Three weeks since the last Superplush post, and a month to the day since landing once again on the Savior’s soil, it’s past time to wrap up the visit home wrap up.
I was in West Virginia from October 13 to 16, which meant the fall colors were stunning. What I love about seasons, which is also why I must live in a part of the world with four seasons when I settle down, is that a year is just enough time to mostly forget how breathtaking is the first snowfall of winter, how joyous are the green buds of spring, how sweet is the kiss of a summer night’s breeze, and how stunning are the fall colors. It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can forget the beauty of these things.
My Salvadoran friends were properly awed by the pictures I showed them of the gold, red, and orange mountainsides. I told them how I had to wear sweaters and warm hats, and how the night is crystal clear and you can see your breath. One old man told me about the first time he saw snow in person, when he was visiting his son in Pennsylvania; he was delighted to find out you can walk in it—he’d thought it would get you soaking wet just like water.
My best buddy Andrew and I spiraled down the big toilet bowl of Lincoln Tunnel’s New Jersey entrance and arrived in New York City from WVa at about 2:30 AM. We picked up a couple other friends to pass the time with while parking, which took about an hour. I was reminded of how living in NYC so often makes one think mathematically: what is the most efficient way to cover the grid of streets and find the closest parking spot to 82nd and Columbus? The great success of our parking escapade was also its greatest downfall: a 16-backs-and-forths parallel job (with Andrew at the wheel and Joe running from one end of the car to the other to signal the gap like some sort of manly Vanna White), ending with no more than 2 inches on either end, which was punctuated by looking up at the sign that said “NO PARKING ANY TIME.” Getting out only took about 12 backs and forths.
Fortunately most of the other great successes of my visit to the city were downfall-free. One, surprisingly enough, was sushi bombs (a sake bomb but substitute a sushi roll for the cup of sake), which are somehow not repulsive at all. Another was tasty craft beer, especially Pennant Ale from Brooklyn Brewery, which tasted especially good while the Red Sox and Rays duked out the ALCS. Another gustatory success was delicious sandwiches, with a special shout out to City Sub on Bergen St. Most of their employees are Guatemalan, which means they look just like Salvadorans. And finally, in the category of downfall-free technological successes (which also includes touchscreen iPods and phones that flip open various ways, as mentioned in Superplush part 2), there was MarioKart Wii and BoltBus. MarioKart Wii may be as close to pure, distilled fun as a video game can get. And BoltBus deserves its own paragraph.
Apparently they sell one seat on every bus for a dollar. Mine was $18, bought online the night before, and never inspected by the driver. For this I not only got from NYC to Washington, DC in under 4 hours, I also enjoyed high-speed wireless internet the whole way. What?!? I signed into Gmail in the Holland Tunnel! Some sort of Harry Potter bullcrap is obviously going on here, by which I mean wizardry. And not only technological wizardry; there were only 4 passengers on the entire bus, obviously pointing to some very dubious economic wizardry. Possibly dark magic. But, as far as I know, I was not required to enter any sort of pact with Voldemort or Sauron, and remain Dark Mark free and quite pleased with the entire experience.
The girl sitting across from me had three books on the seat next to her (although she slept most of the way). It was surprisingly surprising to see this manifestation of an intensely literate culture. In El Salvador I’m normally the only one reading anything on the bus. Unless I’m sleeping, of course.
Speaking of sleeping, there exists a particular style of sleeping I got to enjoy almost every night during my visit that deserves mention here. In fact, this style of sleeping deserves mention most anywhere, and were my poetical abilities more considerable I would like to attempt an ode to it. It is called stooging. There is only one guideline for stooging: no stooge sleeps alone. Stooge classification is not an issue—anyone, particularly a friend, qualifies as a stooge for stooging purposes. So stooging is really a fancy way of saying, no one sleeps alone. It’s as simple as that, but in my mind the advanced stooging aesthete goes above and beyond, considering a single unified stooging superior to two or more concurrent stoogings (for example, four stooges sleeping together is better than four stooges sleeping two and two).
The reason stooging is so fantastic is that, despite perhaps sleeping less well, getting kneed in the groin, being pushed off the edge of the bed, and/or having all your covers stolen, you’re far more likely to go to sleep and wake up happy, if slightly annoyed. Stooging is togetherness at its most basic. Late night thoughts are mumbled, dreams are recounted, hilarity is shared. You wake up feeling you’re part of something. You spend the most creative and impressionable parts of your day with friends. I’m frankly astounded it’s such a rare habit.
Stooging frequently leads to noteworthy events in the morning, such as breakfast. One morning in NYC three other stooges and I were particularly excited about breakfast when my friend Jeremy started badmouthing it. He insulted breakfast up down and sideways. He tarred and feathered breakfast, which could never have done anything to him except be delicious and start the day off right, which is exactly what breakfast has been perfecting for millennia. We stooges fought back on behalf of breakfast. We branded Jeremy “Dr. Lunch” (think Dr. Claw, Dr. Evil, Dr. Octopus, or Dr. Girlfriend for the proper evil insinuation, and Dr. Atkins for the proper dietary crusader insinuation) and commenced a Manichean struggle of good versus evil all the way into an imagined future in which Dr. Lunch has his downfall. Eventually our black and white Manichean realm evolved into a dialectical one, and Dr. Lunch reformed halfway, becoming Dr. Brunch, a shade of gray. We celebrated with breakfast on the roof—bagels, cream cheese, lox, scrambled eggs. Jeremy, however, had Thai lunch food from Pukk (which is what it resembled), which a gust blew off the table into my lap. The evil of Dr. Lunch remains in him, thinly veiled.
Perhaps now I have given my readership an idea of stooging.
I returned to El Salvador to find that I’d missed the heaviest rains of the year. Thank goodness! Before leaving for my visit, the damp, the mildew, and the violent downpours had been getting to me. Hardback books, leather shoes and belts, and even my varnished wood tabletop would all submit to virulent strains of mildew if I didn’t clean them every day. Needless to say, my house was in a bit of a state after being away for two weeks. But it was worth it to have exchanged the rains for fall colors and clear, chilly nights.
Just as visiting the States wasn’t as much of a culture shock as I’d thought it might be, neither was returning to El Salvador. “Yep,” was my main thought. As in, “Yep, it’s still as Salvadoran as ever.” I walked out of the airport into the cloudy, muggy afternoon, sweated my way across several parking lots and through a misplaced garden before finding the inconvenient bus stop, climbed into the micro bus that had seemingly been designed using an Architectural Graphic Standards book written for Lilliputians rather than normal people, and enjoyed the ride to San Salvador. It started raining lightly on the way, and miniscule droplets of mist came shooting in the cracked window. It looked like a snowstorm in miniature. It was mesmerizingly beautiful. I was happy to be back.
Getting to Morazán the next day I found that the rains had destroyed the dirt road to my community so thoroughly that the moto-rickshaw I’d hired could only get to within a kilometer. I climbed out with my luggage and slopped my way through ankle-deep mud and a driving rainstorm the rest of the way to my mildewed, dirty house. It turns out that was the last rain of the season.
Since that day it’s been windy and cold. 55° or 60° may not sound so cold, but it is when there’s no heated home anywhere. In Jon and Katie’s site up near El Pital in Chalatenango it’s been getting down near 45°. The wind and change to the dry season are dropping leaves off the trees. The chilliness and sound of leaves crunching underfoot make it feel like fall. So I’m welcomed back to the tropics with a miniature snowstorm and the feeling of fall. It’s almost as if someone wanted me, with my love of the seasons, to be happy here, and is exercising some climatic wizardry. Now that’s some Harry Potter bullcrap.
