The Doubts of Unspoken Rules, by Diana Kreutzer

What is too much to share with a friend?

How do you know when you have shared too much?

What color combinations of clothes spill over the boundary of creative fashion and into the category of laughable, by those who judge such things?

What is the proper speed to eat in public so that you still qualify as being someone with good table manners?

At what point in a friendship is quiet time appropriate?

How much time is too much to be alone, before one is viewed as eccentric or hermit-like?

When do you start signing off your texts, e-mails, letters with "love" to your friends? 

When is someone considered a "friend"?

How much eye contact is allowed when you are alone among people you do not  know?

When do you decide to trust someone new in your life?

How many questions are too many to ask the tour guide, or bird guide, before everyone becomes annoyed with you?

How do you know that someone is interested in meeting  you and not merely saying "Hello! How are you?" to be polite?

Gab, by Vivian Relta

Gab: to chatter, banter, blabber, gossip

To gossip (a person who gossips), in Spanish, is chismoso(a), bochinche. 

In my culture, a gossiper or one one who gossips is almost always ascribed to women (bochinchera).  Woman and girl talk was considered useless chatter, blabber with little value. 

My childhood friend, Carmen, was a considered a bochinchera at an early age. She seemed to know a lot about everyone. For example, that Rosa got a beating last night after smart-mouthing her mother, or that my new, clean white sneakers came from John's Bargain Stores and not a real shoe store in Westchester Square. Carmen almost always told these stories behind the palm of her hand as she leaned into your ear, creating a momentary intimacy that could flip in a heartbeat. 

Our small group of friends liked Carmen, for the most part. She was funny, could dance real nice, shared her gum, and was known to beat up some of the boys on the block. She was a force of nature, I tell you. Carmen held a kind of power over us because we never knew if she was going to share a secret with us or about us. Sometimes when Carmen wasn't around, the rest of us would talk about her in low tones, calling her a bochinchera, a word we learned from the older girls, with a tone that dripped with accusation. 

Carmen was really no different than her older brother, Alex, a tall, lanky 10-year-old who seemed not to know that sentences could and should have a period at the end. But Alex was never called a bochinchero even though he told many a lie and tall tale in his day. A Puerto Rican boy, when he spoke on and on about whatever, it was never considered chatter or gossip. Rather, boy-talk was viewed as a good sign, a sign that he was practicing his God-given, DNA-driven, boy intelligence, and it mattered little if it was accurate or true. It was enough that he spoke it. 

A note from Zee: Today was DICTIONARY DAY in our Saturday Morning Writing Circle. When Vivian opened a dictionary to the word "gab" this childhood memory came right up. All of us in the Circle were so glad that it did!

Notula Nostalgiae, by Weiwei Luo

Once, back when it was socially acceptable to have blue tongues and sticky hands and stuffed animals whose names were derived from the formula of adding a y-suffix to whatever animal they resembled, I wanted to be a microbiologist. Which would remain the only hexasyllabic word in my repertoire for quite some time. I would travel far and wide, searching for rare specimens of bacteria and examining bdelloid rotifers under a microscope. Knowing about an invisible world that actually existed made me feel powerful, until the ghosts of the future chased those dreams back to Neverland. These ghosts became more real.

a note from zee:

It is with great pleasure that I share this piece with you today, in celebration of Weiwei Luo, who is graduating from Ithaca High School this month and will soon be leaving for Princeton University. She and I have written together for many years, in the teen group at the public library and in the word/play group at my studio. She wrote this delightful paragraph many months ago and I've re-read it frequently since then, taking pleasure in her words every time.

Little Altars Everywhere*, by Vivian Relta

Kitchen as Altar

Abuela's pilon (Grandmother's mortar and pestle)

created magical elixirs with

garlic, oregano, cumino (cumin), salt, pepper

transforming, transmuting

the ordinary kidney bean

or a freshly killed chicken

into a sacred meal.

The pots also played their part

seasoned over the years with her loving

attention and yes, food became God.

God became food.

And sharing this food around a simple table,

voices clamoring over and under each other,

love at high volumes is Grace.

Mami's Altar

As long as I could remember, there were always altars atop a chest of drawers in her bedroom. The altar was framed by images of the Sacred Heart of the Blessed Mother and Jesus Christ, who were always pointing to their hearts aflame. Today I realize all 3 of her children, all of us, were altars as well. Upon us, she poured her love, attention, discipline, light, prayers, water, food, medicine and laughter. Tending daily to us all the same, as she did with her altar in her room. There, too, she offered daily offerings of prayer, a lit candle, a glass of water and sometimes tobacco in the form of a cigar.

Many years later, when Mami died, a dear friend noticed I started buying black shoes just about every week. Black shoes of all types started to pile up outside my apartment door, as it was my habit to not wear shoes inside my home. She said I was walking through my grief. My pile of black shoes became an altar, of sorts, to my loss and remembrance of the one who first taught me about them.

  

*Little Altars Everywhere is the title of a book by Rebecca Wells