It’s Christmas in Mexico.  This became clear to me for the first time today.  I sat in the Zocolo for a long time taking in the Christmas tree.  The tree was an upside-down golden icicle.  It was decked out in gold tinsel, the cheesiest of the cheesy, really, but it looked beautiful.  Who knows what suddenly might pop up and occur to you in particular instant as beautiful.  Some things are obvious – a pale, nearly transparent moon rising through pink and blue clouds above the Sierra last night, seen from the panoramic view of the city we had on the Cerro Fortin.  We were playing frisbee with Stella and kicking a water bottle back and forth to entertain my friends’ new (as of yet nameless) pup, and then there was the moon.  A scene out of a Japanese landscape painting; the elements would’ve been right at home on delicate rice paper.

But that kind of beauty in the Zocolo was different, pulled from different directions.  It’s not as if I’d usually stop in awe of a giant Christmas tree bedecked in gold lights and tinsel, and doing so I felt a brief tinge of slightly pretentious aesthetic guilt.  Is this monstrosity of shiny plastic and Christmas cheer really going to make me fondly, quietly respectful?  But the way the warm late afternoon light fell quietly across the top of the tree and set it aglow against the wispy blue sky, the way the Mexican flag flapped calmly behind it in the wind, the red, white, and green blocks of color so bright and crisp and emblematic, the brief glimpses of the infamous eagle eating the snake, well, it was beautiful.  All sorts of elements of nostalgia-infused beauty coming from different directions – Ohio Christmases, our old wood living room whose smell I half-remember and the boxes of Christmas ornaments and the cookies and snow, coupled with this blue, blue sky that is part of my interior landscape now, part of the landscape of life and death for me, and then the drapings of patriotism of the country I may be leaving which for me holds the memories and sensations and smells and meals and loves of three years – wrapped up there in a moment I had to sit down into.

So I sat down just to stare at it, settled into the scene for a bit.  The dog sat and then, realizing it was going to be a bit, lay down.  I watched for awhile, thinking about a short story I want to write about a girl named Magdalena.  What would Magdalena be thinking, I thought, trying to get inside the characters.  Fiction is an alien form to me.  Me writing fiction is like a bird trying to swim, flapping around inside an unfamiliar substance in semi-panic.  Yet at the same time, I find fiction somewhat alluring, perhaps like the bird finds a sky reflected in a clear lake…and when I nosedive into it, taking the plunge, what’ll happen is a massive fluttering of wings and gasping and flopping and then I’ll say yep, it’s back to the air again, creative nonfiction it is.

But in the meantime I was thinking about Magdalena and I decided she’d be seventeen and pregnant, and she’d be staring at that tree thinking about her baby.  Cliché?  Boring?  Little critical antennae tried to go up to reject these ideas but I was in such a neutral, calm, nostalgia-zenned place that it didn’t matter, the critical antennae had to sigh and curl back up into the recesses of my mind.

I left Magdalena and drifted down to the workers putting pots of poinsettas around the Christmas tree.  It was a hilarious scene.   There were dozens of male workers loitering in various postures around the tree, most leaning on a leg or an arm against the railing and staring off into the distance with that distinctly Mexican gaze that stares nowhere, that’s pure pose and is meant to say here I am, and I know you’re there and have got you all figured out, but hey, I’m not really here. It’s the posture of you and the person sitting next to you in the coffee shop when you’re each trying to ignore each other.  That’s how men here gaze into the distance, only the faintest flicker of the corner of their eyes this way or that, when a woman passes.

These men were the classic men you’d focus on if you were going to write a book about the Mexican working class.  Two were eating tortas on a low stone ledge.  One was rubbing a big, round belly shaped exactly like a torta, slightly irregular around the edges with a domed middle.  Others were in the dust brown uniforms of street sweepers, or the kind of blocky rectangular tank tops shaped like street signs.  They had scuffed boots and mustaches.  They were moving poinsettas.  All these posturing men in their boots and their leather belts and their buff brown arms delicately lifting the government’s poinsettas out of the back of a truck and placing them round the merry Christmas tree.  One man peeked his head out from inside the “tree” which I had just stepped slightly out of my figurative daze to discover was not so much a tree as a giant swath of white cloth wrapped around wire.  Here was a fuzzy head of black hair peeking out from it, shouting something.  I laughed out loud.  The man disappeared back into the tree and the workers continued stepping sideways this way and that around the potted poinsettas, setting more pots down gently and awkwardly in the way people who don’t have children handle infants.

A man in a floppy fisherman’s hat, expensive hiking boots and a neat plaid shirt tucked into American-style cargo pants stepped out of the truck.  He looked like an American tourist transplanted out of the mountains of Germany.  His face was red, his nose was bulbous, he had glasses and looked irritated.  Whenever you see a very white Mexican dressed in American clothing you know he’s The Boss.  As he barked orders at the workers and shuffled here and there I noticed he had a limp.  He made a subtle, gentle, sideways swoop with each step, not that it interfered in the slightest with his command and confidence.  Had the limp shaped him?  In a fiction state of mind I began to construct the story of the limp before I got distracted again when the boss man stuck his head into the tree and shouted something.  I burst out laughing again.

A little boy on his mama’s back turned around and stared at my laugh and then caught sight of the dog and gaped.  I began watching passerby.  The gum sellers stole my attention.  Young girls, fourteen or sixteen, wandered by unconcerned, in beautiful woven blouses and thick wrap skirts like winter blankets, babies strapped to their backs.  One baby’s butt was a slight hump in a lime green shawl.  His little arms and legs and buttocks looked like they’d been made of clay.  He had those round, chubby cheeks of so many brown Mexican babies.  He was looking backwards, bounce, bounce, bounce along as his mom held her basket gently to the left, then the right, then the left, chicle?  Chicle? Chicle?  Other families strolled past, skinny men and busty women with little wide-eyed boys.  They stared at the Christmas tree.  Little girls shrieked.  A girl in a dirty, pretty yellow dress and ancient shoes walked in circles around the tree, forgetting her basket of chicles.  The men postured, shifted postures, postured again, lifted more poinsettas from the back of the truck.  The Boss was inside the tree now.

Stella looked at me expectantly and I gave her a rawhide.  In doing so I glanced round the Zocolo, took in the sea of red poinsettas dotted on all sides and throughout by people sitting on nearly every available inch of public space.  Old men and women and couples making out and young men and women staring off into indeterminate bits of distance, and kids darting around or munching dulces.  A making-out couple beside me was replaced by a woman breastfeeding a baby.  I took one more glance at the top of the tree, still swaddled in that gold light, still glowing before the heartbreaking blue lace sky, and I stood up to go.  Past the potato chip stand, past the foreigners journaling in cafes, up the cobblestone river of the pedestrian street, and back home.