Flor de noche buena
Home is not what you think. This is home too. Why singular, exclusive, monogamous? I’ve never had one home, which is not the same as I’ve never had a home. Home means something different every time you come back to it. At least Pannikin cafe is the same, with the same dyke from high school working the counter – let's call her Meg, whose hair is now wispy and bleached like a surfer’s (it was always buzzed as long as I can remember), the same two waiters, both Mexicans, one fat, the other a wick, nestling the bandeira bagel plates and the Greek eggs in the crooks of their elbows. I wish this was the kind of place where you could tip. They are like the local cats, loyal and bound. I wonder what keeps them.
Across from Pannikin is my elementary school, named after one Paul Ecke. Much in this area (including the local Y) is named after the Eckes, who came from Germany in 19O6 and began farming poinsettias on the land that is now Leucadia and Encinitas. The flower was native to Mexico and was introduced to the US by one Joel Roberts Poinsett, but never really took off until Ecke, noting that the flower bloomed around December, decided it should become the official holiday season flower. I am proud to say that my hometown is responsible for the atrocious pots of poisonous, odorless, tasteless, red-leafed flowers sold in every Safeway, Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons from Thanksgiving day unto eternity. In Spanish, the poinsettia is called “el flor de noche buena" because a poor Mexican girl by the name of Pepita offered a weed to God and he, seeing her love and humility and shame at this poor offer, turned it into a tacky red thing. And that is the story that underpins my town, my elementary school and the Paul Ecke YMCA, the shrine my family still worships at every 6 am, and where I spend my mornings when visiting. Even Pannikin is not innocent – the sprawling yellow Victorian it occupies used to be the Encinitas train station, where the poinsettia mother plants were unloaded from the freight cars that would bring them from Mexican fields, in the transport losing their one redeeming trait, their fragrant Spanish name.
