A Trance After Breakfast by Alan Cheuse

Author:Alan Cheuse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2009-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

6—Homework

It’s been a long day for Jovanna Venegas, starting out as she did so early in her room in the house in Bonita, sitting in her upperschool class all morning and on into the early afternoon, but now, as usual, the assistant from her father’s photography studio has driven over to Playas to pick her up and drive her to the San Ysidro port of entry where they park and walk up the long stairs and across the front of the border station buildings and down the stairs and into the pedestrian crossing building. This is the way to cross, so much quicker than sitting in a car in the long lines of cars in the hot, yellow sun of mid-afternoon.

It’s not a long walk, but the day has grown rather warm considering how cool it was in the early morning, and yellow light reflecting off the roadway and the cars seems tarnished and weighs on her head and shoulders. Jovanna’s book bag is crammed with texts and homework assignments, and she’s a little tired. The weekend lies ahead. So she’s just taking things one step at a time, one day at a time, the only way good students do it, and though she has that homework she enjoys solving the problems and enjoys writing the sentences and the essays and enjoys the praise from her teachers when she turns her work in.

Sometimes her parents wonder about her future. Who knows what she will do with her life to come? One sister in Mexico, another who’s a photographer in New York City, of all distant places. Her father is quite sure she’ll go to a California university. And after that? She might eventually stay north of the border, her English is so good, right now just about as perfect as any elevenyear-old’s in any state of the union can be, or she might stay in Mexico and use her English and other studies to good advantage in the Mexico of the new century. But that’s not a quandary, scarcely even a question right now at the end of the school week, and as she rushes up to her waiting mother on the U.S. side of the INS turnstiles, she’s thinking of nothing perhaps except just how nice it is to be going home.

Or so the pilgrim meditates, sitting in his car while the hot yellow sun heats up the air all around him, and the traffic is not moving at all on the Tijuana side of the border crossing. He himself is quite exhausted after a week at school, though not so tired that he can’t take the time to think back on the small events of the week and see how for many of the students, the smallest things will eventually build into the largest. That is the way education works, yes, and though he himself was not a very good student for a very long while he has seen the best things happen in the minds and hearts

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