If not for my college roommate and dear friend, Kay, my novel, Lost in Oaxaca, would have never been written. Kay and I have been close friends since seventh grade, when nine twelve year-old girls from different elementary schools merged together and formed a friendship that is still going strong almost fifty years later.
You can read about us here if you like:
https://allegronontanto.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/my-girls/
Kay was the one who always did everything first. She cut her hair before it was a thing, rocking a Dorothy Hamill haircut like nobody’s business. She wore espadrilles before there were popular. She painted her bedroom walls a dark chocolate brown, listened to depressing Barry Manilow songs, and wrote deep thoughts down in a leather-bound journal. I borrowed her clothes, hoping that some of her specialness would rub off on me. It didn’t take.
Kay was (and still is) an incredible actress and singer, and she decided to apply to the theater department at USC. I quickly followed her lead and applied to the music school. I know I got in on my own merit, but being the anxious and insecure teenager I was at the time, I don’t think I would have taken the initiative to apply to USC without her doing it first. We were both accepted, and the following fall, we headed off to LA together.
We were too cool to live in the dorms. Somehow, we managed to rent an adorable two bedroom apartment in Santa Monica that had hardwood floors, crown molding, and magically, a sliver of an ocean view out the upstairs window. We drank cheap wine, watched SNL reruns and dreamed of becoming famous. We acquired a cat and named her Cressida. During the summer before our senior year, Kay got a job waitressing at an upscale hamburger restaurant on Wilshire. And because I followed her everywhere, I got a job there, too.
At that restaurant, I fell in love with one of the line cooks responsible for making all those fancy, gourmet hamburgers. He was an indigenous Zapotec man from Oaxaca, Mexico, and not only was he handsome, he was kind. Two years later, I married him. For our honeymoon, we traveled to his hometown in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, the seed for my novel, Lost in Oaxaca was planted. Being the late bloomer that I am, that little seed took an awful long time to germinate. But this coming spring (April 21 to be exact) it’s going to blossom into something pretty big and beautiful.
After thirty-five years, it’s long overdue, but thank you, Kay, for letting me follow you all those years ago, so that I could eventually learn to find my own way.
During the past three decades, I’ve been fortunate to have given birth four times. Each time, right around a month before each birth, I would find myself knee-deep in a frenzy of cleaning that would put Marie Kondo to shame. Nothing would escape my attention. The contents of drawers would be dumped out and rearranged with categorical precision. Closets would be cleared out, baseboards scrubbed, and lampshades vacuumed. Bags of discarded items would be carted away to Goodwill. By the end of the day, my muscles would ache from climbing up and down the step ladder to swat at the lace cobwebs hanging from the crown molding—cobwebs that I hadn’t noticed since before the birth of the previous child.
Allegro non tanto 