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March 28, 2007
The Waiting Room (or Dayna’s Dogs)
In Literatura Caribena today, we discussed the short story “The Waiting Room”. Unfortunately, I didn’t look at the syllabus correctly and didn’t read the right story. So as the class continued on with its discussion about the characters, plot, etc., I sat listening and thinking…
If I were to write a story called “The Waiting Room”, what would it be about? What type of waiting room would it be? What would be waited for?
I listened to Carmen, a student in our class, mention something about visas. How would I feel sitting in a room, a dark cold dusty room, waiting until my name was called to apply for a visa? What would I feel? Would I be nervous? Would I lie to the officer?
I heard the testimony of other classmates—how they tried to get a visa to travel to the United States but were not granted one. Had they waited in vain? Had they wasted their time waiting? I imagine that in today’s world, it must be very difficult for a Mexican to obtain a visa to travel to the United States…
But surely there are other types of waiting rooms, I thought. And so in my mind, I left that room for another.
I thought about our weekend to Chabihau and about Dayna, another extranjera from Muhlenburg University (we actually have a good friend in common there). Over the weekend I got to see a different side to Dayna—her “wild side”—playing with any random, stray dog that we came across…
I thought of the dogs of Mexico and the dogs of the United States…do the dogs of Mexico long for a home? What if they were all rounded up and placed in pet stores? Would they wait very long to be adopted? Would people actually adopt them? I bet Dayna and I would. It was incredible how much we bonded over the dogs of Chabihau—how we left in the middle of the night, side by side, alone without telling anyone—to go feed the dogs of Chabihau our extra food from dinner. Nobody knew about our work except for Dayna and me.
What would a waiting room for dogs be like? What kinds of dogs would wait? Which ones would eventually find a home?
Later on, I thought about how I had waited in Tatiana’s house for hours. She had invited me for lunch as a “thank you” for our hours of conversacion ingles that I hold in the centro every week. When I arrived I had planned on eating. Little did I know that they wait until 3:30 to eat lunch….
It’s amazing how much waiting we do in life…It’s amazing how many different types of waiting rooms there are. And as I write this entry, I too wait. I wait for tomorrow, when I head to Chiapas for the Semana Santa.
And as I wait, the sounds of my own two dogs from the United States echo in my mind…
Posted by jlsumich at March 28, 2007 09:25 PM