The Aunties (Part III)

20 June 2012

Today's page is devoted to Guardian Angel 3, but she almost deserves her own novella, she is such a character. There is so much I want to say about GA3, but I don't know how to concisely weave any of it together, so instead I think I will just blurt out some of the most vivid things that pop into my mind about her:

- the way she delicately twirls her wrists and arms throughout the day at random, often as she talks to you. Presumably this is to keep her joints limber, but the impression is someone with a pair of snakes coming out of their shoulders with minds of their own.

- when, on one of my first days on the job, all my co-workers sat around at lunch and were helping me with my Spanish by asking me standard personal questions and correcting my responses, the question she posed was: "Do you believe in UFO's?" (this was all the more funny because the way they tried to translate it was by saying "oofohs")

- the way she eats her daily orange. She skims off the outside orange rind, but leaves much of the white barrier (sort like the earth's mantle?) that lies right underneath. This is her favorite part, apparently, and she slowly consumes the rest of the orange one half at a time by nibbling away along the edge of this white part.  Seeing this my first day, I wondered for a while if this was how all Chileans ate oranges (GA1 emphatically shook her head when asked as she stared with equal bewilderment at GA3).

- waiting outside for another co-worker, GA3 lit a cigarette and asked me if I smoked. "Nope." "No?" she inquired, "Not even when you were younger?" And then she gestured with her hand to a height of about three feet in the air. I shook my head and chuckled in amazement, until I asked her when she began smoking. "13."

- towards the end of my first week, she called me out on my terrible knowledge of people's names by asking if I knew her first name. I felt terribly embarrassed because I had no idea, and she wrote it on a piece of paper. Hoping to turn the tide and shift the attention off of me, I asked her if she knew how to spell my name - which, as it appears to be the most difficult word in the world to pronounce for everyone except native-English speakers, she and the rest of the office was struggling with. She took her piece of paper, and wrote: K-I-T-Z

GA3 has a quality to her that one might call spacey; there are times when she just sits there in her chair blinking at me with a gaping smile on her face, amused that anyone could be hungry at 11:30 in the morning or pleased that I took pictures on my weekend trip. We certainly amuse each other, and the rest of our office, when my poor Spanish and her non-existent English constantly bump into each other, and we sometimes just devolve into chuckles as words fly back and forth without falling into receptive ears.