Just a Trifle

It was just a trifle. Elizabeth and I are wintering again in Costa Rica this year—nine weeks in the Jaco area. After thirty-four years in the mid-west suffering arctic-like temperature that would fall often enough to -20 degrees with a wind chill factor that caused the air to feel much colder. I had grown intolerant of winter, such even as winter seems to be this year in Minnesota and other mid-west cities. Chicago temperatures actually rose to 70 degrees in the final days of February and there has been minimal snow fall in Saint Paul as the temperatures hovered in the forties and fifties. I have experienced significant snowstorms into May! Anyway, Elizabeth and I were sitting at the beach in Costa Rica as part of our morning rituals. The temperature was already eighty degrees. And in the afternoon when we return to the beach it would rise into the nineties. Before we headed to the beach I would take a morning walk, at first along a noisily trafficked road, then on a quieter and safer road with a return to the casa along a pseudo-boardwalk, but at present I walked along the beach where I could watch the waves and the other folk on their morning ritual walks. Elizabeth would begin the morning with her workout schedule that has now evolved into a daily yoga routine. Then together we packed our water bottles and sunscreen, fold up our beach chairs parked outside our casa and head out for our morning sojourn at the beach. We tend to settle into the same locale daily mornings and afternoons.  Along this beach there are few sun-pilgrims but in the mornings there are not a few vendors offering massage: once during an earlier week we were entrapped, as it were, for a session with Diana and Basilia. Neither spoke any English and we spoke minimal Spanish and suddenly we found ourselves getting upper body (me) treatment and reflexology care (Elizabeth). The cost was forty dollars for each and Elizabeth had to run back to our casa to collect the monies. And almost every morning since these women would pass us, greet us by name and inquire if we would like a massage. I say in my broken Spanish, “hoy no,” or “Mas tarde.” They nod and laugh and move on until the next morning. In fact, we never see these lovely ladies in the afternoon though we would not employ them if we did. Also hawking along the beach though mostly in the afternoons are men selling jewelry, weavers (or salesmen) of colorful hammocks, charitable youth club vendors offering what pass for homemade pastries, and somebody offering something to do with tattoos though we do not know exactly what is he is offering: the man carries a large stretched sheet covered in tattoo designs and he calls to us “Tattoo?”. We have been speculating that he is offering temporary tattoo inkings, but we are reticent to engage the man with our minimal Spanish and his minimal English. I do not fancy either a stencil of a sailing ship or Ché Guevara on my upper arm. Actually, my upper arm is not thick enough to accommodate the visage of dear Ché. I am certain that neither Elizabeth nor I are interested in getting a tattoo, and even if we were we would be averse to having one carved into or stenciled onto our skin in the non-sterile environment of the beach where at a minimum dogs run unleashed and free. Traveling along the beach as well are horseback riders plodding very, very slowly. I would think the diapered horses must suffer frustration to be traversing back and forth along the beach carrying people who are merely recording the experience that is not really an adventure on their phones. They do not look happy, neither the horses nor the riders.

            It was just a trifle. Sitting quietly on the beach, lathered up in sunscreen, I was thinking about Amelia and Lilian. These two El Salvadoran ladies have been cleaning my apartment for years. When they began their fee was $80.00 for four hours bi-weekly, but in fact my apartment was spotless in less than two hours. I paid them for four. I didn’t care: my home was clean, and I could afford the charge. Every year I raised the fee the ladies had set, and now I pay them $130.00 for the exact same cleaning session and now it seems to take even less than two hours to clean the apartment. Perhaps they have learned my living patterns and know where attention needs to be paid. I don’t care, my apartment is clean and their life is more difficult than mine. I don’t feel like I am condescending, but well, maybe I am being so and I know that I suffer middle class guilt. Anyway. To continue, while I winter in Costa Rica Amelia and Lilian come in at their leisure, so to speak, and do what Amelia has termed “a deep clean” of the apartment for which I contentedly pay $200.00. And while I winter away in Costa Rica I pay them nonetheless for a regular bi-weekly cleaning. In addition, the condominium association has for the past several years hired these ladies to clean the entire building. I recall during the pandemic when I regularly paid Amelia and Lilian their cleaning fee despite the fact that they were not permitted into my apartment that Amelia wept that so many of her clients were canceling services that she lay awake at night worrying how she might buy food for her family. I was in my anxious bread making state and I gave her a loaf or two every two weeks when she arrived for her check.

            And it was a just trifle. Sitting on the beach I was thinking thinking about Amelia and Lilian. And then for some reason it crossed my mind that, perhaps, I might purchase something to bring the ladies from Costa Rica. And suddenly this memory arose: My father had a factory in lower Broadway in New York City, and he employed workers from Latin America who belonged to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. And whenever he would go on vacation, he would purchase souvenir trinkets from the countries he had visited for each of his employees.  I don’t know why he did this, but then, we did not speak very often about much other than the time or the work. And then one year, perhaps it was 1972 or 1973, when I was working in my father’ factory, I planned to visit Israel where my fourteen year old sister was living and attending school, and to which my 21 year old brother would travel from his study abroad at Lincoln University in England, my father instructed me not to forget in my travelling to buy something for the ladies in the factory. And on the last day of my visit, I searched out a market to purchase some thirty or so meaningless items that I could offer to the ladies in the factory on my return. 

I consider that the ladies might have recognized that this was a tradition organized by my father and I had become just a vehicle for him to continue to ingratiate himself to the ladies who worked for him, and perhaps the gesture served as a subtle way of informing the ladies that I was meant to be a future factory-owner and their boss. Through me my father promised the continuity of his presence and power. My trip became a mission organized for the enhancement of his relationship with his workers. The joy with which I planned and enjoyed my trip became compromised by my father’s directive. And I wonder now was it the women for whom I purchased the trinkets or was it for my father? 

The narrator of W.G. Sebald’s novel, The Rings of Saturn recounts (and paraphrases) the words of the Vicomte Chateaubriand, who had written, “Memories lie slumbering within us for months quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life . . . what would be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past.” Memory acknowledges the existence of Self, the insertion of self between space and time. No, I believe that memory creates the self. Without memory we would live completely in the present and would know nothing. Our observation of the world is not perfectly of the world; that observation requires the existence—the creation— of a distance that permits that observation to become knowledge, and this occurs by the insertion of time (and space) that acknowledges the Self remembering. I come to exist.

It was just a trifle.