I made my way through central Mexico by myself for a month in the summer of 1975. I’d finished my post-BA education classes to qualify for an Illinois teaching certificate, and I had just broken up with a longtime boyfriend. I flew into Mexico City from Chicago, took buses, walked beaches, swam, wrote, and carried a large, orange, nylon backpack. To an outsider, this might have looked incredibly romantic and freeing, but I often felt pretty depressed. The long periods of speaking only schoolgirl Spanish, fighting off Mexican men, and sitting alone at restaurants and in my lodgings were taking their toll. As I stood in a room in Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology between two giant granite figures, I considered throwing myself through a huge window.
I picked up small crafts in local markets along the way, things that weren’t too heavy or bulky for my pack like tiny clay cups and plates, a poncho, a small rug, and a six-inch tall, hand-painted, porcelain candlestick.
Ten years later I had a husband and babies, but from that whole Mexican trip I only saved that little candlestick. My little son was sitting on our kitchen table one evening, playing with the candlestick as I prepared dinner. The candlestick slipped from his grasp and shattered on the linoleum. My former life lay in pieces on the floor. I screamed my anguish at him and at the world. To this day I can see his wide eyes and remember my scary overreaction. The candlestick had cost maybe 50 cents and wasn’t even particularly unique; somebody had poured clay slip into a mold, painted decorative vines, applied glazes in an Acapulco assembly line, and stuck it into a kiln with thousands like it.
As much as I was happy and loved being a wife and mother, that little Mexican candlestick was my spontaneous long-ago life where I had been the center of everything, where I could decide to hop on a bus at a moment’s notice, where life was all about me, and I’d survived some serious depression. No amount of glue would bring that back.
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