Leaving Bogota

It is done.  We left.  My life in Bogota as a diplomat has come to an end.  I left behind a trail of unfinished business—cable routers and internet modems that need to be picked up by the internet company Telmex, walls that need to be painted white today by Isabelle this morning, and three boxes of photos to scan.  I really gave it my all.  Meaning, despite my 17 year-old babysitter, Angelica’s best efforts to scan nine boxes of photos in four days,  when we left this morning, she had one more full box to weed through with ten albums that all needed to have the photos extracted before they could be sorted, and packed for digitization by category.  I hired her to work all weekend while I took Santiago, my son, and our nanny Kelly to a Colombian Finca--the latin version of a summer home.  When we back to Bogota last night the baby sitter said, “Oooff, I can’t take it any more, do you realize when you went to Japan in 1999 you took a picture of every single chopstick, fork, knife and mouth you saw? Oooew—No!  I have thrown out three boxes of landscapes, flours, forks and mouths.” 

My response had to be, “Angelica, you are the boss, keep sorting, let me know what I am left with.”  I had decided to keep all the albums that were really hand-made scrap books—there were 30 that take up three boxes filled with concert tickets, love letters, pictures cut out with rounded scissors around the heads of me and my high school sweethearts.  She will negotiate the scanning of the last three boxes or scan them herself after one more ten-hour day.  It isn’t that Kelly, the nanny and I didn’t work, we just didn’t start working again until 8 PM last night.  We filled three full grocery carts of unboxed things I felt like I couldn’t pack up when the movers came, like Santi’s Bumbo seat, a girls basketball, and my biking shoes and rolled them under cover of night to a friend's apartment.  

(Note to every future self that reads this: this was a terrible idea.  Everything should have gone with the movers last Wednesday).  

I mistakenly thought Kelly and I could push three carts and walk my bike one block North and two blocks South down hill around 11PM to an apartment I am moving into for my coming one year sabbatical.  Having recently become a single mother by choice, I am taking a year off of work to breast feed him on demand, teach him baby sign language, and enjoy all the baby gymnastics classes Bogota has to offer.  

The high of the evening, no doubt, was convincing the doorman in my soon-to-be-vacated-Embassy-apartment to allow us to roll the carts out of the building.  “They must stay in the building.  I am not allowed to let you leave with our grocery carts,” he said blocking the door. I begged and before you know it he was helping us lift the wheels over the two curbs to get to the street.  The first thing I learned is that grocery carts aren’t made for real streets, especially not Bogota’s streets lined with pot holes and uneven surfaces.  The second thing I learned was that there was no way on earth that Kelly or I could push more than one at a time.  They were heavy, the street sloped, and Kelly felt like the best way to overcome the cracked cement was to run with the cart, which also required laser-focused attention.  We appeared to be two homeless women with our carts filled with our life’s possessions.  When we reached the first corner with the military guard, we paused under the yellow streetlights to take a picture.  That picture opens this series of posts.

The low of the evening, on the other hand, was seeing how many of the clothes I gave away, the things I used to love but no longer fit in, which perfectly fit 24-year-old Kelly.  She was wearing one of my old favorite red yoga tank tops as we cleaned last night that says, “Be Present” on the back and a cute white top this morning for the flight.  I keep saying to her, “Send me your picture in these things when you turn forty please.” assuming she too will outgrown the clothes of her 20s.  “Sure, Señora Amy.” She says laughing as she pulls a black skullcap over her braids that looks infinitely cuter on her than it ever did on me.  “I think you used to have my body,” she says.

“Dios Mio.”

But we did it.  We turned in my black berry, quickly pulled phone numbers out of the soon-to-be-lost phone book, and made it to the airport in time to sign all three of us up for Delta’s frequent flyer programs.  We are a few hours into the flight and I am waiting for in flight wifi to kick in and post this as my first blog post of the one-year Sabbatical—which, by the way, needs a name. 

I feel like Santi is a grown man on this flight, wedged between us on the plane.  Compared to the trip we took in late March when he was just a 3.5 month-old baby he is now nearly a teenager.  At seven months and one week he sits up on his own in his seat, he picks up tomatoes and feeds him self, and he won’t stop saying, “da, da, dada, da, da, da.”  Kelly and I look at each other, half-laugh, and start repeating in front of him “Maaa, Maaa, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma.  Maaaa, Maaaa.”