The first call was supposed to take fifteen minutes

Margaret gave me three names. Three families. A brief note next to each one, a sentence or two about who they were, what kind of materials they had, why she thought we might connect well. I read those notes on Saturday morning with my tea and thought: okay, I can do this. I’ll make some introductory calls this week. Easy.

I called the first name on the list Monday afternoon.

Two hours and twenty-three minutes later I hung up the phone, sat at the breakfast bar, and stared at my legal pad like it had personally wronged me. Not because the call went badly. Because it went beautifully, in that overwhelming way where you suddenly understand that you have accidentally agreed to something much larger than yourself. Her name is Dolores. She’s 78. She has four boxes of photographs in a closet she hasn’t been able to open since her husband died in 2019, because the last time she looked inside she found a picture of her mother as a young woman and had to sit down on the floor. She talked about her grandmother’s village in Oaxaca. She talked about a recipe that doesn’t exist in writing anywhere in the world except in her memory. She cried twice. I cried once, quietly, so she wouldn’t feel observed. By the end we had a loose plan sketched out and she’d already asked if I could help her with a second set of materials from her sister’s family too.

The first call was supposed to take fifteen minutes

This is what Margaret was handing me when she gave me that list. Not just names. Whole unfinished stories. People who have been waiting, not necessarily for me specifically, but for someone with enough patience and enough love for this kind of work to sit down and ask the right questions. I think about the Vasquez archive and how long that took, how many afternoons with Abuela Rosa, how many contradictions we had to untangle, and I multiply that by three families and I feel something that is equal parts terrified and deeply, weirdly right.

she didn’t know i took this

Jake came home on his lunch break and found me at the breakfast bar still surrounded by notes. He didn’t say much. He set a glass of water next to my elbow and went back out. Later he texted me: looks like it’s going well. I think he meant the mess. I think he meant it as a compliment. It’s July and somehow this summer became the summer I accidentally became a community heritage coordinator, and I genuinely have no idea what I’m doing, and I think that might be exactly the point.