My New Year’s Gift: A Fountain of Youth

This past holiday season, I received a fantastic gift: Barbara del Carmen Feliciano, a school teacher in my homeland of Puerto Rico decided to assign my novel, a story of broken hearts and the path back to ourselves, to her 12th grade students at “Escuela Vocacional Metropolitana Miguel Such,” a vocational high school in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico.

Surprised (and way too delighted) at finding a great amount of reality, humor (and more than a dozen “bad” words) in a “textbook,” they told Ms. Feliciano they wanted to meet me. And so, I traveled there before the end of their term, to some 40 students with many more than 40 questions, funny stories, queries and the little bits of their touched-on souls that they’d brought along to show me how much effect my characters had had on them.

They gave me many presents that day, best among them a trip to the past and, in their smiling eyes, a life-sized picture of the path I’ve walked throughout my life. We talked about love, literature, infidelity, relationships, divorce, sex, about fear, peer-pressure, and the strength and courage we all need to summon just to live and make our best effort to be happy. And it was amazing. “Awesome!” as they would say if they were to tell you in English.

And so today, I’d like to encourage all of you, my Wise Latina Women out there, to find inspiration in a young person too. Talk to him or her of the things you would have liked to hear when you were their age, tell them life can be beautiful if they want it to be, because it’s all in their hands. You’ll find eyes full of dreams and hopes looking back at you. Their energy will make you feel younger than any Botox injection. Best of all, you will never be the same! (You’ll be even wiser and happier, as if that’s possible!)

I send you all love. Thanks for coming by today. And please feel free to send me your comments on the video below. I’d love to know of your experiences when talking to these life-sized mirrors of our younger selves.