Waxen Anagnorisis.

i came home friday to find my dad's car in the driveway. 430p strange, he shouldn't be home until after seven. walked in, dropped my art-bag thing and backpack on the couch and walked to his room from which i could hear the tv going. Dad was sitting on the bed with his white headphones plugged into his acer netbook. he looked up just as i dived for his bed.
they let us go at work because of the holiday. what holiday i thought? well, easter and good friday. what makes it good? well, catholics say that they put jesus up on the cross today. "Creciendo en San Fransisco El Alto presentava pocas razones para estrenar ropa nueva. Solamente este dia, Viernes Santo, Carnival el cumpleanos de tu hermano, Navidad y talbes mi cumpleanos" First i should explain that my dad's conversantions and i whenever they venture to times before he spoke English well turn into his Castellano and my Spanglish. Second a transaltion: The Town my dad grew up in in Guatemala offered almost no chances for premiering clothes. When he was given clothes by his family of farmer/tailors, the latter a profession he would excell in once he moved to the capital at the age of thirteen, it was only three maybe four times a year. His birthday was a maybe, having a birthday in march meant easter and the holy week were less than a month away, two important days is such close proximity lowers the chance of double gifts -my smaller brother jason is familiar with this concept having been born on december 29th- October there is a mayan Carnival that celebrates the village, the women offer pagan tributes to catholic saints, surrounding "aldeas" bring their wares for a special market-day on the village square. The people stay up late and out of the house visiting with extended family at the matriarch's house. He mentioned my brother Kevin's birthday because it lands on october 4th, in the week of Festival. Christmas is a given and finally good friday. He remembers this week happily. As a child my dad would be given a few cents to buy beeswax to play with.

"So we would run up to the central plaza to buy our wax. Not like the gold stuff you have here but this black wax like roofing tar, but hard. enough for the size of a large quarter and thick like a poker chip. then we would play a game for keeps. You challenge a friend to a game and set your coin down on the ground. the pavement was pretty uneven but the stones in the road were perfect. set down your coin but not before scoring it with a nail so that the bottom side looked like the sun's rays. as you set the coin down you would thumb it into the ground hopefully adhereing it a bit to the ground. his challenge was to flip your coin and his to keep both sets of wax .you could tell who had been good at it by mid day carrying coins that were three-four times the size of yours, a coin with two or three wins. there were things you could do to help yourself out. i always went home and made two thinner coins first. my brother had taught me to find a wide thin button to add more weight to my coin, as tailors we had boxes of buttons and i would make my own watching them. another thing i saw with them was before you hit someone else you flared your own, thinning out the edges so that the softer wax would adhere to theirs causing them both to flip over as one.
"later when i moved to the capital with your uncles we looked forward to going back home. i was thirteen at the time but well off. your grandma loved it because i would come back with fabrics that you couldn't get in the mountains. in return she would have made me a pair of slacks, but never new. they were scraps that she had puzzle pieced together from cuts of other people's finer textile. the fabrics all matched but a well trained eye could see the new seams from an extra panel, but i loved them both as a kid and teenager.
"The shop we ran in Guatemala City was doing well but we would have given everybody the day off anyways. We all went home on saturday through to sunday to see our parents and it felt like the city would deflate. the busses on the way back home would be packed with men and women going home to eat their mom's food. It felt like half the capitals population migrated out for three days to put their feet up at their own homes and go to church with their dads.

A friend about that growth a family works for to get out of poverty. My family started in an apartment in Korea Town off of vermont. So here was my dad some thirty years later. A house in a pretty suburb, three boys one in junior college and the other away at college in Los Angeles. Three cars and sometimes brother's motorcycle in the driveway. Home with a huge Brazilian Pepper Tree in the front and big German Shepard in the back.