Every morning I wake up in a Dominican neighborhood and take the train to a Russian neighborhood where I teach Turks Spanish. My favorite thing about New York is that I am exposed to a myriad of cultures on a daily basis. Unfortunately, I wasn’t born with this love of the exotic.
When I was in fourth grade, a Filipina girl from my class invited me to her birthday party. She was cool, so I was excited. I arrived with my little friends, and the mom invited us to go downstairs where the refreshments had carefully been laid out. As I descended the staircase, I was horrified to see an entire pig carcass, eyes bulging, with an apple protruding from its mouth. This was the kind of thing that I had only seen on Looney Tunes and I was not mentally prepared.
As we stood on the staircase, quaking with terror, my WASPy crew and I saw only one solution: flight. We ran back up the stairs and did not stop until we reached my house. I was still clutching a wrapped copy of Babysitter’s Club Book #59: Mallory Hates Boys (And Gym)* in my tiny hand. It was time to regroup. We knew that what we had done was a grave infringement of the rules of etiquette, but we had panicked.
My mom found us and told us to go back, so we slowly trudged down the street, with the icy fingers of dread clutching our hearts. We tried to give ourselves a pep talk, but each step brought us closer to the unspeakable. When we arrived, I stammered, “Uhhh… sorry, I forgot something,” and bestowed the gift upon my forgiving friend. As we went back down the stairs, we realized that our porcine foe had lost the element of surprise and we were able to face him valiantly.
* This may or may not be historically accurate, but it‘s an educated guess of what kind of gift I would give in 1990.
This is a gem.
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