Looking back. Looking forward.

When I first arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay to begin my position at the Uruguayan American School, I came with an idea. A former colleague at my last post, Westminster School, told me she studied Spanish at MIddlebury with a teacher from Montevideo and she would make an introduction. This gave me a great idea!

I was hired to teach English IB and help the school become authorized as an International Baccalaureate Diploma School, to become the IB Coordinator and College Counselor. It sounded like a perfect job for me and I was very anxious to leave Westminster after three years of classes and duties literally 24/7. I had a dorm of thirty-six teenaged girls, I was asked to coach squash, run the Model United Nations, moderate the chapel program, mentor eight international students, and teach a full schedule of English literature classes. Classes were held six days a week and Sundays were allocated to driving a school van to church or hosting my advises to a dinner or my dorm girls to an icecream fete. Chapel was obligatory three times a week and I was responsible for lining up gueest speakers and moderating the senior speeches, a senior graduation requirement. Inevitably there were chapels where the senior speaker was unprepared or even refused. In that case I became the faculty speaker, and did my best to come up with a topic that would hold the interest of two-hundred fifty restless teens.

I had only been back in the United States for eight years and I was missing the benefits of teaching in international schools. The offer of a position in Montevideo seemed a welcome reprieve. I consulted my son before accepting the position and he enthusiastically responded: Hey, mom, it is a continent you have not conquered and after spending two years in Ecuador, I know you will love the warm South Americans. And so it was done and I went through the process of attaining a work permit, sold all my furniture, most of my belongings and headed south with my two suitcases and a box of books!

My great idea began with emails exchanged with the Spnnish literature teacher in Middlebury College, asking if he were coming to his home town at all I would love to welcome him at UAS to speak to the students about Middlebury College. Later, after I Googled Eduardo and learned that he had been shortlisted for a Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry, I quickly wrote back apologizing for not knowing his real interest and talents. I asked if he would consider being the "Visiting Poet" at the Uruguayan American School that fall. He was on his way to Montevideo at the end of his summer position at Middlebury and agreed to showcase his work at the school. With the news that I had snagged a "Visiting Poet" and one from our own city, I became a sort of star overnight!

The school had rented a small cottage for me; they provided housing for all of the overseas hire and my cottage was perfect! Small, rustic, a fireplace, and a garden. It was actually the guest house on a larger estate in Carrasco, the neighborhood that had been large summer homes for Montevideans. My cottage was a block from the Rambla and the beach. The school had a standing account at a furniture store downtown and I ordered bedroom furniture, sofas and a dining table with four chairs. At a nearby second-hand store, I found a large glass wrought iron table for my patio and six chairs. I was ready to have a party to debut my new house and had invitations printed announcing a party to celebrate our Visiting Poet, Eduardo E. He was a great hit with the faculty and students, many of them Uruguayans who were very proud of their hometown celebrity. I encouraged Eduard to invite his friends from the city to my party. I bought cases of wine from a local winery, supplied coolers of beer and soft drinks. Eduardo had warned me that his friends, artists, playwrights and poets, all drank whiskey. So I brought in six bottles of Ballantine whiskey. The Director of the school brought his guitar and a couple of the Uruguayans also brought guitars. Soon everyone was singing Country Western songs! I had invited all the faculty and some of my new neighbors, too. All in all, about forty five people helped me initiate my cottage and garden that afternoon.

Eduardo became a close friend and we had a few adventures over the visit until he had to return to the United States where he was tenured at Texas A & M. In addition to his many published books, he wrote a daily editorial in the Montevideo local newspaper. His article was titled El Sotano, "the basement". Each day I would visit my local kiosk and buy the paper; his column became my Spanish exercise. He wrote about everything from football, politics, philosophy of life and humorous anecdotes. We shared many emails and met when our paths crossed in the United States and when he returned to Montevideo. These are some of our letters.

The Poet

The Party

In exile - 2011

Dear Eduardo,

"I Am My Favorite Poet" has been my reading over peaches this morning, looking out at the sun inn the garden. I realize that there are many things about your treatise that speak to me. I, too, have chosen to live for most of my life, it seems, outside of my country where I feel like an alien. I cannot seem to connect to baseball, Hemingway, Walmart, running marathons, and all those sort of American things that are common to my fellow countrymen. I just don't belong. It was l987, standing on the Parthenon, looking down at the Herod Atticus theatre where Sophocles' plays were first acted, I wept. It had taken me half a lifetime to finally be there - in that place I had read about, dreamed about, even imagined I had spent time in some previous existence. I had come home. Yet, in Greece I was xenos - and always would be. 

But then, I had been a foreigner in almost every land I´d been. In a way, being a foreigner affords you a good deal of forgiveness. The small mistakes in syntax, the inane questions of strangers, are accepted. The joy of being in this land, a stranger, is celebrated by the locals, as my enthusiasm reminds them of those things they may have forgotten with familiarity. Even the disaster of America's foreign policy is forgiven when you are a stranger in a strange land. So here I am in Uruguay. The land that you left. I will embrace what is here just as I have rejected what you have embraced in America. The observations of this new place allows me to look at myself with new eyes. The distance from those other places, that I called home, stretches out behind me. I write. I write to try to make sense of the world. Like you, I write poetry to talk to myself. I am not my favorite poet, but my most loyal reader, which makes me embarrassed to say, but others do not matter in this case.

The past is a far away shore that I visit seasonally in my poems and essays. Gradually the grains of sand have been changed out and the landscape there will soon be foreign, too. You turned to me the other night in the restaurant and said "You have to learn Spanish" and it is true and I am. I am amazed at how much I understand, but speaking is another matter.  Mollie