The Aunties (Part IV)

21 June 2012

I wanted to close this week on Guardian Angel 4 on her last day of work, as I had been told she was leaving the office. It turned out that she'll be continuing on, for an indefinite amount of extra time, which is fine by me.

I adore GA4, who confusingly has the same name as GA2 (obviously unclear as I mask their names behind these titles).

GA4 has a sass and a sense of humor that I meshed with right away. She also possesses something of a worldliness, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be that common in the office. Whenever I ask about traveling to a different corner of Chile, the rest of the office points me to her, and she seems to have the most experience crossing into other countries too. This could be a function of funds, as I am quickly discovering how expensive it can get to travel in Chile.

I will miss GA4 because she is the only one in the office capable of stringing together complete sentences in English. When my brain farts and a sentence comes out in English instead of Spanish, normally only she understands. Likewise, if I can't for the life of me decipher a Spanish phrase a colleague is repeating, we both typically turn to GA4 for a translation. Still, there are no guarantees. She knows lots of English music and movies, too, and I will catch her muttering lyrics to herself at random.

What I will miss most of all, however, is GA4's car. GA4 is the only staff member who drives (other than our boss), and she generously offers to give the rest of us a ride each evening to the subway stop so that we don't have to walk 30 minutes or cram onto the public bus. Of course I appreciate this favor and the reduced time it takes me to get home, but this is not the reason I enjoy the car so much. Rather, the pangs of nostalgia I am already feeling for the thing about to be taken away from me is the crowded few minutes the five of us experience huddled in the tiny car, letting off steam as soon as we are out of the office. We sit there, varying levels of language ability among us, trying to somehow communicate a joke across the English-Spanish divide, and the car fills with laughter, sometimes because we can all understand each other but more often by the sheer fact that we cannot.