#19 - Big Questions and a Small Comfort

I am an avid NPR listener. When I moved a lot, the first thing I looked for on the radio was for an all-jazz and classical music radio stations. So when I moved to Dallas I immediately found 88.1 and 101.1.

And then at work a woman whose intelligence, wit and humor I admired, Joyce, mentioned 90.1. Since then, I’ve made of NPR my constant driving companion. I cannot say I know about politics or politicians, but I’m guessing NPR tends to be more of a liberal then a conservative radio station. So be it, I thoroughly enjoy their reporting and the human slant they give to their stories and their tendency to be inclusive of all peoples.

So, lately I hear a lot about the imminent “sequestering” and the immigration reform. The other day I heard that this sequestering deal will impact “everything,” even things like the Head Start program whose vision is “to be the untiring voice that will not be quiet until every vulnerable child is served with the Head Start model of support for the whole child, the family and the community.”
This is something that for always will baffle me about this great country and its generous people. I’d like to know how is it that the most powerful country on the planet still has these basic questions and indecisions about how to care and provide for our children, who in my mind should be our top priority? And let’s add our elders to that mix, can we?
I know economic problems and issues, inflation and crises will always come and go. Debates will always tend to divide us instead of uniting us. But in my silly mind, our children and our seniors should be a topic we should have solved a long time ago. At least that is my thinking (perhaps of no value).
I guess I’m thinking as a mother and as a daughter. Since I became a mother, everything I do is oriented towards providing for my daughter to the best of my abilities. Most of the monies I make are thought in relationship to her needs and wants.
My mother was a widow shortly after turning 49 and never remarried. From my father’s Social Security fund she began receiving less than five hundred dollars a month as soon as she qualified to claim those benefits. She is now 80 and that is all she gets. I think she is amazing in her mastery to make do with that.
As her daughter I feel an obligation to help her. But it’s an unmet obligation, given that I do not have any monies assigned to her from my monthly income. I feel I should, but my own commitments make it hard to do so.
I believe being born in a Latin American country has to do with this feeling of commitment toward her. In my culture you are taught that somehow you are indebted to the two people that gave life to you. I seem to take that seriously and since I can’t really fulfill that debt, it’s a source of guilt.
I find comfort in having a bedroom that is my mother’s, with lamps, a night stand, a dresser and a mirror, a nice walk-in closet, and that there’s no doubt whatsoever that if anyone stays the night there, they’re sleeping in Marga’s bedroom instead of a fully furnished guest bedroom. And that atlong as she is in my house, she’s in her house and that I will cover her needs in the best manner I can, no questions asked.
This is a source of a small comfort for me.
But as a nation, where do we find comfort when so much is at stake by this new word, sequester, being thrown around in the political realm?
So that is why I wonder how this powerful country still rethinks on how to care for its children and seniors. Shouldn’t at some point all that power serve minimally for this purpose?

#18 - My Second Mother

In fifth grade in California, my English and home teacher was Mrs. Debbie Moore. This grade was when I became an unrepentant reader and a devoted music lover, and Mrs. Moore played an important role in my life. So in that regard, I am indebted to her. Thank you, Mrs. Moore.

My first books that I bought for me with my father’s money through a book catalog provided by Mrs. Moore were Harriet the Spy and Sara Crewe. That is all it took for me to be forever smitten by the written word.

Music. Mrs. Moore decided to play some songs on her record player giving us the lyrics to those songs and asking us to underline the components of sentences, like verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. Two songs stand high and clear in my memory from that class. The first one is The Sounds of Silence with Simon and Garfunkel. Oh, it was beautiful, poetic, poignant and I loved it. The other one was You’re so Vain with Carly Simon. I just fell in love with Carly, the song was witty, sassy and plain cool.

Pretty soon I was investing one hundred percent of my allowances in books and music. That is how I discovered jazz all on my own, specifically Louis Armstrong, as well as classical music via a two-record collection that had a bunch of pieces by different composers. That collection helped me know how beautiful this music is, no matter that I do not listen to it that often.

Curiously, I would buy some records recommended to me by my mother. Like very old Mexican folk songs by the Dueto Amanecer or the Hermanas Padilla that I still treasure and some were my daughter’s lullabies as a baby.

From "Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits” long play, I claimed one song as my personal anthem in English, I am a Rock. I felt that everything about that song defined who I became as a sullen and lonely teenager. “I have my books and my poetry to protect me. I am shielded in my armor…I am a rock, I am an island, and a rock feels no pain and an island never cries.” There, all said.

Carly was another thing. I would religiously buy as I could any of her albums. I told myself that I was practicing my English and perfecting my pronunciation, improving my immigrant accent (yes, by then I was a young adult).

My mother was never really inclined to identify with any phase I would be living through in my teenage years, but I felt Carly understood everything there was to understand about me and the depths of my feelings, my conflicts and my needs. I like to think and say that I was nursed by Carly, that she somehow became a second mom to me, my true confidante.

I still get excited when I hear anything about Carly, I know she is a grandmother. I know the names of her two kids, Sally and Ben. I hope they’re a lot like their mother. I imagine they had a great and privileged childhood.

Sometimes I imagine writing a letter to Carly where I tell her how much her music means to me; how much she and it helped me when I was my most neurotic. That sometimes I imagine the child I was, and that as “a bunch of flowers” “I set her moving to her sweetest song.” Ay, Carly, that odd little girl sure loves you!

#17- Then and Now: La Gurmia

For La Flaca

Today I think about my sister María Irma, younger than me by almost a year. Along with my mother, Irma is one of the most hard-working women I know. Old-age is beginning to impose itself on my mother, but in her most mature and productive years, she was like Irma is today--totally dedicated to the cleanliness and comfort of her home.

My mother still calls her La Niña, being that she is her youngest child. My dad would call her La Gurmia or La Garrapata (The Tick) because in the orchards she would practically attach herself to him with her bucket picking peaches from the ground and asking him to rattle the branches so she could fill her bucket with the fallen fruits, something she would do, fast and furious to everyone’s admiration.

To me she is La Flaca, not because she is really skinny, but –let me explain- because any regular size woman next to me can be considered skinny.

Anyway…

La Flaca has a magical and child-like soul, a soul she keeps alive and luminous, and with whose imagination my sister transforms reality into a much nicer and gentler place, a resource that I have never been able to call mine. I surely have shown myself to be way more neurotic than her.

I think I have mentioned it before: As little girls my sister liked to play what in Spanish we call “comadritas” (“pretend”), game that apparently was beneath my mutism and emotional indolence. To compensate the lack of a playmate, from her kitchen my mom would become her Niña’s “comadre.” My sister would make ample use of the pecan tree in the front yard. As she would climb it, in her imagination and magical thinking, the first branches would become the rooms of her house, the kitchen, the living room and the bedrooms would be those higher branches up there (I still scratch my head).

When la Gurmia (maybe eight years old) would tire of living and interacting with her imaginary family, she would go visit her “comadre.” Sometimes she would go into the kitchen, seemingly crying and saying: “Ay, comadre, comadre, your compadre has left me and gone to Hawaii with his secretary. Pour me a glass of wine?” Surprised, my mother would respond with a barely-veiled seriousness and the anecdote would later be the reason for much laughter between her and our dad.

Another more remote image comes to mind: Irma and I are smaller still and we are playing with our uncle Ezequiel in Guadalajara. I think our uncle is trying to take a nap. My sister decides she is a nurse and the man in bed is very ill. She’s come to give him his shot. Without anybody realizing it, she sticks a real needle to the bottom of the poor “sick” man, who quickly straightened up and carried out the scene with us, asking me, his wife, to pay the nurse.

Such is my sister. My sister, now in her fifties too, lives in California with her sick husband. Two of her three kids are now married, one of whom has given her two beautiful grandkids. And my sister continues to be such a hard-working woman who never stops. She has two income-producing activities. The main one, as I understand is in a retirement and rehabilitation community. Irma is a supervisor there and responsible of making sure that the residents have a dignified, humane and kind experience in the center.

I say that my sister keeps her soul child-like and magical because last time she was here, Marga (our mother) told me that one day a lady resident, Molly in her 90s, was very upset and about to throw a tantrum because she was not allowed to smoke in the community’s dining room. When my sister became aware of the situation, she invited the old lady to go out with her to the patio. As they sat together, my sister pulled out an imaginary “carton of cigarettes”  and started “smoking,” asking the lady to go ahead and take one, telling her that nothing beats a smoke after dinner. With her face lit up, the old lady smiled and took one partaking of the game and expressing her gratitude to my sister.

With a woman like my sister near, who wouldn’t?