After Sunday Mass, I fill my motorcycle top case with books and ride out to Quezalapa for a library afternoon. The community is in a remote area with no public transportation and few services. But there are plenty of dinosaurs, planets, and books about outer space. Six-year-old Wilson loves all this. He is the honorary member of our new library, sometimes the only one who shows up—which at first made me feel like the Pouting Fish from a bestselling children’s book.
Why do I pout when Wilson hasn’t missed a Sunday? His grandparents and mother live next door to the community center where we meet—an aluminum roof with bamboo benches and no walls—so they store a few chairs and a collapsible table for the library at their home. For the first few Sundays his grandfather accompanied Wilson, and then his father showed up a few times, returning Wilson to his mother after weekend visits in San Salvador.
Wilson’s dad is a big, strong man of Spanish descent. When I ask Wilson about his mother, he says she’s learning to dance. His mother is a strong, beautiful woman sculpted from the family’s indigenous roots. She has never accompanied Wilson to the library. I only know her from the small storefront where she helps her mother sell vegetables and fruit. Wilson’s grandmother told me Wilson developed a severe stutter when his parents separated a few years ago.
When Wilson sees a book about dinosaurs, his eyes glow as bright as stars, so I’ve been adding lots of dinosaur books to our collection. His favorite is El magnífico Libro de los Dinosaurios.
Recently, Wilson’s father began arriving Sunday mornings and stays with Wilson and his mother the entire day, except when they take an hour or so to read books and play board games at the community center. Last Sunday, when I went to get the table and chairs, Wilson immediately pulled his father out the door to join me and two other children at the library. His father resisted, but Wilson tugged and pushed until he succeeded. His mother didn’t come with them, but later that afternoon when I returned the table and chairs to the store, she received them with a smile and a warm thank you. I thanked her for reading with Wilson during the week—I said this as a way of testing the waters—and she confirmed that Wilson loves those giant creatures and that she reads with him every night. “Pretty amazing,” I said. “They roamed the earth for some 150 million years.” She looked at me with a nod that said, I know, I’ve read that one a million times.
I see Wilson drinking in every word like water in the desert. I hear his stuttering turning to laughter and watch his parents learning to dance, doing all they can to show their little boy he is not broken—and how to use 150 million years of creation to build an amazing imagination and mind. ♦
Maryknoll Lay Missioner Richard Dixon serves in El Salvador. His poems have appeared in Tomorrow’s American Catholic.