Tijuana · Saturday March 20, 2010 by Julie
When I was about six or seven, my grandfather and his wife visited from New York. They were not particularly interested in us girls, which was just fine with us. We’d been trained to be seen but not heard, an arrangement that’s gone out of fashion but has much to recommend it. One day, all of us got into the Pink Mowkel and drove from Hollywood down the coast, through San Diego and over to Tijuana in Mexico. This was before seat belts were required, of course.
That trip was one of the reasons that I’ve always been drawn to foreign countries. Tijuana, even though people love to scorn it as a border town, was all romance that day.
Unlike the quiet, shabby-but-scrubbed immigrant neighborhood where I grew up, Tijuana was dirty, noisy, and pungent.
We trotted through awning-covered markets, picked our way around ripped-up sidewalks, and listened to the chocolaty sounds of Spanish. My grandfather and father had spent World War II in Bolivia. My sisters and I hung close to them, proud beyond measure that they could talk Spanish. It was a bewildering, dusty, tumultuous day for me.
At the very end of our trip, we each got to pick one item from a stall crammed with trinkets. One sister got some hideously striped candy, the other a pair of castañets. I got the loveliest scarf in the world. It was some kind of gauzy nylon, pink on one side fading to blue on the other. A glittering butterfly had been painted near a corner. The whole confection was tucked into a flat white box with genuine white tissue paper wrapped around it.
I cherished that box and the knowledge that inside it was that scarf. I kept it for years and years in my treasure drawer, along with a purple velvet ribbon and a mechanical tin cat. It was not necessary to open the box to remember the tissue paper and how it crinkled, and the scarf’s exquisiteness.
One day, about ten years later, I opened the box again to see a tawdry little rag, badly hemmed, with a dated looking butterfly clumily daubed on it. I threw it out.
