It had been a few months since I last saw my padrino, but this weekend I finally had some time to hang out with him.
Last week was his 36th year as a priest of Obatala. (Happy Birthday!)
In addition to bringing my plate, coco, candles, and derecho, I had another reason for stopping by.
According to the Letter Of The Year, I need to receive Eshu Lekun. To help out a bit, I tried finding a potential otane on my own. He’ll still need to ask the orisha whether it can be used or not, but I figured it’s better than nothing. It was actually pretty cool looking. A little rougher, jagged, and porous than most of the other typically smooth otanes I’ve seen, but Eshu’s known for doing things his own way…
When I found the stone, it was half-buried in the ground. Picking it up, I saw that half of it was white and half of it was green. It reminded me of the pataki about Eshu having chosen to wear a hat that was colored one way on the left side and a different color on the right side. As he walked between two friends, he disappeared out of site, but the disruption remained. The friends argued about which color Eshu’s hat had been. Each person could only see the color on their side and was convinced that they were right and the other person was wrong.
I hate to have waited this long into the year before doing something mentioned in the year’s Letter, but sometimes that’s just how things go.
Anyhow, the rest of the day went by pretty smooth. He had family stop by, which was nice. It’s important to have a relationship within the religion with your godparent, but it’s also important to know them outside of the religion, too. I had heard a little about his family before, but hadn’t yet met any of them. I was able to chat a bit with his cousin and listen as they caught up on old times.
One thing that definitely caught me off-guard, though, was when my padrino was telling his cousin about me. I won’t go too much into the details (mostly because I don’t remember the exact words). He’s had a few godchildren come and go, but I was the one that he was waiting for. He’s got high expectations for me and is proud of how far I’ve already gotten. You know…. That kind of stuff. Neither one of us are much for sappy things, so it means a lot more when he does say stuff like that.
After that, well…. I ate some food, laughed at padrino doing a little dance to ocha music in his chair, and just sort of hung out until I needed to head back home (two-hour drives are no fun).
