Ceiba trees

My friend Suky flew to Canada to see me for a few days. I haven’t spent a day with Suky for forty years. Short visits, yes, but this takes me back to high school, waking up Saturday morning in her room, with her still sleeping while I, the early riser, finished another Alistair MacLean thriller checked out from the Standard Fruit Company library and waited for a lavish Honduran breakfast of scrambled eggs with stuff in them, bululo (French roll), refried beans (red beans, not black), heavy sweet cream, fried plantains, strong coffee, butter avocado, and hard salty cheese.

We lost track of one another for years because her husband is a petroleum geologist and had got moved around the world to wintery places like Russia, Alaska, and Denmark, where I wish I could have visited her. I found her when a mutual Honduran friend recognized me in the Houston airport and gave me her number—she happened to be in town. Since then we’ve kept in touch, and when we meet, all the intervening years disappear. She is most comfortable around people who weren’t born where they now live. Oz people.

Suky is a collector of people. As we reminisced, she mentioned high school friends I haven’t thought of for years. She also brought me a gift from Sister Christina, whom she’d just seen before she flew to Canada. Sister Christina was our principal in high school and had gone to a Bible Study with my mom. She’d kept a photo of the Bible study group tucked in her Bible for all these years, as a reminder to pray, and sent me a copy along with a book of poetry (how did she know after all these years?). There in the photo is Sister Christina and my mom. Some forty years back. My mom’s hair is still jet black.

Memories of Suky’s family come back to me now because of all the hours I spent in her home. I remember her grandfather pestering us with tales of older days yet at the dinner table. I remember her younger brothers, who teased me and irked me as younger brothers do. I remember her mother giving motherly advice and her dad giving fatherly affirmation. I had a nickname in that house that no one else remembers, thank goodness. I remember a dinner party her mom gave, and Suky and I got into such a hysterical giggling match that her mom came into our room and checked our drinks (there was nothing but coke and ice, I assure you), and we were offended. We competed for the highest grades and ran neck in neck, but she won because she was athletic and Honduran, so her Spanish and her basketball lay-ups were better. We analyzed everything and everybody and not once, that I remember, got cross-wise of one another. I lost something when I moved away.

Did we all grow up in idyllic times? Will our kids think the same when they are old? Back then La Ceiba, Honduras was a small town with safe streets. You always knew where you were because to the south rose Pico Bonito (Pretty Point) and to the north lay the beach. You couldn’t get lost. I used to ride a big, black Chinese bike all over town: to school, to dad’s office facing Central Park with its enormous trees, and to Suky’s house. There was one stoplight in town. Mom used to pick up her order of meat from the neighborhood butcher once a week and buy hand-made tortillas and fresh, hot coconut bread from the ladies that came by the house with baskets on their heads. She shopped in the marketplace for local food and had our clothes made fit to size by the local seamstress. Everything fit. The ceiba tree, for which the city is named, was called a “life tree” by native Americans, holding earth and sky together, past and present.

Today La Ceiba is a city, and I’d get lost (or worse) trying to find familiar places. As the world changes, I still get lost trying to find my familiar places. And change itself becomes my kids’ familiar place. Robert has a home place where people knew him when he was born, but I don’t have this, and nor do my kids. We need “life trees” to orient us.  I hope they find their Suky’s and Sister Christina’s to orient them when they have traveled far--to remind them their past had goodness in it, and it’s good to be reminded.