What We Wish Were True by Tallu Schuyler Quinn

Author:Tallu Schuyler Quinn [Schuyler Quinn, Tallu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

A New Knot

In Nicaragua I passed a long weekend sitting in a rocking chair that didn’t rock anymore because one of its bowed legs was snapped off in the back. It seemed like everything there was broken or almost broken or was at one time broken and was half-repaired with a belt or an old bra strap. A few nights before, I went home from my office and found Martha, the Nicaraguan woman I lived with, fixing the nasty, gnawed-up clicker for the TV with some Super Glue and a crayon. She was listening to “Crocodile Rock” when I walked in! Elton John’s Greatest Hits was the only CD they had that didn’t skip, and I think we listened to it eighteen or nineteen times that Saturday afternoon.

Passing a day there was like taking a lesson in knotting—how to make double knots out of bungee cords and pieces of old rubber hose, figuring out how to tie one outrageous situation to the next one, and how to make all the ends meet. Things that are usually so simple were so complicated, and regular daily life was held together by whatever old things would reach. When I walked into my room and turned on my overhead light, it only sometimes worked. It was suspected that a neighbor was stealing electricity from our wires—a totally hilarious claim since our electricity was already spliced half a dozen ways to feed power to our cluster of homes. When I went into my bathroom to wash my hands in the sink, the faucet only sometimes worked, because there was a leak in our pipe, so we kept the main line turned off. When we needed water, we walked down the street to unscrew it—not a huge deal except when it was the middle of the night and I had no clothes on and my bedroom door was stuck in its frame if it was a humid night, which seemed like every night.

My taxi driver Gregorio was late in the mornings, and when we weren’t running out of gas, which was almost once a day, a tire was flat, or we drove in the night without headlights or the clutch just fell off onto the car floor. People showed up late to places, and they might call to say they were coming, or not coming, but chances were good one of our cell phones was out of minutes, so the call wouldn’t go through. Passwords to semireliable wireless connections got changed, and no one knew the new ones or who we might ask to find out or why the old one stopped working in the first place. There was no haste in solving any of these problems or getting answers to any of these questions, and I assumed the chain of command for finding out was probably broken anyway.

But something held daily life together—maybe it was God or the strength of human will, or maybe it’s just that daily life has to keep going, because what

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