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Plaid Orange Shirts and Wrinkled Hands
Plaid orange shirts and wrinkled hands
Paola Pavón
My favorite color has always been orange. Not the bright annoying orange you might be thinking of, but the sunset-like with little droplets of dark yellow orange that paints the sky every afternoon. I’ve lived here in Monterrey my whole life but have always felt as if my heart was somewhere else, in a little town 1,237 kilometers away from here, called Los Mochis, Sinaloa. I only visit it once a year but every single time I go it feels like coming home after being away from a really long trip. In a little blue house, with an old swing set that has been a witness of the joy of many children and a few scraped knees, and all kinds of flowers that blossom as if trying to replace the vivid laughs that once used to resonate within the house’s four walls growing in the front yard, lived an old man who’d wake up every morning and wear one of his six identical plaid orange shirts, style his hair with a lot of gel and lean in and give his wife a kiss on the cheek. He’d drive to the same old restaurant he knew ever since he moved here when he was thirteen years old, park in the same spot, greet everyone in the place with a big smile and sit down to order the same exact thing he ordered for the last ten years every single day: a set of waffles with a lot of maple syrup, a bowl of oatmeal and two scrambled eggs. Back when I was a kid I used to find this routine kind of odd, but never paid enough attention to it. It wasn’t until I turned fifteen when I began to understand how the bumps of life changes someone with the course of the years, I started seeing the tiredness of a complicated life in my grandfather’s eyes, the wrinkles of years and years of hard work in his hands, the weak smile that could only come from someone who has seen and felt too much. I started to understand that maybe this was his way of feeling that things wouldn’t change again, so he lived in this endless loop of ephemeral happiness and bliss, enjoying the little things that life gifts us like having the opportunity to eat a good bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon on top and wearing your favorite plaid orange shirt. When you’re young, life passes you by and you are too busy to even notice it, it feels like you’re always rushing to get somewhere, always being too late or too early, and we end up forgetting what a sunset looks like. I forgot what a sunset looks like. But now, as those six identical shirts lay on an empty bed, waiting to be used again, is that I understand the lesson my grandfather wanted to teach me with his silence.
