Sense and Responsibility

Abstract

We were never taught to believe that horizons were intangible things. The bold black line where the sky and earth met seemed always to exist only several miles away from our home, and, if our mother would only let us, my sister and I were positive that on a Saturday afternoon we could reach that line before it disappeared to the other side of the world. But we were at an age when we could also block out whole cathedrals, mountains, and moons with our right eyes squinting and the left ones shut, our thumbs held out, eclipsing the intended object. Our world seemed, to us, the center of the entire God-fashioned universe. My sister and I would sit on a couple of empty fertilizer pails drinking strawberry Kool Aid, leaning back against the trailer's aluminum walls, our legs dangling and swaying back and forth to an understood rhythm. There we would sit and contemplate the seconds it would take the mountains to engulf the sun, to transform gracefully from an immense royal blue, and to disappear and be replaced by the striking sincerity of the desert night. My parents never invaded or countered our wondrous musings; it was, instead, in town and at school where we learned to deal with perspective. Both my parents had a very limited knowledge of English. Their English was forced, painful, unmelodious. They knew enough to get by. When we would go to town for visits to the dentist, to the bank, or to shop for groceries, my sister or I would translate for my mother. With age the novelty of it all wore off. It became apparent to us how people treated my mother, how they talked down to her and easily bypassed her. It became apparent how a person without possession of English went easily unnoticed. By fourth grade I refused to translate for my mother. I would, instead, sit off to the side in an uncomfortable, orange chair and watch her wrestle with a language that tore her throat and pained of shattered pride. Shame became synonymous with being Mexican, with speaking Spanish. Shame came when the women laughed, the ones who sat behind counters, who