Un Milagro en las Posadas

....or a Miracle in las Posadas. Las Posadas are a Mexican tradition for the nine nights before Christmas Eve, when everybody goes and walks from house to house re-enacting the efforts of Joseph and Mary to get a room the night Jesus was born. They sing songs and we end up back at the church hall for pozole (stew), pan dulce (baked goods) and a pinata. Some nights they even have tamales.

Anyway, Joey decided to go with me last night. We had hot punch at the house on the next block up for starters, then walked up Marshfield to 46th and over to Ashland, where we made a big parade crossing the street with our tiki torches, stopped at the bakery next to IHM, then went to the hall for marimbas with our pozole. Fr. Bruce plays! I didn't know that. He got up and played with some of the young guys for a while. Jose seemed pretty interested in watching the marimba players, who are all teenage boys. There were three girls there who were watching and giggling. At the end of their first number one called out, "Your number one fan!!" and they all started laughing. Who knew you could be a rock star playing the marimba?

But believe it or not, that's not the miracle. The miracle came when Joey turned to me out of nowhere and said, "I'm thinking about transferring." This was a reference to my yearlong campaign to get him and his parents to think about putting him in San Miguel. Here's a link to see what the school is like:

http://www.sanmiguelchicago.org/AboutSMS/boy.html

Frankly, I had pretty much given up on it since Joey has been saying he wants to stay with his friends and his mom seems to be looking at the idea more as a threat to get him to work than as an opportunity he should take advantage of. (His parents may be worried about the cost, too, even though it's much cheaper than regular Catholic school.)

So I don't know what hit him, but he said he was interested. "I'm glad to hear you say that. I think it would be very good for your future," I said. "They work really hard with all their kids to make sure they go to good high schools."

"At Chavez they only do that with the good kids," he said. (Much as I love Joey, I know he's not considered a "good kid" at school. He's not a bad kid, but C's are his top grade and I know he's fooling around in class a lot.)

"I know. At San Miguel they do that with all the kids."

On the way home we started talking about how to count time from B.C. to A.D. He was telling me about some timeline he found with a friend on the Internet, so he came over to my house and we found it on Google. We started looking through it and got all caught up in photos of the Great Wall of China. Here's a fun one that was part of the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Greatwall-SA14.jpg