How Tía Lola Learned to Teach (8 page)

In the midafternoon, Papi and Carmen say their goodbyes. Miguel gives Carmen a goodbye handshake, which she turns into a heartfelt hug.

“Hey, Miguel Ángel, thanks again for a wonderful visit!” she gushes.

“Thank you for coming,” he says, glancing toward his
mami
.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!” Carmen gives him another hug.

“It was fun,” Miguel concedes. It is hard to resist Carmen’s enthusiasm.

At dinner, Mami queries them about “your breakfast meeting with your father.” It bugs Miguel how his parents talk about each other like they themselves were never related. Your mother. Your father.

“He talked about learning from mistakes, like me not paying attention in class, but now I do,” Juanita says, going on to give a garbled account of how Papi learned so much from being married to Mami.

“I’ll say,” Mami mutters. She doesn’t like to criticize
their father in front of them, but sometimes she can’t help herself.

“He said you’re the greatest!” Juanita adds.

Mami replies with a
hmph
, then bites her lip to prevent any further criticism from coming out.

“Ay, querida,”
Tía Lola reminds her dear niece, “Daniel has grown up a lot. Remember,
los tropezones hacen levantar los pies!
”

“Stumbling might have taught him to pick up his feet, but meanwhile, what about the people he’s stepped on along the way?”

Tía Lola must have a dozen sayings about forgiveness, but she says nothing. Sometimes you just have to let people express their hurt feelings. Mami would be the first to tell them that.

Mami folds her napkin and places it beside her uneaten plate of food. Then she hurries from the room, wiping her eyes on her sleeve since she doesn’t have Tía Lola’s handkerchief handy.

“Your
mami
will be just fine!” Tía Lola reassures them. “Those tears are just washing away the past so she can begin again, too.”

“Did Papi really step on her, Tía Lola?” Juanita’s bottom lip is quivering.

Tía Lola is shaking her head. “Let me put it this way: they both made the mistake of getting married too young. Afterward, they found out they disagreed on a whole bunch of things. But they would both agree on one thing: if they hadn’t made that mistake, they would
have missed out on having the two most wonderful kids!
No hay mal que por bien no venga
.”

Every bad thing has something good in it.

“Is that like ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’?” Juanita wants to know.

Tía Lola looks surprised. “I had no idea that clouds had silver inside them.” This must be science she never learned because she never went past fourth grade. So Miguel and Juanita have to explain. It’s a saying, just like the ones she has been teaching them in Spanish.

“Don’t you love sayings?” Tía Lola says after laughing at herself. “They really help you to remember wise things.”

At the door, Mami has reappeared, her face shy with an apology. “Sorry, everybody. I just want you to know I made some mistakes, too.”

“But you are picking up your feet, right, Mami?” Juanita says.

“And how,” Mami says, kicking her heels up in the air just like Mr. Flamingo, now dangling from a ceiling hook at Amigos Café.

lesson six

En todas partes cuecen habas
Everywhere, people cook beans

Now that Juanita is paying attention, she has made so many friends at school. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that Juanita is related to Tía Lola, whom everybody loves. It’s just too bad that Juanita’s birthday is in September, too early in the school year for her to have made a whole lot of friends. But now, midyear, could she ever throw the greatest party—even better than Rudy’s!

Maybe she can have a half-year birthday party? But she isn’t turning eight and a half until March. And it’s now, in frigid February, that a birthday party would be most welcome.

“Tía Lola, what do you say I have an almost-eight-and-a-half-year-old birthday party?” Juanita proposes to her aunt as they are riding the bus to school on one of Tía Lola’s teaching days.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea! We need a party every week in this kind of weather.”

Juanita gazes up lovingly at her aunt. The wonderful thing about Tía Lola is that she thinks like a kid, but being a grown-up, she can actually make wishes come true.

“So when should we have the party?” her aunt asks. “When you turn eight and a half or now?”

Juanita doesn’t have to think about it. “Now!”

Tía Lola laughs in total agreement.
“No dejes para mañana lo que puedas hacer hoy.”

“We have the same saying in English! ‘Don’t leave for tomorrow what you can do today.’ ” Juanita is so excited when English and Spanish actually match. Usually they don’t because each language is like a fingerprint, totally unique.

“The Americans must have copied us!” Tía Lola says, not doubting for a second that Spanish speakers think of everything first.

“But, Tía Lola, how can you be sure?”

“Un pajarito me lo dijo.”
Tía Lola winks playfully.

“We also have that saying! ‘A little bird told me.’ ” Juanita is amazed. It’s like when a baby discovers that the hands at the ends of her arms belong to her and she can move them all by herself. “That one you copied from us,
right?” Juanita teases back. It’s a game now: What came first, the Spanish saying or the English one?

“I think we both copied it from the little birds,” Tía Lola remarks, laughing. “By the way, I haven’t seen a bird in a long time.”

“Tía Lola!” Juanita narrows her eyes. She isn’t sure whether her aunt is still teasing her. “You do know that most birds go south in the winter, right?” She watches her aunt’s face, trying to figure out if Tía Lola already knows this.

But Tía Lola’s face is hard to read. “I guess those little birds forgot to tell me before they left!” Just when Juanita is convinced that her aunt missed out on basic science by not going past fourth grade, Tía Lola winks. “Maybe they were chirping in English and I didn’t understand?”

It’s Mami who vetoes the half-birthday-party idea. “I don’t mind a party party,” she explains. “But if you call it a birthday party, people will feel they have to bring a gift.”

Exactly, Juanita thinks.

“And if everyone in the world starts having half birthday parties as well as full birthday parties, we’ll never save enough money to buy a house.”

Juanita loves the idea that they might someday actually have their very own house. But she also hates the idea of moving out of this wonderful old one, with so many nooks and crannies, and an attic with a little
bedroom for Tía Lola, and a long staircase with a sliding banister, and a big bay window at the landing. “Does Colonel Charlebois want this one back?”

“No, he still wants to keep renting to us. It just makes more economic sense for us to buy rather than rent,” Mami explains unhelpfully. When Mami or Papi starts talking about mortgages or income taxes, Juanita is just glad she can wait until she’s older to find out about all that stuff.

“Okay.” Juanita lets out a long sigh. “I suppose my half birthday will go by just like any other stupid day.…” As she heads out of the room, her little shoulders droop with the burden of not getting her way.

Upstairs, she delivers the news to Tía Lola, who instantly puts on her magic thinking cap. It’s not a real cap, just a look on her face where you can almost see grand thoughts parading across her forehead.

“Let’s see … what other kind of party can we throw in
febrero
? I know a good one for the end of February! We can celebrate
carnaval
!”

“What’s that?” Juanita doesn’t feel too hopeful if it’s some holiday she has never heard of. She herself was thinking of Valentine’s Day.

“You’ve never heard of
carnaval
? All the more reason to have a party, then!
Carnaval
is huge back home. It’s a big celebration right before Lent.”

“What’s Lent?” Juanita wants to know.

Tía Lola looks at her niece in total disbelief. “Your parents
were
young not to teach you these things!
Bueno
, Tía Lola will!
Más vale tarde que nunca
.”

Before Juanita can tell her aunt that “Better late than never” is also a saying in English, Tía Lola winks. “Don’t tell me! You have the same one in English, too. And I know you didn’t copy it from us or we from you. It’s because we’re all one human family, even if we speak different languages and come from different countries. Like the saying says:
En todas partes cuecen habas
.”

Everywhere, people cook beans? “That’s one I never heard before in English, Tía Lola,” Juanita admits. “What does it mean?”

“There are certain things that people everywhere in the world do, like cook beans or have babies or dream dreams or fall in love.”

“Or want birthday parties,” Juanita joins in dreamily, “and half birthday parties and lots and lots of wonderful presents.…” Juanita imagines a Chinese girl and an African girl and a French girl and a Mexican girl, all wishing for a birthday party with lots and lots of gifts.…

The thought of a Mexican girl reminds Juanita of Ofie. Last week, Ms. Sweeney’s room had a sharing circle about birthdays. When it was her turn, Ofie told the class that she had never had a birthday party because she can’t have friends over on account of her parents being Mexicans.

What in the world does having Mexican parents have to do with not having friends over? Juanita wondered.
She would have asked, but Milton’s hand had already shot up. This time, however, Ms. Sweeney did not pause for questions. In fact, she hurried on to somebody else’s birthday story.

Thinking back now on Ofie’s story, Juanita feels lucky. Not only can she have friends over for sleepovers and playdates, but she has had a birthday party with gifts once a year all her life, for as long as she can remember.

“Do Mexicans celebrate
carnaval
, Tía Lola?” Juanita wants to know.

“Why, of course!” Tía Lola says. “Why do you ask?”

So Juanita explains about Ofie never having had a birthday party in her life. “So if we have
carnaval
, Ofie’ll get to celebrate a holiday her family would have celebrated back in Mexico.”