Alvina

I just got in from stringing up Christmas lights.Anyone who knows me will immediately recognize the absurdity of that statement. But it's true. I hung them for Alvina, my 85 year old neighbor.

photo by Sonia Rangel

Alvina and I met about a year and a half ago when I moved into our 4-plex on a tiny street in South Austin. Alvina in no way resembles the beautiful, young, Swedish woman she once was, except for her eyes. Her eyes are bluer than the giant exercise ball abandoned in the corner of my living room, bluer than the interior indicator lights of my Volkswagen. The rest of her is sags, wrinkles, bruises and veins. Crooked toes jutting from holey knee-highs worn on concrete without shoes. Wild white hair almost always absentmindedly tucked into 47 bobby pins. Pendulous breasts that flop from side to side like out of sync metronomes, only seeing the inside of a brassiere on special occasions, like trips to the HEB and Furr's Cafeteria. She hasn't had her own teeth since the age of 25.

A day or two after I moved in I noticed small scoops of dirt missing from my potted Aloe plant by the front door. Not long after that I noticed a small trail of dirt leading from my Aloe pot to the newly potted Aloe by ol' Alvina's front door. This continued throughout the summer until her Aloe was out-thriving mine. Sometime later that fall Alvina offered me a potted mint plant as a gift because, "I been takin' your Aloe all summer," she chuckled. What started with a few pinched Aloe sprouts, since her heart attack last fall, has blossomed into what I believe to be full blown horticulture therapy for her. She has about 11 plants now, presumably all swiped from other folks in the neighborhood. She's 85, she can do what ever the hell she wants.

Sometimes the old woman drives me nuts with her shrill, squawky voice and her incessant repetition. Almost everything she repeats to me she has repeated to me repeatedly. A year and a half of heading out the door for a waitressing job and she still asks: "yew a waitress?" just so she can tell me: "I yewsed ta be a waitress over at Scarber's." Three semesters of heading off to class and I'm still greeted with "Goin' to skeewl? I never went ta skeewl. My mama said I dint hafta go ta skeewl." And that brings me to another things that just drives me crazy about ol' Alvina. She's so damn simple minded and as much as I can relate to that it's still hard to maintain interest in what she's saying. Except for sometimes. Sometimes she surprises me. Makes me see things I think about constantly, like my impending death, in an entirely different way. And makes me feel like a dick for saying things about her plant thieving and shockingly windsockesque breasts.
Last week Alvina knocked on my door at the disturbingly early hour of 8am. Luckily I had already been woken up by a dull and endless rumbling noise. Our tiny street had just gotten our fancy blue single stream recycling carts and the whole neighborhood plunged into chaos and confusion. Our street is less than 1/10 of a mile long and is completely lined with ramshackle 4-plexes. By adding the recycling carts to the already existing rolling garbage cans, alongside eviscerated couches, shattered televisions, and other ghetto apartment jetsam my street now proudly displays 144 cans!

Alvina was knocking on my door to make this suggestion: we could share her cart so I wouldn't have to block my whole window with one. She followed up her brilliant idea with, "I'm just glad we're neighbors, I just love you to death." With little comments like that, my crusty old grinch heart grows just enough to not only offer to hang lights for her today but also go as far as to suggest she show me those new pants suits she bought at Beall's that she's been chompin' at the bit to show me all week.
So I get everything hung and she can't find an extension cord so I run next door and grab one of mine and as everything illuminates Rockefeller Center style I say, "when I take this stuff down
in March, I'll need this cord back" and Alvina says, "well if I'm not here, just tell 'em it's your cord." And I'm wondering why the hell I would be taking down her Christmas decorations if she wasn't home and just as I ask her this I realize she said "if I'm not here," not "if I'm not home."

She's so sweet that even if she dies before this wretched holiday is over, she wants to make sure I get my extension cord back. Truth be told, Alvina is the best darn neighbor I've ever had.

laundry.

Monday I had a Mexican Day. Mexican Day is what my immigrant Mexican kitchen laborer friends call Monday. Their one day off, their descanso. The one day when they sleep as late as possible to make up for all the sleep they didn't get because they were working six doubles in a row. The day they wash all their clothes at the laundromat, buy and cook all their food for the week and Western Union much of their hard earned dinero back home. I don't work six doubles a week; I trade my extra sleep for a titillating Algebra class. And I skip the Western Union and just go to the Wells Fargo and cry.

My friend Daniel is from Guanajuato and has a really odd opinion of my life as an American woman. He thinks that because I'm white I go to a lavish, secret, spa-like laundromat where only rich, white people like me go.

The laundromat I've been going to for a year and a half is on William Cannon. It occupies space in yet another Feng Shui nightmare, nearly defunct strip mall with a super ghetto-looking beauty school, a rent-to-own furniture store, a nail salon and a CVS Pharmacy where I once bought condoms and the cashier actually said: "Looks like some one's going to have fun tonight!"

I chose my laundromat for two reasons: 1. its proximity to a bar and 2. the absence of children. When it rains, the drop-ceiling panels leak murky liquid the color of expectorated bronchitis phlegm and then fall in chunks onto the floor. Today when I arrived and with frantic grace began sorting and cramming my clothes into the machines, the old guy who runs the place asked: "Where ya been?" I eloquently responded, "Huh?" Then he said, "I haven't seen you in a while, did you go out of town or somethin'?" And I start thinking, this guy is wack. I schlep my filthy, restaurant-stinkin' laundry in here every friggin' week. He must have me confused with the other white girl who washes her clothes here and then I remember: HOUSE SITTING! Yes! For three joyful weeks I washed my clothes in one of those magical machines, a quarterless clothes cleaning device in a house with a solid roof. Spa-like indeed! "Yeah," I finally answered, "I did go out of town." and he responded, "Well next time, don't stay away so long!"

Sometimes it's nice to be noticed.

lucky.

A friend recently read a passage for me from one of his favorite books and reminded me of how lucky I am. Here are some of a million things that I'm feeling particularly lucky for at this moment:

• my health.

• water. it flows out of my faucet hot or cold when ever I want and I can drink it! as much as I want whenever I want.

• my hearing. I cannot imagine life without ever hearing laughter, music or ocean waves.

• my sight. for every beautiful and ugly thing I see every second of every day.

• my freedom & autonomy as an American woman. I can live alone, chose to get married or not, have kids or not. I can work and vote and drive. I can eat what I want, wear what I want, read and watch what I want. Screw who I want. I can drink; I can curse. I am woman; hear me roar.

• humor. I most definitely would have died a long time ago with out it.

the technological advances in my lifetime. I don't know how any of this shit works and I don't know how I ever lived without it.

•  tampons. seriously!