize stopped and said “No,” that was not how they danced in Mexico. “Like this.” She said, and put her body next to mine and her hand on the back of my neck.  She said that in men and women danced with the emotion of the song. One had to feel the music. In the room the sultry music played and I was 12 year old boy that had never kissed a girl. As we danced she put her warm cheek next to mine and pressed her body against me. She slowly rubbed the back of my neck up and I knew if her parents came home and found us, I would have to marry her. Felize stopped dancing and looked up. Our faces were inches apart and I looked down at her red full lips and into those big brown eyes. She said, “Michael, your heart is beating very fast.” Then I said to her, “Felize, you are a very beautiful girl. You will break many hearts with your seductive charms.” She laughed and buried her head in my chest. Then she raised her face and looked me deep in the eyes and said in a low voice, “Michael, two hearts beat fast here.” That’s when I knew, if she had said to me, “Let’s go on a killing spree.”  I would have done it without question.

On the flight back, yes, I thought of my dance with Felize; but I also thought about the aliveness of the Mexican people. That night, home in my own bed I dreamed I was a white stork, flying high out over Lake Chapala , looking down on a magical land and people.