It's a
question TCKs (third culture kids) hear regularly and to which we often have a
variety of answers:
·
Both
·
Yes· It's complicated
· When?
· You want the long story or the short?
and so on. We can't help it; our worlds are not necessarily defined by the geopolitical boundaries described by a desktop globe.
I got to
thinking about those boundaries and why we create them. Political power.
Ideology. History. Family structure. Culture. Religion. You could probably add one or two.
The funny
thing is, those reasons are reasons that are common to us all. Even our
boundaries fail to fully divide. When I was in junior high, my parents lived in a small town in the foothills of the Andes. I went to boarding school in the capital city, a three-hour bus ride away. There was one other family in town whose children attended the same school. On occasion, our parents would coordinate our travel so that the younger of us would always have an older teen to watch out for us.
After one
particular holiday, bus space up to the capital was at a premium. The scene at
the town square that served as an informal terminal for interprovincial buses
was chaotic. Mud everywhere, dogs
underfoot, people heading to market, and in the midst of the madness attendants hung
from bus doors yelling the names of their destinations. "A Quito a Quitoooo!" "Esmeraldas,
Esmeraldas, vamoooos!" When a
person's city was called, there was a push through the crowd to ask how many
seats were available. You had to beat anyone else who might be pushing through
the same crowd to claim the few seats up for grabs. So on that day, my friend Gwen and I stayed
back with our moms and her brother Guy, while our dads did the requisite work
to find us seats.
They could
only get two seats on one bus that would arrive before it was too dark. Guy -
our designated "older teen" - would have to come alone on a later
bus. Gwen and I were given the strictest
of instructions to Stay Inside the Bus
Terminal in Quito Until Guy Arrived.
Emphatic instructions. Repeated
instructions. You'd think our parents knew us or something.
And so, we
boarded.The interprovincial buses were all the same. Three seats to each side
of each row meant there was always some stranger in close proximity. You hoped
they didn't fall asleep on you. There were unscheduled stops along the way to
unload passengers or pick up new ones waiting hopefully by the highway. There was always someone selling food,
eating food or sharing food.
We got to
Quito and the manager of the bus terminal told Gwen and me that our parents had
called. Guy would be arriving in two hours. He fixed an authoritative adult eye
on us and told us sternly to
Sit Inside the Terminal Until Then. No Exceptions.
As I'm not
sure whether the statute of limitations on teenage adventures has yet expired, the
rest of that particular tale will go untold for now. But yesterday, for the first time since high school, I rode an interprovincial bus. No longer confined to a series of little shop fronts on a busy street downtown, the Quito bus terminal looks more like an airport. A ticket agent pulled up the bus plan on her computer, selected my seat and took my fare with a smile. A young man in uniform checked my ticket before allowing me through the turnstile to the boarding area.
I climbed the steps into my bus. Two seats to each side of the row. Reclining seats. A small portion of the TV screen at the front of the bus showed the time, temperature, estimated time of departure and reminded everyone to ride safely.
What a difference time makes, I thought! It was a whole other world now, I thought!
Then we
pulled out of our bay and onto the open road.
Twenty
minutes later, we reached a toll booth. The bus doors flew open. An attendant leaned out of the open doorway
yelling, "A Baños, a Bañooooos!" Several people came running with their bags in
tow.
Food vendors
barked offers of sliced mangoes, fresh empanadas and (of course) allullas,
those little hard rolls that break apart, melt in your mouth and taste like
home.
I gained a
seatmate, a highland Indian woman who seemed to feel that the seats were
much too big. For the next hour, she rode snuggled against my arm. At one unscheduled stop, a large group of teenagers boarded. One sat down in the seat vacated by the snuggler. About ten minutes later, he turned and yelled to his buddies in the back of the bus. "Why are we going to Baños?" he asked.
Spurred by
the same protective instinct as that terminal operator decades ago, I shot a glance at this unaccompanied cub.
"Because!"
came the answer from the back of the bus. He nodded, content.
I was overwhelmed with echoes. He was me, 40 years ago. I was now the resident grown-up. All the players were there; my role had just changed.
So perhaps my boundaries of time were as flimsy as the boundaries we create around space.
So perhaps my boundaries of time were as flimsy as the boundaries we create around space.
Perhaps, when you push aside age, politics and geography, you just find people.
Perhaps I
should have told my neighbor on the plane: "There is no or".
