Lorena is inordinately preoccupied with maintaining an immaculate social standing within the spheres she frequents, so being away from the real or imagined oppressive microscope of gossipy Tambo, she became a lot more candid and thus a lot more fun to be around. Although the vast majority of our interactions are me amusing myself trying to confound Lorena’s impeccable social graces by clouding up the air with ridiculousness, she does not actually take any crap from me, which is cool. I learned so many things about the new and improved candid Lorena that I had to totally change the context in which I regard her. She’s cool. I knew she was a good person, but I didn’t know she had any depth.

         Lorena and I ate hamburgers in the mall food court, looked for a gift for the kid taking his first communion Saturday and window-shopped. I took her to internet, which she had never seen. She supplied large amounts of opinion to my shopping decisions, which Ecuadorians never do. We almost even went to see a movie, as I had scored 2 buy-one-get-one-free movie coupons at Hipermarket buying a coffeemaker. However, in all the festivities, I sort of bailed out on the non-classes of English I was supposed to be giving at Melva’s house at 3 pm. That wasn’t cool, but Lorena had told me the people in Melva’s house are Jehovah’s Witnesses, so I kind of didn’t really care that it wasn’t cool. If this wasn’t all just a ploy to attempt a high-profile gringo conversion, I figured, it was at least all given a more sinister spin knowing that their principal interest in English, as my experience here leads me to believe, is to use it to convert people.

        I arrived home about 7pm. The family who had just recently finished eating dinner, was sitting around in the dining room/bedroom/living room. When I entered the room carrying a large plastic bag containing something bulky, the conversation stopped and Susanna, in great anticipation, asked what I had bought. I announced that I had picked up a new coffeemaker and pulled the box out of the bag to reveal it. They were electrified and demanded to see the picture of the coffeemaker on the front of the box. I turned the box so they could see the picture. They drew in breath audibly and murmured superlatives. The box was then snatched from my hands and they huddled in tightly around it murmuring at a fevered pitch.

        Then I made an even bigger revelation. I pulled 2 boxes of Christmas lights from my backpack and dangled them in the air without comment, waiting for the room to detonate. I bunched my shoulders and winced as the room exploded in exclamations and unintelligible spirals of verbal shrapnel. Alex, apparently a state of shock began yelling “Little lights?! You bought little lights?!”

         Susanna, thunderstruck to the very brink of wetting herself, was literally bracing herself in the chair she had almost just fallen out. She wanted to know if the little lights were slated to go in my room. I shook my head no. “Then where?!” she shrieked. Everyone began shouting out location proposals at once. The din of delirium pushed the unexpected excitement over the purchases well into absurdity.

        I slipped out of the room for a moment to toss my backpack onto my bed. My return trip to the festivities in the dining room/bedroom/living room was interrupted at the halfway point by the family running through the house in the opposite direction carrying my coffeemaker. They wanted me to take it out of its box. We carried the coffeemaker into my room where the light was better and took a look at it. They were very impressed.

        For lack of anything else to add to the circus I was now emceeing, I called everyone’s attention to the mechanism my new coffeemaker has that allows you to rip the pot off the burner and pour yourself a cup while it is still brewing without getting coffee all over the place- a little “convenience” which I fancy to be like the “Caps Lock” key on a computer. How often do you really need to type in all caps, versus how often you accidentally bump the stupid Caps key and type half an email screaming at someone? Speaking only for myself, I am far less likely to insist upon a cup of coffee 5 seconds after I start the coffeemaker than I am to forget to replace the plastic top to the coffee pot after I’ve washed it, a mistake that results in a filthy lake of coffee and grounds on your coffeemaker and countertop. Alex, having recently become obsessed with “gizmos”, could not contain himself while I was explaining how the coffeemaker’s shut-off valve worked and repeatedly finished my sentences by screaming out the ends as he correctly predicted them.

        When the circus disbanded, I could tell from the tone of the muffled conversation in the next room what was coming next. Julio walked passed by my door carrying a ladder. When my new coffeemaker was done brewing, I wandered out front with full cup to watch the lights being strung up. I refused to add any input to the discussion on what design they should use in stringing the lights because I didn’t want my perfectionism to be the only thing I saw every time I came home in the dark and found the house lit. I wanted the design to be local. There’s something ridiculously endearing about a sorry string of lights tacked crappily across the front of a mortar block shack. I could have bought more than 2 strings of lights if I had wanted to. I didn’t.

         At around 3pm, I reluctantly dragged my butt over to Melva’s house to give non-classes in English. She had called earlier in the day, completely undaunted by my open disregard for yesterday’s non-classes in English (which is consistent with the Jehovah’s Witness’ modis operendi) and re-obligated me to stop by. Almost none of the non-students had shown up by the time I arrived at 3:15pm. But then, non-students began calling by phone to see if I had arrived, the few non-students present leaned out of the 2nd floor window and began signaling J.W. operatives passing by the house in busses and soon the room was full of people.

         Melva then clapped her hands and told everyone to quit screwing around and come to order. In a flurry of excitement, everyone scrambled for chairs and dragged them into a big circle surrounding me. The non-students plunked down left and right and soon the whole room was silent and assuming postures of full attention. I let the silence endure uninterrupted for a very, very long moment until we all burst out laughing. Then I asked the non-students why they looked like they were waiting for some kind of class when I had said I wasn’t giving one. To their credit the room instantly went into action reorganizing itself and in moments had taken control and announced they would begin by asking me questions concerning greetings and social perfunctories. That was exactly where I would have begun, too.

         At around 6pm, as if God had given the signal, the class abruptly disbanded without a word. A few non-students lingered behind to ask me to translate very specific phrases that they alone were interested in knowing, and soon I found myself sitting on the couch in an empty room with Raquel, estimated age of 30, who asked endless questions in which she obviously had no true interest, while making starry eyes at me. Then Melva, Raquel’s mom, brought a plate of food out from the kitchen, placed it in front of me and took a seat on the other side of me.

        Melva, estimated age of late 60’s, is like the Latin campo version of Florence Henderson’s character on the Jeffersons. She sports a set of dimples on her deeply wrinkled face and is forever fixing you with sparkling glances because she has always just finished rapping off a wisecrack. She is sharp as a tack and spent the entire non-class firing off answers to the questions the non-students couldn’t come up with, subsequently taunting them by chanting “heads of stone” or “ears of donkey”.

        As long silences are perfectly normal in social settings here, one never knows when one is overstaying one’s welcome. For all I know, there may not be any such thing as overstaying one’s welcome in Tambo. However, anyone in my shoes, or flip flops as it were, could have successfully argued both that I was overstaying my welcome and that the duo was trying to keep me there forever. At around 8pm, I picked a random moment to raise myself up from the couch with feigned nonchalance and rasped “bueno”, thereby taking my leave.

         I arrived back at Julio’s at the same time that Merci (of the tienda) and husband Justo were arriving to pay a visit. This was only the 2nd visit I had ever known them to make, thus, like the 1st visit, I knew it to be mixed with “business”. And just like the first visit, there was a long period of first hanging out with the family in the other room, as if their hanging out were an everyday occurrence, and then casually drifting into my room, as if that weren’t dripping with ulterior motive.

        Justo alone came wandering into my room this time. He sat in the furniture and asked if I was ready for the big First Communion. I answered that I was. The conversation continued along this vain of banality- when it continued- for its duration. At one point, Julio and Alex had drifted in to take their place with us among the furniture, but after several series’ of incredibly long pauses in the conversation, they drifted back out. Then, as Justo and I sat there like stone statues, 95 % of the conversation passed as dead air. I had no idea what the purpose of this visit was. The only thing I could guess was that it was some kind of customary behavior associated with bequeathing high honor upon someone else, such as in cases of asking someone to be your son’s Padrino. While this custom proceeded to waste my whole evening, I racked my brain trying to figure out patterns in the way Tambo folk hang out, which has obviously eluded me heretofore. Eventually, as the pauses in the conversation passed well into the absurd, I became fixated on the paranoid suspicion that Justo needed some kind of signal from me to be released from whatever social obligation he was performing in my room. I came up with nothing, naturally, as I am socially inept in any culture. After at least an hour of excruciating silences, Justo slowly rose and rasped “bueno”, thereby taking his leave.

         I wasn’t sure if Melva was trying to interrupt Raquel’s flirting or what she perceived as my boredom. “Are you tired?” Raquel continued to probe. That was the local euphemism people use to give other people an out. She was smiling like she was sure I would say I was not tired and to proceed with her flirting. However, Melva’s outburst struck at my anxiety about never knowing what is going on in social settings, and since I didn’t want to eventually be fed a plate of food and was now uncomfortable to boot, I said I was, in fact, a tad tired.

         When I walked into Julio’s house, Susanna laughed and said Julio was on the phone that very minute with someone in the house I had just left. I had been gone so long the family had set out looking for me. I peeked my head into the room where Julio was on the phone to let him know I had arrived and then sat myself down at the dining room/bedroom/living room table.

        When Julio got off the phone and came back into the room where we were now all eating, he told me that either Melva or Raquel had just been asking him what I eat. I blinked at Julio because this was not the first time I had heard people here asking this question about me. Susanna carried in a plate of food for Julio and said that people are always asking her that same question. I blinked at Susanna because I was dumbfounded to learn not only that the whole town was wondering what I eat, but also that the whole town might be sneaking around with plans to feed me. In response to my puzzled expression, Susanna explained that “people think you eat a special food”. She made a gesture in the air when she said “special food” that seemed to imply she had some inkling as to what the hell that meant, though she did not elaborate. This I found even more mystifying.

         “Special food”, I repeated to make sure I was hearing correctly.

         “Yes”, she answered, still not compelled to elaborate.

         “Like what, Balanciado for Gringos?” At that, Julio (now missing a front tooth) and I exploded with laughter and hurled ourselves on the floor. The rest of the room, as is likely of the world-at-large, did not see any humor in this remark. This is because in addition to being a total simpleton, one would have to be inordinately preoccupied with animal feeds (Balanciados), as are Julio and I, to derive enjoyment this remark. To Julio and I, even the word “Balanciado” invokes the romantic imagery of animal projects in full swing and fat animals that we can remark to each other in amazement about with pride and an upwelling sense of prosperity. In a world of kitchen scrap animal rearing, Balanciado is the Lexus of the campesino (and gringo animal productionist).

         Susanna, now sitting at her eating place in the kitchen (because she is female) and behaving as if in some way indirectly wounded by Julio and my laughter, raised her eyebrows, though she kept her eyes lowered and in a voice arguably too soft, said, “I just tell them that whatever we eat” (she made a light chopping gesture with one hand to the right), “he eats” (and made another light chopping gesture to the left).

         In spite of other things I should have been doing, I spent the rest of the night playing with the duck, turkey and guinea fowl texts I had copied earlier from the internet.

         After lunch, as Julio was very proud of his newly completed fence, I removed the sticks protecting the gringo garden from street pigs and chickens at his behest so that passerbys would see a fresh green garden in all its magnificence standing nobly behind his grand construction. The gringo garden is actually just a sparse collection of what may someday be very full landscape plants, but which are now hardly anything to look at. Susanna, emerging from the side door one afternoon to find several tiny plants poked into the ground, referred to the arrangement in a fit of rapt wonderment as a “garden”. This declaration amused me, as it originated inside of Susanna, who is but a blip of consciousness occupying a very, very small and dusty crumb on the planet. I had previously assumed that people never attempt to care for plants here because they do not appreciate them. But evidently they can appreciate them in ways in which I cannot. It is the monument by which Julio tells me the family will remember me when I am gone. Thus, the Gringo Garden shall sport its majestic title, as it has more heart than “The Mall” in D.C. or Tienemen Square in Beijing.

        I cut out to Libertad to pull money out of the bank and then returned home to write until about 6:30 pm, when I had to get ready to be a Padrino for the big First Communion. Justo placed a very nervous phone call to us to make sure we were all getting ready. When I was all dressed and sporting crisp side-part (in spirit, if not in actual fact), Julio and I set out into the night.

         Outside, it felt like how trick or treating used to feel when I was young (and not just because I was wearing a costume. HA!). There was some kind of generalized electricity in the air. You could tell something big was happening. Perhaps due to heightened mental activity in both scenarios, I felt somehow “omnisciently oriented” among the grids of glowing porch lights. I was even up to my ankles in dry leaves at times all but perfecting the parallel.

        When we rounded the corner and caught our first view of the church, the feeling of trick or treating suddenly changed to one of attending a school Christmas musical. I was dismayed to see the hordes of people clustered in front of the church, so dressed up and acting like it. Everyone was all serious and checking everyone else out. My students were scattered throughout the continuously murmuring crowd and obviously keeping a curious eye peeled for me. Admittedly, it was really funny to see them so dressed up, so outrageously in contrast to lives they lead, peeking out with amused expressions from between people and then ducking back in again. Lorena was on hand dressed up as someone’s “Madrina”. I deliberately kept my back turned to her so she could not do anything to make me laugh.

        Soon, all the Madrinas and Padrinos lined up with their communion kids and walked ceremoniously into the church with the horde of spectators in tow. I have nothing to say about the ensuing ceremony other than that a dog got in the communion line.

        Immediately after the ceremony, Lorena, sitting in the Padrino/Madrina section perpendicular to me, began trying to make me laugh. Julio, whom I had taught earlier in the day to use my manual camera, was running around inside the church like that guy with the camera on the Muppet Show that was always jumping out and popping his oversized flash in people’s faces. I was not enjoying my surroundings- a mix of religiosity and chaos- and was thus not amused with any of this and wanted to leave. Justo wanted us first to take pictures in front of Mary or some doll in a glass box in front of the church. In spite of Lorena’s antics behind the camera, I could not force a smile, even for a picture.

        Finally we got away from the church and resettled at Justo’s house. We ate a cold chicken dinner at a big table and then moved to the front room where somebody put really bad music on. The first communion kid and I exchanged the gifts that custom dictates we exchange. He received a dress shirt which was almost certainly way too big for him and I received a plastic monstrosity containing a clock, a penholder (but not a pen) and a plastic woman frozen in a grandiose sweeping gesture. I could see that the woman was supposed to light up, but the first time I touched the switch with my finger, it broke off and fell inside the base. On a plastic dome engulfing the clock, was written “A keepsake from my first communion” followed by communion kid’s name. “For my Padrino Treen Estiben”. That was actually how my name was written in gold paint. Communion kid’s family said they couldn’t remember my last name when they went to what must’ve been a trophy shop (but they could remember my first and middle name?), which I suppose is anti-climactic in absurdity after having a non-catholic Padrino.

         The males sat in awkward silence in the front room, each nursing a Pilsener beer. The music was periodically fiddled with, as there was little else to do. Then a photo album was dragged out. It contained exactly the same pictures as every other photo album in town because few people own cameras and no one would think to be as frivolous as to take pictures of silliness or random non-pedantic events. Every photo album contains only formal pictures from religious rites of passage and graduation, in the same exact poses and in literally the same exact places in the church and school. There may be a few old black and white photos of someone’s military days and there is usually also a handful of super old, heavily faded black and whites of somber old people that have long since died. These pictures are always about 1 square inch in size. These cookie cutter photo shoots are so poor at capturing the spirit of an era that I don’t know why anyone even bothers. It makes perfect sense, of course, if you never think outside the box. Tradition is for those that either don’t think or that fear discovering the insignificance of their personal lineage. However, in spite of all this, I was genuinely rapt by the photo album because it was hilarious to see my students, invariably captured in the backgrounds of years old photos (as the cast of characters here never changes), looking like little kids.

        Justo decided then to just cut the crap and retrieve a bottle of whisky from his store downstairs. In the beginning, the women’s dramatic inability to consume shots of whisky, plus my unexpected talent for same, provided enough comic relief among those present to dispel the awkwardness and get the party rolling. Then Susanna suddenly decided she was the official facilitator of festive moods and jumped to her feet, where she remained the whole night, demanding this or that festive measure be taken while she stalked about snatching and consuming glasses of beer whenever they remained too long in the hands of the insufficiently festive individuals.

        From our second story window, one could see and hear that widespread partying was sweeping the whole town. Wild parties, ironically celebrating the “sacred” first communion, were sparking ancillary parties in houses with no religious excuse to get trashed and dance. In our own party, the kids had gone to bed and Alex was designated the ‘drunk handler’, for people attempting to navigate the staircase to get to the bathroom downstairs. The bottle tops popped and the shot glass flipped aplenty. Susanna repeatedly grabbed Julio off the couch to dance and the stereo rumbled the house to its very foundation. We shrieked and howled and laughed and the party raged tempestuously into the electrified night.

        I typed until about 4pm, when I went to Merci’s tienda to pick up a 5 gallon jug of purified water. On the way back, Lorena’s sister’s called me over to their window and then inside the house. They called Lorena, who emerged from the back of the house mortified to have been caught not wearing makeup, but smiling, as though hiding a secret. The grinning sisters took seats nearby and seemed to be anticipating something. As if facetiously acting out a soap opera, Lorena dramatically asked me, through an ever growing smile, ‘why I had pushed her last night’.

         “I pushed you?” I asked, as shocked that it had happened as that it had been forgotten.

        I had no recollection of pushing Lorena. I had the distinct memory of falling out of the bathroom and telling Alex, waiting outside to get me back up the staircase, that we were going down the street to check out the party at his grandpa’s house (where we knew Lorena was at) because we could see from our second story window that the party down there was going absolutely bananas. I remember someone spotting me approaching the grandpa’s house from its open door, then Lorena and Alex’s cousin Ormega (a nickname meaning “ant”) charging out of the house and capturing me. I remember Lorena’s face hovering in front of mine for a moment and that it was covered in an even coat of fine sweat beads and that she bore a striking resemblance to a tiny, bulbous sparrow. Then I have a disjointed memory of the world spinning and me catching hold of the bars of the window to keep from falling, and then another disjointed memory of Alex and I walking back to the party from which we had originated.

         I told all of this to Lorena, whose only response was to repeat that I had pushed her, still smiling. When I tried to corral her into a precise description of the push, she hedged and offered imprecise, evasive responses. The “push”, although it had aparently really happened, was nothing but an overblown drama she was using to get my goat for refusing to join her and Ormega at their party.

        “I left because I had no idea what was going on. You attacked me.” Ha! Two can play at that game. I had actually only gone down to peek at their party, not to join it.

         At 7pm, I left Lorena’s and went home. As I had disappeared from Julio’s house without a trace at 4pm, it was assumed I was out in Libertad or somewhere and would certainly have grabbed something to eat out there. The family had already finished eating and there was nothing left for me, but I tapped into my emergency stash of Sugar Smacks and all was right with the world.