FUNEARIL
My last night in Guada I met a woman from Kansas who I had seen around the hotel for 2 days, but who I hadn´t bothered to meet on account of her very bizarre look. Her hair cut was short and spiky. Her lips, a wild fushia. Her ear lobes always drooped from the weight of rather strange, chunky, round, gold orbs.
Last night she showed up at the graduation dinner to eat and meet and investigate the school and that´s when I found out where she was from. After a round of chicharon and quesadillas made by Quetzechotal himself, we went to the Mutualista for Victorias and a mexican band belting pretty damn good american covers. Over our drinks, she says that back in the states she was studying to be a Speech Pathologist, and did I know what that was because it's okay that most people don't.

Actually, once she tells me what a speech pathologist is, I remember that I had one of my own, although neither I nor my mother can now remember why. Still, in the third grade I got pulled out of class once or twice a week to sit in a lab repeating words I heard from giant headphones much like the ones my ear nose and throat specialists had hooked me up to in sound booths so many times. The speech tapes were a breeze compared to the hearing tests I'd been taking. The only penalty I'd get from speech therapy was a verbal correction and be forced to repeat myself.

With the hearing booth I agonized over the penalty for my wrong answers: best case- oral antibiotics, then ear drops, or the worst of yet another gassing at the hospital for more tubes (it could take 4 nurses to hold my 6 year-old-body down). Once, I was even threatened with tonsilecomy.

I'd adapted into a creature too crafty for my own treatment. I was far too good at reading people, and so the later tests I remember conducted in solitary; in a dark, sealed, sound-proofed booth, pinned to a chair by a headset and facing a corner under a dim light. At first the tones would make a pattern, and then alternated between each ear. A long silence tricked my brain into believing that I was missing something...and sometimes I'd raise my left hand or right just because the timing between tones seemed off and I was scared to be wrong. I'm surprised I wasn't prescribe psychiatristcs right then and there.

So, I found out those hearing problems were the big clue as to why I was in those speech classes. Sometimes she said, kids that have hearing problems get sent to the speech therapist because they don't learn how to pronounce some words that they miss when they were sick. Sometimes the words come out from the back of the throat like Helen Keller.