Possession

In my zip code girls didn't share stuff instead we all hauled our own gallon-size canisters of Aqua-net hairspray to and from gym class teasing up our bangs till they were crispy. It would not have dawned on any of us that a better idea would have been to share one bottle as a commmunity. Likewise, we bought jeans by the dozen and god knows how many pairs of shoes that cluttered up our closets and sat mostly unused... and definitely "unshared." This was my mentality at fifteen heading off to spend the summer in my mom's home town of Monterrey, Mexico. One particular night my cousin Tala invited me out with a few of her friends to go see a movie. Nancy arrived smelling like Maja talcum powder and donning this beautiful leather belt, thick like carmel, hand stitched. I had not seen anything like it.

"I like your belt," I told her in Spanish. Without even a pause, even a second thought, as though I were her sister and as if it were my birthday, she took off the belt folded it up and handed it to me.

"Please, please have it." We had just met, we were total strangers.

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Just a month ago in Puerto Aventuras, I was admiring my cousin Paty's brilliantly flashy shawl, a fabric I found to be so alive with color, it just begs to be danced in.

"Ay Paty me gusta tu camisa," I told her, turning her this way and that way so I could get a good look. She smiled, poured me a glass of wine and then excused herself. A few minutes later she returned to the table wearing another shirt, the one she had on neatly folded up in her hands.

"It's for you," she said.

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I just recently finished reading Sonia Nazario's pulitzer prize winning novel, Enrique's Journey, the true story of one Honduran boy's odyssey to reunite with his mother in the States. It is the journey 35,000 children make a year clinging to the tops of freight cars. When Enrique arrives to Veracruz, Mexico after enduring hostile bandits, gangsters and a serious beating. He is comforted by a dozen or more people who come from their houses to meet the train clutching small packages of goodness. One stranger greets him as he is about to board the train, "without a word, the man puts a large sandwhich stuffed with scrambled eggs into his hands." This man lives by the tracks with no running water and a dirt floor.

As Nazario explains, "these are unlikely places for people to be giving food to strangers. A World Bank study in 2000 found that 42.5 percent of Mexico's 100 million people live on $2 or less a day."

I remember in our discussion of this novel at book club, a woman commented, "why is it that the poorest of people are the most generous and that the richer we get the tighter we close our fists?"

Her question haunts me.

I can only promise this that the G will run the streets of Mexico alongside his cousins sucking down ice-cold Joyas and camarones secos, squeezing the key limes between his fingers. In these moments he will be surrounded by the richest of people as my mom always says because he will more than likely meet many Nancys who will teach him that there is no such thing as possession, what's mine, mi amigo, has always been yours.