I Remember Paradise 

Done battling the tropical heat of the day, Uncle rounded us — my siblings and me and all the neighborhood kids — at the verandah for storytime. He told us tons of Anansi stories, Siren stories, stories of Sisimito, and funny stories about a drunkard he knew as a kid. We laughed like mad at them all. And sometimes even asked him to repeat one more time …

Ah, but he was a smart one, my uncle was.

If it happened to be hotter than usual that day in Paradise, he took out his best story and in no time sent us all running home — COLD — to Mama.

Let me tell you how he did that.
“There are a few who have encountered him,” my uncle would begin.
“They describe him as only three feet tall, like so…” He’d show us.
“Stump built,
“Hairy body,
“Ugly mean face.” Uncle held nothing back when he showed us what all that ‘looked’ like. We gasped.
“ ‘His feet point backward, they all swear,’ ” my uncle said to us.

And there was that one time when Uncle put Norman and Martin to stand back to back and made us imagine what those backward feet looked like. We looked. Eyes bulging. Petrified!

“And his hands have no thumbs!
“He lives deep in the forest…
“And when near, you can recognize his closeness by
the fragrance of a rare flower known as ‘Lady of the Night.’ ”

And Uncle used to tell us that if we heard a whistle close by that meant the spiritual creature was still far away. Ah! We relaxed then.

“But what if we hear a whistle far far away?” someone brave always asked.

“Well,” Uncle would say, scratching his head and looking around him nervously, “that would mean that he was…”

Oh, Sheesh!
Here’s where I got goosebumps — as that distant whistle meant he was inches away.

I heard the distant whistle.
And smelled the fragrant flower.
Yes, I did.

That must have been when pixie dust fell on me and my Writer-brain was born. I really heard and smelled those things he warned us about.

Then, Swoosh!

We dispersed in all directions like the ribs of the umbrella branches of the Ceiba Tree that the Mayas believed reached out to the thirteen corners of the cosmos.

We ran.

We never found out how close Tata came — Belizean kids are not stupid — we ran home as fast as we could! And the Goosebumps carried over to the next morning. Which was good considering that no one had cool air conditioners to turn on then.

Oh, my childhood! I loved those goosebumps AND the stories that brought them on.

Come to think of it, Uncle kept repeating and repeating the same introduction to us and we never stayed close long enough to listen to the rest of the story on Tata Duende. Hmm. Uncle’s still around, next time I visit him in Belize I’ll need to remember to ask him to tell me the rest of the story.

This is my way of showing you how the children in my country lived through the heat of the still bearable climate in the tropics. It was a genius way and one that worked wonders for us.

Tata Duende
Tata Duende is the Mayan name of a powerful, mischievous spirit that appears in folklore-stories, mostly in Mayan and Mestizo cultures. Tata means Grandfather and Duende means Goblin. Wikipedia tells me that in some places, he is also known as Nukux Tat.

In my native Belize, I knew him exclusively as Tata Duende. Researching for this article I learned that in 1991 commemorative postage-stamps unveiled realistic sketches of the dreaded Tata Duende that I only heard about as a child. For copyright reasons, I cannot screenshot the postage stamps but I’ll link you to google to save you the trip.

Be sure to pay attention to his feet.

And if ever, you happen to come across a whistle as you roam the jungles in Belize, be sure to hide your thumbs as that is the only way to fool the mischievous little man into believing you’re just one like him.

He’ll spare you then, and your horse will not get its tail braided into a tangled mess that you’d end up having to cut.
Trust me on this one.

In Belize, there is only one season. Hot. And when that’s all you know about you do not complain.
I never complained. Never.

But, as I got older I became curious when at the end of the year I started noticing a pattern.

First came the migrating birds and shortly after the migrating tourists.
They landed on our shores; their pale faces a sure indication that they weren’t getting enough sun.

“How do you do?”
“How’s it going?”
“What nice weather,” they said.

People in my country never asked those questions or talked about the weather. We tended to our sugarcane fields, washed our clothes by hand on wooden tubs — sometimes sang to tunes on the radio — and hung the clothes in the sun to dry. What was there to talk about?

That’s what Paradise was like.

The tourists came to bask in the sun and as the years of hospitality increased, they came more often than only at years-end AND they started bringing presents for the locals.

First came the mammoth clothes-washing machines and matching dryers and then they brought noisy air conditioners which they helped to install in the small huts they stayed in.

And you know what happened in Paradise after that? It got hotter and unbearable and confusing that even the birds stopped landing for longer than overnight. And the locals started questioning the weather.

People stopped sitting on verandahs
telling stories or
people-watching.
The hum of the room-cooling-machines
hypnotized everyone into staying indoors.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
— Joni Mitchell

If I let it, Summer reminds me of the noisy birds that
migrated every year and of the present-bearing tourists
who came and changed Paradise.

I won’t let that memory override what my childhood memories were.
They are mine to keep alive for as long as I’m able. 

I love an easy evening by the seaside.
I love taking dips in the water too.
I love the feel of sunshine on my shoulders,
but of that, I try not to overdo.

I love the long hours of daylight
and I love the lovely chorus of birds and bugs.
But I do not need it to be summer to enjoy these;
I can do all those things any other season of the year.