“When are you going to eat this?” asks the fruit seller holding up an avocado that I selected, “today or tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” I answer.
“Let me get you another one.” He selects one that is slightly less ripe than the one I chose and puts it in our bag.
“I am so happy to see you!” says Larissa as she greets me and then another woman participating in the exercise class. Larissa lived in New York City for twelve years. If ever I have a question or am confused in the class, she is there to help.
“Los Juegos de Hambre!” exclaims the book seller, noticing the author of The Hunger Games. He has tables of used books outside the Facultad de Lenguas where I work, and I’ve brought him one of Suzanne Collins’ early books. Because the girls and I finished reading it, he can sell it to one of the students. He and I disfrutamos placticar, enjoy chatting, about books and authors.
On their birthdays, I read the kids a blessing that is adapted from one of Cardinal Newman’s Meditations. “You are a link in a chain,” I remind them as they roll their eyes. “A bond of connections between persons.” (Apparently, being reminded of this is SO embarrassing.) “God has not created you for naught.”
Part of the reason that I applied to Mexico rather than another country is that it is close to Arizona. If, I reasoned, we are going to make connections, new links in the chain, then we’d be able to maintain them in the future. And we will. We will stay in touch with the people we have become closest to, and I hope to visit again. But leaving is weird.
And, I realize now, all the links are ephemeral.
“Hola!” Simone and I wave at the toddler in the supermarket.
“Hello!” He crows back at us.
We all laugh together, he at his own cleverness, and we at the fact that this human who has been in the world for less than two years realizes that we speak English.
And that is our moment.
Our link in our chain.
He will never remember us, but we have had this moment together.
I will likely never see the fruit seller, Larissa, or the book seller again. But we have had our moment.
In my middle age, I realize saying goodbye is a blessing. We so rarely realize that something is the last time.
In preparing to say goodbye to my students, I have organized and shared my materials. Here are a few things to remember, I tell them. We stayed long after the last class, talking and taking photos.
It is strange that saying goodbye is so sad when it is a normal and necessary part of life. That fact that saying goodbye feels somehow wrong does seem like a sort of evidence of deeper links to the humans around us, links of which we are not yet fully aware, a hint of the eternal and the life of the world to come.