Last week I ordered a Corona-Care package for myself
Bananagrams
Super Big Boggle
professional cutting scissors (for the left hand)
black carbon comb
alligator jaw clips
hair serum
As you know, Bananagrams and Boggle are word games with letter tiles that players use to build words faster than their opponents. Once a week, son and daughter-in-law play with me on Zoom, and they crush me. I use words to write, right?
We’re going to add my other son and word-whip of a wife whose pastime is the NYTimes crossword puzzles. I have to work on x, y, and z words, also k’s and q’s. Please help!
How is your hair?
Mine is big and wide, and split ends are frying my hair—they tend to show up on the top layer of hair. So I’ve decided, I’m cutting it, a light trim, “a dusting,” as professionals call it.
I’ve been watching U-Tube videos with gorgeous young women that make it look easy as they pull their long tresses to the front and clip and clip. They hold their fingers flat around the hair and cut across or piece into it with the tip of quality scissors.
The pros say “Wait!”
Can I wait?
What would make you feel safe at a beauty salon or a barbershop?
The primas will join in on a Zoom call today for Gay’s birthday; she’s one of my wonderful cousins and part of almost every day of my childhood. I’m betting that all my cousins will be wearing aretes. My sister Patricia tells me that, mask and all, she can’t leave the house for the supermarket without earrings. A Panamanian woman understands this. I am a bit of a gringa though. I’ll put on a necklace for Gay and eat a beautiful little mango tart I bought in her honor. I cut a bouquet of lilacs for her from the bush in front of my house. The love will be there in that hug of lilacs.
A couple of weeks ago I read a scene from my memoir for Tint Journal, an on-line magazine that features writers of English whose first language is not English. I had to get into it, practice moderating my voice and giving it some energy and smiling enough. (Here it is.) This week I read one of my new poems at a Zoom poetry event, another opportunity to let go and be fully present when I read.
We meet with friends and strangers on Zoom and FaceTime. We’re not sharply lit, and we’re dressed in soft clothes; we’re not trying to impress. It’s deeply affecting. The warmth, have you found it so? and the human connection supersedes everything.
I wonder what new things you are facing. And in what ways you are growing in these uncertain times.
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Seemingly out of the blue, last week, Las Comadres and the National Latino Book Club notified me that At the Narrow Waist of the World, is their June selection. They reach out to Latino communities and book clubs. There will be a national teleconference on June 22, “an intimate conversation,” as they describe it, opening “windows into the soul of the author.” This is especially sweet for me because it gives me an opportunity to connect with other Latinos en los Estados Unidos. It is doubly sweet because a fair number of interesting events for the memoir were cancelled due to Covid.
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At the grocery store I buy a stash of multi-colored, sour Jelly Bellys. Every evening, long after I’ve had my dinner and should be going to sleep, I pick at the jellybeans for that mouth puckering sugar charge and for the resistance that Jelly Bellys put up against your teeth with skins of this and that and pectin that give you that chewy pleasure.
Have some. Right here.
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Spanish Words of the Day:
El CABELLO (kah-beh-yoh)– Hair (human tresses)
Ex. Tengo el cabello seco. – My hair is dry.
El PELO – a more basic word for hair.
PUNTAS ABIERTAS – split ends
El PELUQUERO (peh-loo-kéh-roh) – Hairdresser (male), also Barber
La PELUQUERA (peh-lu-kéh-rah) - Hairdresser (female)
YEHLEEBEENS – Jellybeans