I bought a pink wooden airplane.  I dislike using the verb bought here because it suggests such a hollow transaction.  Purchased and acquired are even worse.  I wish I could say I traded something for the airplane, a handful of jade beads for a pink airplane, a purely symbolic and equal transaction, where each person received a gift of artistic, aesthetic joy.  But no, I handed over thirty-five pesos for the little wonder.

There is an old man sitting outside the market every day, carving wooden spoons.  He has the type of face that would be on the cover of a coffee table book about Mexico.  Dark brown, deeply wrinkled, between leather and paper.  His eyes are surprisingly white and vibrant.  Sometimes when I walk out of the market I see him studying writing in a notebook.  I like to think it’s Spanish.  I like to walk the dog up the sharp hill back towards the house thinking, here is this man in his seventies or eighties sitting on a stoop outside the market, studying Spanish in a spiral notebook.  Does that not, I think, sum up everything beautiful and heartbreaking about humanity?  An octogenarian Mexican man studying Spanish vocabulary, carving wooden spoons.

But I’m not exactly sure what he’s studying, and faced with his piercing eyes and regular, everyday presence on that stoop I feel it’s unfair to take the poetic license to assume it’s Spanish.  I’ll withstand the urge to impose my dreamy writing fantasies on this man, who obviously has a purpose that eludes my grasp and that I don’t want to own by pinning down.  My conditioned writer’s mind jumps at the possible story behind the notebook – he’s a Zapotec Indian from the valley who has been carving wood for generations, who never got to go to school because of government repression, who now comes to the city and studies the writing his daughter does for him in the notebook, meticulously, carefully repeating verbs in his head.  But that’s my story, not his.

Whatever his story is, however, there’s a poetry to it.  The way he holds that worn notebook, makes notes in it, traces it with a finger, returns to it – it is a lifeline to something else for him, a tendril eagerly extended towards another realm.  Whatever he’s studying, it’s out of love, out of persistence, out of that bottom layer of humanity that urges at and believes in utterly impractical, soul-lifting things.

So I already had a semi-relationship with this man.  And then I saw the pink airplane and thought, there’s a symbol of everything I like to think about when I walk up the sharp hill towards Crespo every day.  He picked it up with crinkled hands and gave it to me.  Simple wedges of wood rounded and smoothed at the edges, glued together, with metal axles and wheels that spun.

I looked at that airplane all the way home, held it up to examine it, smiled with the solid satisfaction of it.  I don’t know why I liked it so much.  It just felt like something to hold on to amidst the swirliness.