happyb rthday
The last time I went to visit my Spanish teacher (Sra) I noticed that she hadn't put up the papel picado1 I got her from Olvera Street in Los Angeles two years ago. She laughed when I asked her about it. With a sheepish grin, she revealed that she hadn't put them up because she wasn't tall enough to. (Sra is, I think, 4 foot 10 inches tall.)
Today was a teacher workday, so I stopped by before noon to help her put them up. Sra helped me tie knots in the string and reminded me to be careful as I tiptoed on combo desks to stick command hooks to the cinder block walls and hang the papel picado from them. It took a little under an hour for us to get all of the cutouts up. How do they look?
As you can (maybe) see, most of the cutouts have vaguely Mexican themed designs: roosters, bulls, dancing, flowers, horseshoes (which I didn't quite understand). I didn't realize until we were already midway through the second pack that one of the packs I got her didn't have these designs, but instead spelled out H-A-P-P-Y B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y. By then it was too late to fix things, so now in one corner of her classroom the papel picado spells out H-A-P-P-Y-B and in the opposite corner you can see R-T-H-D-A-Y. (We didn't have space for the I.) That gave both of us a good laugh; Sra was bent over for a good few minutes laughing at the silliness of it all. "I wonder if the kids will notice," she managed to get out between her wheezing fits.
I only planned to hang around for an hour but one turned into two and before I knew it it was half past two. We talked pretty much nonstop the entire time, catching up on just about everything — family, travel plans, love, divorce, the latest gossip. I didn't want the afternoon to end, but had to head home when my stomach started grumbling at me. The most important meal of the day to me is the next one, after all.
literally "perforated paper", or the traditional Mexican decorative papers with elaborate designs cut out you might see↩