Tijuana Gringo | |
Daniel's Journal | by Daniel Charles Thomas |
19 December 2001. Wednesday. |
I've been spending all day working on the translations. Finally I go for a walk around the park. Sit down to scribble a verse of my own. Voila. vOICI :
almost winter on the California divide
no where to hideno when to mark the last days of advent
it comes, he comesagain this sacred birth, this candle in the dark
while in the parkvacation children play before their holiday
tonight a meeting with Luisa over poems. they are:
- Uxmal
- Smiling Face
- Butterfly
- Bombs
- Cholula
- Mitla
- Atrio and
- Coyox.
Five poets from the 19th and 20th centuries. Eight poems. I'll be proposing our terms to her. Fifteen pesos per line, realizing of course they can't & won't pay, but we still need to charge at least that for our own sakes as artists. Sigh. They can still use our work, but we need to at least make a gesture at charging some portion of our worth.
She will agree, I can tell you now with hindsite. Hindsight. It brings back such memories tonight to be in the beaches again. My first nine months living in Tijuana I had an apartment near the ocean. Very near. Within ear- and eye-shot. Crumble break... whooshhhhh roar sighhhhhh of the waves, yes. And the beach bum picaros and vatos like that group of workers living in the house-under-construction, and the teens and twenties coming out at night with their cars and girlfriends to park by the sea, and all the families who came out to the beach every summer weekend and the people riding their horses on the sand and yes . It will bring back memories just to be there in the smell of salt air and the sound of the breaking surf... ah, California boy forever for ever f o r e v e r
Day after tomorrow morning I am taking Tere to the airport. She is flying away to her family in Nuevo Laredo and San Antonio. This is the last year she will leave me. Or we won't be. If we still be then I will go with her or she will stay here with me or we won't be. Sigh. But I've go to understand this is the only time she really has to get away from work and go see her family....
Tomorrow night we are crossing the line and will spend the night at my parents' house. Right now her friends at work are making fun of her, --Eh eh, Tere, Daniel will come knocking on that door tomorrow night...!
It will not go easy meeting her at the border tomorrow night. She will get there late, of course, and think I have gone somewhere else, and run around like a chicken with her head cut off while I am slowly pacing up and down the sidewalk still waiting for her. But a young man and his taxi driver buddy will find her and find me and reunite us, and I will only give him a twenty peso tip. What they really want is for us to ride in their taxi for ten, twenty dollars worth of ride. But I will not forget them. What was his name? I wrote this twelve days later. Yes. Eduardo? Javier? Ernesto?
Next Entry | August 2001 |
November 2001 |