Wednesday

There are days where I don’t accomplish much except to think and think like the wind weeping through the aspens. Sometimes, I think about the fall and the winter. The way the trees dimple into a shy, earthy color in the colder months. The beauty of Pessoa’s wayward sentences as they march crooked but bold across the page. The sound of a tenor saxophone. I like to think, and I like to think about thinking. Maybe that is why I like cognitive science so much.

So today, I have not lived up to my own expectations of what I want to do with life. On a normal day, I would get up, make tea, read some journal articles, read some poetry, annotate some book. What I have accomplished is to organize my work cart, with my textbooks on computer science, Turkish, Persian, Russian, French all lined in a neat row. But I have thought a lot about my grandparents, my grandfather who passed away before I was born and my grandmother who died when I was ten.

I think about them all the time. I think that my grandfather, Alex Rivas, and my grandmother, Charlotte Morris, are the ghostly twin pillars that hold up the roof of my identity, these two people who built their families. My father’s family is Mexican; my mother is of Southern stock.

Kailee and I had matching sombreros as children. I cannot even express how important that loud, overbright hat meant to me when I was a child, how it felt like the entire happy world when I dressed up in a Huipil for heritage day at school in the third grade. I don’t speak Spanish, but I have a lot of strong feelings about my heritage, and I have always wanted to talk to my grandmother in Spanish. For the past two years, I have loosely followed Dia de los Muertos activities by building an altar with pictures and candles. For so long, I always felt like, because I don’t speak the language, I didn’t have a right to love being Mexican, but that has changed as I have come into myself. It’s more than the fact that it is pretty cool to be Mexican — and that is pretty cool — I think it is the fact that I am finding community in my heritage.

I try to gather as many stories of my grandfather, like I am sifting through a massive beach, looking for shiny pebbles. The last time I was in the Four Corners, I put flowers on his grave and I listened to Tia Jackie’s stories of how Abuelo was a hard worker (that is actually the number one thing people have told me about him — he was a hard worker).

My grandmother was a writer. She wrote beautiful poetry, and she passed that legacy of writing on to my mother, who passed it on to me. And while I was supposed to be declining Icelandic adjectives and reviewing Turkish phonology all day, I spent my time thinking about how my grandmother’s dream was to leave a legacy. About how I want more than anything to do what I can to advance her legacy. Even being from the South in a tense time, my grandmother was an anti-racist who did everything she could to put her family on the correct path, to live a life devoted to words.

It is 3:50 right now. I have not studied algorithm efficiency. I have not reviewed any more math for the GRE. I have not worked on Java. Instead, I have whittled away the hours thinking about what I can do for my family, for my mother. I pottered around my kitchen, I pet my cat, Fable, when he demanded love. Maybe that is all we really need sometimes.

I like to think. That is all I have really done today.