To the Band of Brothers: May 27, 2021

Good morning!

Something hit me this morning. We are inches away from the end of the year. While it has been a difficult one, I could have sworn we began it the other day. I was almost positive it was just yesterday that I walked out into the central patio in August and was live-streamed into the classrooms, welcoming you guys back from your summer break. Wasn’t our Band of Brothers theme launched recently? Amazing! Instead, I found myself this morning standing in front of the ICA reminding you guys, as you dragged yourselves out of your cars, that we are almost at the finish line.

I guess the expression “time flies when you’re having fun” is truer than I thought. It’s like when I was a boy and my parents told me that in a couple of weeks, we would be going to Disney World for the weekend. The days before the trip lurched forward at a snail’s pace. I would come home from school, rush through my homework, put on my Donald Duck pajama shirt, and go to bed early so the next day would come quickly and I could finally cross it out on my Banana Splits calendar. Eventually, the night before the trip would arrive and I couldn’t get to sleep. I would be so excited. I would suggest to my dad we should leave at 4:00 a.m. to beat the early Saturday morning traffic. He would disagree because with several brothers and a sister in tow, 7:00 a.m. was a more likely hour.

Up the Florida Turnpike we would go singing all the Disney songs we knew with an occasional song by Julio Iglesias that my father insisted on playing (I can still sing most of Hey). About an hour into the trip, just before Stuart, the naturally annoying activities that siblings engage in when they’re stuck in a car, bored to death, would begin to emerge. Phrases like “I’m not touching you,” or “get away from me” could be heard. These phrases would be a warning to my mother that it was time to come up with a distraction before my father was forced to perform the miraculous feat of turning around and smacking us in the back of the head without having to slow down or veering excessively from one lane to another.

My mother’s first distraction of choice was always the Cuban game Veo, Veo. The game was played between one individual and the rest of the people in the car. The dialogue went like this:

Veo, veo.
¿Que tu ves?
Una cosita.
¿De qué color es?
Azul.

When the color was identified, everyone would frantically look around for something blue that could be the object in question. If you guessed it right, you would be the spotter and would inform the others of its color by using a little dialogue. Where the game became a little tricky was when my mother’s object was discovered and we got to choose one. In order to stay in control, we would cheat by changing objects and colors randomly midway through the guessing. 

All this and more would take place until the long-awaited moment would arrive when my father would interrupt to say: “I will give one dollar to the first one who sees Cinderella’s castle.” Needless to say, we cheated on this one as well. But, one of the things that never failed about our Disney excursions was that, even though it took forever for the day of the trip to arrive, the weekend was over before we knew it. That time phenomenon just doesn’t seem fair. 

Either way, this year has been a lot of work, but it has been great. The months have flown by because the experience has been amazing. I am grateful to you, your parents, the faculty, and our staff. Way to go Belen! I pray that we all have a great closing set of weeks and enjoy our well-deserved summer break. Hopefully, it won’t seem like the time off passes by too quickly.

 
Auspice Maria