One Minute Calls

Yesterday’s drawing of Mary Magdalene

Today’s drawing of Mary Magdalene

I was planning to write yesterday, but my mother in law visited me in my studio, and I ended up just listening to her. It was Thanksgiving Day after all, and she is someone to whom I owe much gratitude.

She was the person who took care of my son when I went back to work, who took care of me when I was sick, and who took us in, the whole family and later on the two cats, when we had to leave our house. She’s always treated me like a daughter, and I have tried my best to do as much as I can for her.

She describes her life as a life of work. Very young, around 7 years old, she was sent to work in a house in the nearest city to the countryside where she grew up, where she took care of the little children of the family. And her life of work started.

She didn’t receive much education, became a single mother, and later on, when she found some stablity with a man, he died of cancer, leaving her with 2 children and pregnant with another. The man was well off, but his family stole most of the inheritance he left her and the children, and she became afraid that they would try to kill her young sons as a result of their greed. She also worried that the dictatorship under which the country existed would claim her sons when they grew up. It was not safe for the children at the time, or in the future.

This made her decide to leave Dominican Republic and emigrate to the US in the 60s. She was part of the first generation of Dominicans to arrive in New York.

After working for long years in cold factories, she became a home attendant, and then a baby sitter until my son was born.

She is now 94 years old and still cooks, cleans and does everything for herself. Only recently she accepted an attendant who comes to help for a few hours, but she’s still up for anything. Just yesterday, she told her son not to leave her behind if he was going to Dominican Republic.

Her strength is not just physical. She is healthy in mind. Her positivity is legendary. She is kind and also strong when she needs to.

Above all, she is wise.

One of the aspects of her wisdom is her ability to make and keep connections. She keeps in touch and calls people for one minute every so often. I mean one minute, literally. That’s all it takes her.

In a world where connection is becoming so rare, and everyone is afraid to call someone else, her one minute calls remind me that just because we have learned to be afraid of each other, it doesn’t mean that we should be. It’s all a creation of our minds and our fears, a result of the disconnection we are experiencing through our connection to screens.

I am one of those people who have become disconnected and fearful. I too have felt those moments during the last calls I made to friends, where my call was not well received, or not answered. Little by little, I stopped calling. I stopped reaching out, and started relying only on myself, and the few close relations that keep the costum of connecting through phone calls. I do talk to some friends, usually the same. Others I see in person. And others stay only in my heart.

Recently, I decided to follow my mother in law’s good example and called three of my old friends for a minute. I consciously tried to keep the call short, with the main message being that I remembered them and cared about them. It really brought happiness to my heart, and I felt that my friends also appreciated it.

In this time of gratitude, a one minute call might be what someone needs to feel remembered and loved. It’s not easy for us disconnected people of the world. And that’s the point!

(Magdalene Blessings. Let’s say that Mary Magdalene inspired me to write this, even though it may seem unrelated to the topic of this blog 😁)