95: When things start seeming very petty

When I was 13 my older sister moved away from our home in Quito to go to a boarding school in Paraguay. From then on I only saw her when she came to visit every year from December to February (the Southern Hemisphere's summer).

I remember the last day of one of these visits, the day before she would return to Paraguay and I wouldn't see her for another nine months. I might have been fourteen or maybe fifteen. We had had a great couple of months together as a family. One of the things we had been doing was working on some songs. My brother and I had both taken up the guitar in the course of that year. My voice had changed and was suddenly an adequate singing voice, and together with my two more melodious siblings we had learned some trios together.

Now it was the night before her departure, and I wanted to sit down with a tape recorder and make a recording of our recently rehearsed trios. But my sister was busy packing, and the household was generally in a disarray, and I saw that we wouldn't be making any recordings, and she was flying away in the morning.

I remember sitting in the darkened living room fighting my tears that night. I was angry with myself for crying over such a small thing. So we didn't manage to put a song on tape. Was that a good reason to cry? It didn't occur to me at the time that maybe my emotional turmoil was not so much due to not recording a souvenir of our time together as due to, well, the departure of a sister.

But the pettiness of things got a hold on me. Everything that bothered me -- really bothered me to where I could throw a tantrum or shed tears -- seemed so very banal and insignificant. I felt ashamed that the stupid little details of life could get to me like that, and I did not want to acknowledge them enough to let them reduce me to tears.

I did not cry again until I was 28.