What My Eyes could Read, Part 1

For what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?

(Luke 9:25) 

Sunday, December 26, 2004, Ellensburg, WA

            “Did you get what you wanted for Christmas?” Our pastor opened his sermon with this question and then followed it with another: “Did you ask God for any character gifts?”  If we had not, he encouraged us to do so in place of a New Year’s resolution.  I knew exactly the one: “a quiet and gentle spirit,” a quality I had come across earlier in the year in 1 Pet 3:4.  Between my anxiety, insecurity, insomnia, Irish red-headed temperament, and post-partum depression, I was far from having a “quiet and gentle spirit.”  Both a new mom and a new college instructor, my juggling act overwhelmed me with anxiety.  My husband tried to help, but he worked long hours.  With no energy, I needed us both to do what I could: limit the words and maximize the understanding. 

“I can’t read your mind,” he complained. 

“You don’t have to read my mind.  Just read my eyes!” 

“You’re an English teacher.  Can’t you speak English?” 

No, I’m spent.  Can’t you just read my eyes?  And speak with yours too?

Before the sermon was over, I had resolved to pray every day of 2005 for a quiet and gentle spirit – something I sure did not have at that time.  Nor had I had it growing up in San Jose, California, where we moved from New York state when I was five.

Late 1970s, San Jose, CA

A song had come out about San Jose less than a decade before we arrived.  But the song described a town I have never known.  “LA is a great big freeway,” begins the song; then it shifts to San Jose: “You can really breathe in San Jose.”  Really?  Perhaps in 1968, when the song first came out, you could.  But by the late 1970s, everything had changed.  San Jose was the most important city giving birth to an up and coming, thrilling new world, soon to be known as Silicon Valley.  Dad had arrived in time to be among the first of the “Yuppies,” Young Urban Professionals.  They were young, brilliant, well-educated, and handed a career and a salary previous generations had known only through sweat, years, and seniority.  Dad moved us into a wealthy section of San Jose to work as a computer engineer at the new national headquarters of the especially high tech, high powered company of the 1970s, IBM.  He had caught the American Dream. 

            And I was miserable.  Maybe I was a “poor little rich kid” with a huge three story house and lots of stuff, but few friends, busy parents, and no siblings, except for the little brother who other people called “imaginary.”  We were all “latch-key” kids in my town, like the Peanuts’ kids who live in a world of few adults who speak in muffled mumbles.  In that world, you’d better make friends, or you’d be like me, a bewildered stray.  Small and shy, I was ridiculed at school, mocked for not cursing, last picked for PE, and teased for my red hair and freckled face.

            My teachers observed me in a world of my own.  I wasn’t reading, talking, or following directions.  In kindergarten, this was accepted.  Colin, my brother other people called imaginary, sometimes joined me in my kindergarten classroom, especially if I went into the kitchen room, our favorite spot.  My teacher had the classroom set up with different spaces: a large carpeted area where we all sat down for the ABCs and a full class story, read by the teacher; a project area with long tables for arts and crafts; a math center with another long table for instruction and activities with numbers; the “kitchen” room in the corner with a play stove, fridge, and other toys where Colin liked to join me; and a reading space in the corner, but I didn’t go there much because I couldn’t read.  Even though I didn’t make friends in kindergarten or connect with my teacher, I tolerated kindergarten, in thanks to the kitchen room and Colin’s company.

            That changed in first grade.  By this time, I was expected to do that mysterious activity other people could do: read.  Colin had stopped coming to visit me at school, I had no kitchen room, and I was overwhelmed with many kids in a classroom so small.  I tested smart, baffling my teachers.  But, thankfully, it wasn’t just that I wasn’t reading or following directions, I also wasn’t talking – and that was my first grade teacher’s in to get me into speech therapy.  I loved my speech therapist, a kindly gentleman with graying hair, glasses, a warm voice, and eyes that peered into mine with a sparkle of tenderness.  The other three kids in my speech therapy class smiled, chuckled, had wide eyes, and, like me, were hesitant to speak, had to work at it.  We liked each other, trusted each other, and never mocked each other.  Without speech therapy, I’m not sure how I would have survived first grade.  The funny thing is it wasn’t speech therapy I needed; it was the therapist and the other kids in the class.  I started following directions, I started talking, and the following year, I started reading.  I had to take summer school after first grade to avoid repeating it.  But, in thanks to speech therapy, I did not flunk first grade.  It worked.  But no one knew why.  No one could offer an accurate diagnosis of my condition: culture shock.

February 2005, Ellensburg, WA

Two months after I began praying for a quiet and gentle spirit, a member of our church came to the podium and announced a three week mission trip he was hosting to Venezuela.  Little did I know that this mission trip would answer my prayer for a quiet and gentle spirit by taking me down memory lane to my early childhood in São Paulo, Brazil.  Although I had been born in New York state, and we moved to San Jose from there, New York was also not the place I knew.  The one I knew was where we had lived when I was one year to four years old: São Paulo, Brazil.  My parents had both spent their youth there and had both attended the American São Paulo Graded School.  Fluent in Portuguese and a Computer Engineer, Dad accepted an opportunity to teach Computer Design at the University of São Paulo.

The host of the mission trip to Venezuela announced that he had already recruited a number of teammates and was inviting more.  He also had a special request: a fourth interpreter.  The team was going to serve in four churches, needed four interpreters, and had only three.  I had taken five years of Spanish, had studied abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico, and felt it burning within me to be that fourth interpreter.  But nine years had passed since I had studied Spanish.  Could I do it? I shared with the mission trip host that I’d pray about it.  Two weeks later, I asked him if a fourth interpreter had been found; he said no and would I do it?  Yes.  With three months to regain my Spanish, I set myself on a crash course with my old Spanish textbooks and a set of children’s books in Spanish that I had already read in English.

May, 2005, Valencia, Venezuela

            As it turned out, what really broke the language barrier while I was serving as an interpreter was not my study of Spanish, but my mystical bond with my Venezuelan teammates, especially Daniel the young pastor and team leader and his main elder, Samuel.  When language was a barrier, our eyes filled in the rest.  We could read each other’s eyes.

            My North American teammates, on the other hand, could not get on the same page with either our Venezuelan teammates, or with me.  When one of our Venezuelan hosts apologized for forgetting an essential dish to complement the meal, one North American partner said to me, “Tell him it was better he didn’t bring it.  There was a lot of food.”  I knew what a South American would hear from those words: “the food was no good.”  So I had to cover her tracks and translate, “Thank you, but don’t worry.”  

Meanwhile, the North American leader had much he wished to say.  He often approached me with yet another conversational topic to raise with our Venezuelan teammates.  I could see their discreet head shakes and their eyes just slightly cast down, conveying the message Ahora, no.  Not now.  So I mimicked their cues to my North American leader, who responded by repeating what he wished for me to translate.  Clearly, subtlety was not working.  I tried a different tact: an ever so slight lift of my finger toward my mouth, hoping he might catch a “shhh” signal.  No.  He repeated yet again what he wished for me to translate.  This, unfortunately, made me lose my South American subtlety and brought forth, instead, the Irish in me.  It’s a tendency I have to this day: if subtlety doesn’t work, my Irish self takes over, and I overcompensate.  I gave him a glare and a reprimand: “Not.  Now.”

            That evening, he reprimanded me: “Respect your elders.”  I apologized, explaining that I had “translation overload.”  I’m not fluent in Spanish.  Could he let me rest a little more?  Thankfully, he agreed and began to reduce his requests.  But he never learned what “translation overload” really meant: if the words had to issue forth from my mouth, I wanted them neither insensitive, nor ill-timed.  I was in a Catch-22.  Do I “respect” my North American leaders by revealing their insensitivity or do I remain sensitive to our South American partners? 

            Lying in bed that night, I started to recall similar misunderstandings throughout my life.  South American subtlety is not easily replicated in North America.  Despite my mom’s time in Brazil, subtlety has never worked with her.  Nor has subtlety worked with my husband.  Nor, of course, did it work in speedy Silicon Valley. I was beginning to see why I had been so out of place in San Jose and why, throughout life, a “quiet and gentle spirit” had so evaded me.
            The contrast between my Venezuelan partners reading my eyes with my North American partners who could not follow my words was only just the start to that quiet and gentle spirit that had so evaded me.  What spoke even more deeply were the sights, sounds, and tastes that ushered in what I began to call the cascada de recuerdos, the waterfall of memories.

      ~ End of Part 1.  To be continued . . . 
© by karina, 2020.  Please use with permission or a citation. 

Continue to Part 2