How to Find a Note

I love notes. Before we came to Nicaragua, Davie and I lived in Seattle, and in Seattle we made a game for ourselves. As we walked to work or down the block to the grocery store, we scanned the sidewalks for handwritten notes that people had dropped on the ground. And when we spotted one, the rule was that we absolutely had to stop and pick it up, no matter how silly it might make us look to be scrounging around on the ground for an old wrinkled piece of paper. In this way, we collected two large shoe boxes of handwritten grocery lists, bus directions, manifestos, and love notes during the two years we lived in Seattle. We fancied that these little slips of paper told us things about the strangers that we would never know.

Here in Nicaragua, notes are an even bigger deal. Because most people don't have smart phones on which to send messages and look up directions, good old fashioned pen and paper are still the prevailing media for written communication. We've found so many notes here, in fact, that we've given up trying to collect them all.

The high school in San Nicolas is the town's note jackpot, and lucky for us, we work there. Although passing notes is technically against school rules, the town's most skilled note authors have their ways. And as teachers, we are specially authorized to confiscate these notes.

Of course, note-confiscating isn't as easy as it might sound; there is definite skill involved. First of all, you have to develop a sixth sense for note writing. The dead give-aways are the students who spend all class yawning and drawing tattoos on themselves and then, all of a sudden, start scribbling away furiously in their notebooks, forgetting even to glance up at the board.

To verify that it's a note they have and not, say, a dialogue in English, you have to wait until the note gets passed. An easy way to tell that a note is about to be passed is if a student looks up directly at you with a sort of shifty-eyed look, and if both of their hands are hidden under their desk. Sometimes this is a good time to swoop in and grab the note out of their hands. Sometimes, it's better to wait until the student passes the note. Whenever it is that you decide it's time to get your hands on that note,you sneak up on the student from behind, moving slowly, and get a firm grasp on the note before they even realize you're taking it away. If the student realizes what you're doing before the note is in your grasp, you run the risk of them shoving it down their shirt, where it's as good as unattainable to you.

The notes that do survive this rigorous note-confiscation system often go to their graves, ripped into tiny shreds, in the gutters lining the road that descends from the school. Free at last, students prance into the streets and rip up the day's secret conversations, tossing the note confetti to the whim of the wind. What they don't know is that the local gringo note-hunters occasionally pick up these bits of note later and piece them together with scotch tape like a jigsaw puzzle.

Kendall also loves peanut butter.

One of my favorite notes, however, is not one gotten in stealth, but rather given to us directly. The story that goes along with this note is about a little boy named Kendall. Kendall, who is in fourth grade, loves riding bikes. Unfortunately, Kendall doesn't have his own bike, so for a while, I used to lend him my bike. He would come knock on our door and say, "Hi Sarita, can I borrow your bike to do errands for my mom?" We both knew that he wasn't actually doing errands at all - he just wanted to ride around town and decorate my bike with Oreo stickers. But I would usually let him.

Then one day after I had lent Kendall my bike, his sister Josary came back with it and told me that Kendall had been shirking his homework and almost gotten into an accident with a truck, and his mom forbade him to borrow my bike ever again. After that, every time Kendall came by and asked if he could borrow my bike so he could do errands for his mom, I told him no.

Then, one Sunday, he showed up at our house with this note:

Translated, it says: Profe Irela (his mom). Gringos, my mom can't come. For this reason, she sends this paper. Lend the bike to Kendall, only on Sundays.

Note collecting here is a whole different sport than it was in Seattle. I suppose the main difference is that here, we're not reading the handwriting of complete strangers; we're reading the thoughts and feelings of people we know.