An Overstayed Welcome: Finding Home

Travel

I looked down the tunnel looking gate that led to the airplane and felt a mixture of excitement and nervousness. The new and unknown seemed full of possibilities- magical even. I wasn't aware of anything else but that which I saw before me, and thought of nothing except what my father had been telling me for the past few months, "If anyone asks why you are there tell them that you are just visiting." "Just visiting." I repeated to myself under my breath in the best English I could muster.

I didn't know why I needed to say that at the time if we weren't visiting; the reason was revealed later on in life. All I knew at that moment was that we would be going someplace different. I liked different. I liked change. The bleak and unknown future from the tunnel like gate stared back at me, daring me to go in and pursue the same dreams my parents were moving towards. As I stood there gazing into the gate to the plane, I looked forward to the unknown that the tunnel-like gate promised, half expecting a great adventure and half doubtful and fearful of the outcomes that were to come. I finally took a step and went into the blissful unknown.

~

A few months before my parents got my sisters and I on that plane, my parents had met a family who were visiting from the United States and attended the church we attended. Mother had them over to eat several times before they had announced to my sisters and I that we would move to the United States with them. The Hendersons were a Hispanic family of four kids.

The only thing I remembered of the family was that they spoke to our parents for a long time after church attendance because I was always ready to go home and eat but could not because they would not stop talking. I would try to join the conversation at times, but most of the time I listened to their conversations and pretended that I was an adult myself. The family visited the house sometimes. Mom always had something for them to eat when they did. Sometimes we would go to their house to eat. We would always have a game and a gospel lesson and my favorite- sing hymns.

We had only been living in Toluca, Mexico for less than a year. I knew that it had been close to a year because my youngest sister- Lina- was born there, and she was not a year old yet. This was not uncommon for us. Even though I was only seven years old, I had noticed a trend. We only stayed in one place for a year or so before moving again. I was a fan of it. I did not mind moving and meeting new people. I did not mind all the things that came with the move and saw only positive things out of it. I might have inherently been an optimist at heart, or I might have just wanted something different that much. Yet, the thought of seeing something that I had never seen before excited me to the brink of joy.

Before Toluca we lived in Mexico City but before living in the D.F., we lived in Cuernavaca where I was born but not raised. And where my parents lived in a house that they took care of for someone. Mother cooked and cleaned while father worked out in the garden and was a chauffeur. Shortly after we moved to the city to be nearer to family. I was around four or five years old when on a family outing to the castle of Chapultepec went wrong and instead landed us inside the walls of the most beautiful building I had ever seen.

Dad decided to take us to a place he drove by during his Taxi route. It was a white building that seemed to reach the heavens. Almost as soon as I stepped into the building, I had an indescribable happiness that warmed my heart. We walked from one room to the next. We sat to watch a film that brought tears to my eyes and afterwards walked to a room where a blue starry sky encircled me and a Christus statue stood before me and spoke to me.

Shortly after my parents were baptized. An ocassion that would live in my heart forever and a memory that I would never forget because of the joy and happiness I felt. Though Julia and I had gone through the first communion ceremony in the Catholic church a year or so before my parents were baptized in this new church that they had found, I had never felt  as close to God as I did at their baptism.