#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?

#16 - My Parents

For Valentina Perla Luisa

 

To speak about them I need to distance myself from all things learned and read; from my feminism and my pseudoleftism; from all things known and apprehended, even my uncertain feminine condition and to see myself as a child once more.

To speak about Marga and my papi, I need to get up close to certain hazy images which the infinite sands of time have been eating away.

One

Let’s begin with Marga’s embrace, suffocated by the heat, red from the heat, sweating in the heat; crying and hugging my sister and I, seven and six, after long months of separation, she in “Gringoland,” us left behind in Guadalajara while we waited for the “green card” that legitimized our residency in this country.

Two

Now an auditory memory: my papi’s laughter in the orchards and fields, the never ending fields; his happy laughter in spite of his clothes drenched in his sweat.

The songs my papi would whistle as if he never tired, atop skinny and long ladders all named by him with a woman’s name (I remember a Martha); ladders that would take him high into the tops of peach, apple, pear, cherry, olive trees and from which he hurriedly would climb down with sacks filled with the fruits from this noble planet.

Three

I see my parents squatting, mounted on buckets, crawling or with hoe in hand among rows of tomato, watermelon, beets, strawberry; or under almond or pecan trees; both of them picking, always picking; Marga, tenacious and indefatigable, determined to give a little more; my papi happy, always, happy; laughing, always laughing.

Four

My parents’ house was a house of open doors and windows. Long was the list of relatives who paraded through my parents home. Many work seasons my parents’ home was a boarding house for peasants from Michoacan who would send their meager earnings back home, earnings that in Mexico would became a fortune for wives and children, whom everyday would fold their sadness as a handkerchief and who would let pride and hope fly high as kites, for the absent husband and father, far away in el Norte, but that in some small way alleviated the chronic poverty that afflicts my people even today.

Five

Marga would always get up earlier than anybody because, of course, all those adult mouths had to be fed. The still-young woman would invest herself making the flour tortillas for the tacos that would be eaten later for breakfast and lunch in the field and which we all ate voraciously. Then Marga would gather with all these cabrones to demonstrate that a woman with strong ovaries tends to work harder than anybody who claims to be a total macho. That’s just how she rolls.

Six

My papi always seemed very proud of his woman. And to reciprocate he would never say no to a pan or to the mop, and how he loved to spend his evenings in the back yard tending his tomato and pepper plants.

Seven

The image that absolutely never fades is my papi speaking to us in formal Spanish when he scolded us; my papi instilling in me a blind passion for the education that he never knew.

#15 - An Important Monologue

It’s been a long break, not that I really needed one, but since I didn’t keep my commitment of writing weekly, let’s say I did need it.

Finally, sweaters are on! Loving it!

On another note, my house is on the market. The lovely home where I thought I would retire with Husband while from my rocking chair, I would admire my beautiful daughter living a wonderful life, that home in on the market. Sigh.

Don’t get me wrong. Fortunately, bills are being paid and we are current. But, you know (well, maybe you don’t) that feeling of scarcity and poverty you have when you get an email from your bank telling you’ve got 49 dollars left in your checking account and you realize that there is still three days before payday? And then the next thing you know you're biting into your daughter’s college savings, those same savings you promised to never touch unless they were addressed to some fancy college 18 years from the day you opened that account in her name? Well, I hate that feeling. And we’re having to go through it more often than we ever thought we would. So, after painful deliberation, we made the decision to sell our home and downsize in order to enjoy life better with our not so terrible two incomes.

And let me tell you, for me it was really difficult, because I poured heart and soul into this house. In every decision we could make, I painstakingly researched and studied countless options, bought too many decorating magazines from where I tore out too many pages to show the builder because I loved the wall color, the backsplash, the tile, the fixture, the floor, the carpet, the wood finish, the granite, a specific appliance, the shelving (definitely), and a very long etc.

The result was worth it. I think. So this time around in order to let go I had to go through the same monologue as when we moved into our first home back in 1996. I already had the keys to the Riverside home. It too was brand new, though a spec home, so we had no say in the finish out. Oh, but how much pleasure it gave us with its arches, its ample spaces, though I recently found out it was just 1,978 square feet. This was before motherhood. So for two people it was more than plenty. It didn’t have a back yard, and to reach the tiny green patch in the back you had to walk practically the entire side of the house. So when our little girl arrived, I began thinking I wanted her to have a yard. So we moved to the Menard home where we lived for seven years before moving to this our Miami Dr home.

Oh, yeah, the monologue. In truthfulness, personally I did not think my husband and I would be homeowners. I don’t think that home ownership is something immigrants arrive with or plan for. But there we were, with keys to a brand new home. I was in sheer disbelief. One day, during my lunch break I drove to the still empty house to admire it quietly and alone from inside my car and to talk to God, telling him something like this, “I thank you for this house. I never thought I would be worthy or deserving of such a beautiful space, and yet here you have me. After all, I am just the simple daughter of peasants, and all I ever thought we could aspire to was a job to pay for the rent. Dear God, if some day you decide we shouldn’t be here, give me the strength and the humility to leave not in pain but in gratitude for the time you allowed me to live here. And to never forget that no matter how beautiful this house is, it ultimately is just a “thing,” and that I can be strong and brave enough to walk away from it, knowing in my heart that my home is where my loved ones are, and that I will leave it with no regrets, but with only gratitude to you.”

I said, more or less, the same thing when we moved into the Menard home and the Miami Dr home, all three times with tears in my eyes.

Now if a buyer would pop up! Or maybe just the Lotto…

#14 - There's a Country That Pains Me (Sunday, July 1, 2012)

I write this letter for the current government officials of Mexico and to its four presidential candidates. I don’t think I ever believed in the possibility of freedom of expression for me. What a privilege!

Many kids, probably millions, do not have happy days in the country that pains me. Many have to go out into the world, small and defenseless. Some do so ordered by their mothers; others, out of their own initiative. They climb into public buses hoping passengers will deposit coins into the palm of their dirty, scrawny dark brown hands. Others will sing for coins and others will sell gelatins, and still others improvise with whatever talent they might posses. When they get home they give their mom their meager, sad earnings and then watch their drunk father continue drinking and turn vicious and violent toward them and toward her. It’s from her, that they quickly learn that they must stay really really quiet until his storm passes. They don’t say an “ouch” but hot tears do embarrassingly push and drop from in between their tight eyelids.

Ay, the sorrow I feel for these children!

For old and young alike life is rarely kind in the country that pains me. People make a risible amount of money for a day’s work, money that people in the country I call home could not accept.

Life is so unfair that things one considers a given, precisely because of our human condition, do not come easily in this country that pains me; things like a bed; things like a day with three square meals; things like an eight-hour work day fairly paid; things like water and bread and a shower. Millions of inhabitants in this country that pains me do not live like me in this country I call home, with my cute little house, my nice little car, with all the utilities needed to live a dignified and decent life. But most of all, so many of the children in this country never feel loved or cared for. This so utterly pains me that I ask, How do we let this happen, especially to children? Are the people in this country’s government so heartless and inept that they so easily lose track or do not care how millions of their children live, without a proper education, physical and creative activities and nutritious meals to make them grow in beauty, talent, grace and health? How and why do they stop caring? Are these kids (let me call them ours), are our children not entitled to love and milk and diapers, to sleep deeply and grow healthy, do they not deserve to be cuddled and to be sung sweet lullabies in Spanish (a la rurru niño, a la rurru ya, duermete mi niño, duerméteme ya)?

The people in this country that pains me are sick and tired of being absolutely sick and tired of this unfair and long endured status quo. Now the masses are beginning to come together and are saying, “Enough, you idiots! We’re tired of you so blatantly lining your pockets with our hard work and contributions to this country, taxes you apparently think are yours for the taking. Enough! This being fed up cannot even be named, so just call us one-two-three or one-three-two, call us “We The People”. And stop thinking we’re just kids out here in the streets. It’s all of us, it’s everybody, we’re in foreign countries, many of us maybe feeling exiled and displaced by your inability to contain and satisfy our most legitimate needs. We’re quietly going to work and blogging in to that Nothing that is the Internet and the social networks, that Nothing where we nonetheless all converge to mock you, you governing fools! We are everywhere, we are here. I am here crying in anger and desperation, I am wishing upon you the wrath of God like I’ve never wished it upon anybody in my existence. I am wishing his wrath on you, but I am also imploring his grace on the cojonuda gente (like Benedetti calls us), asking him to save us from the continued likes of you. Stop eating up the country, sucking its wealth and riches for your personal benefit. Take the millions you have already stolen and go. Leave this country alone.”

Because in the country I want to remember and bring back to life the most real thing are its people. People that go to work or to school every day, just to make sure the country keeps running and to make sure it knows we know its noble purpose: the wellbeing of its people, all its people.

In this country I remember and I want back, many women stay home, I know, but of course, they are never idle. They stay behind to make the home floors shine and to keep their plants alive, lush and green, to wash (and wash by hand if needed) all their family’s laundry, and to iron too. Then they walk among the street market stands to buy their produce of reds and greens and whites so they can cook the midday meal and prepare dinner for their loved ones. These women’s hands, always damp and in flight, are busy and hard-working hands. It’s the hands of these women that lift the men of this country, its children, so they can produce and learn, so they can generate the richness they have a right to. Women are the grace of the soul that defines this country; among them I can see the hands of my sister and of my octogenarian mother.

In school, children try to sit quietly and show that they can obey their teachers. Most of them are captivated by their brains’ miraculous ability to learn and grasp things that are not readily available in their immediate reality, things like numbers, but that with the proper instruction from their teachers they can build this fantastical world in their minds. The same thing happens when the teachers talk to them honestly about the past. No, these things happened hundreds, maybe thousands! of years ago; they happened to people from whom they are told they come from but to whom they almost don’t even look like anymore. It’s magic I tell you! It’s hard to understand that if you want to understand the present sometimes you have to look far, far away into the past.

Still, the highlight of their school day is recess where all their pent-up energy of the morning bursts forth in silly games and gales of unstoppable laughter that make God smile in delight.

Don’t talk to me about your organized crime, your narcs and how you cannot offer your citizens a decent and safe living to the point that so many parents feel they must migrate north, risking their lives, forsaking their families. The list of your failures and ineptitudes grows and multiplies anyway you look at it. Don’t get me started on our beaches, forests and trees, our jungles and our weather and your reckless and irresponsible lack of environmental education. And don’t blame the people, please. People are busy trying to live on the nothing they make and to not die in the intent, how can they worry about our environment’s and generations’ future? For once, be accountable for your failures.

I don’t care what initials you go by, pri, pan, prd, panal, I don’t care. What I care and what I demand is that for once in your life you display a strict sense of moral, I demand it come July 1.And moving forward. It’s time for the heroes to stand. Theirs is the moment. If you can’t be one, clear the way, because they’re on your heels.

(This article was published online by Hispanically Speaking News on 6/29/12)

#13 - Loving Elsa

I had a teacher. A mechanical engineer, born in 1932 (like my mother). Taught Mathematics, Group Theory, Algebra, Trigonometry and Differential Calculus. Pretty impressive, huh? I always got high grades. Not because I understood abstract mathematical concepts, but because I could memorize. Algebraic formulas were easy for me to memorize; once I had that down applying it to a problem was as we say in Spanish “pan comido” (eaten bread). I so much liked these classes that I was very tempted and seriously considered Mathematics as a college major. But the question of how far I could go on memory alone, made me doubt myself and I stopped pondering that option.

Oh but that didn’t stop me from developing a crush on my teacher, forget that she was a woman. Elsa Moyado was her name. At my very first class with her I immediately felt I was in front of a homosexual woman. Why? Everything about her reminded me of Terry, a white character in an English-language novel I had read earlier who was a lesbian and fell in love with a talented pianist, a beautiful black woman, character whose name I can’t recall.

The title of my book was Loving Her. It was the first time ever that I heard about homosexualism, at least to the point that I became aware of human beings falling for people of their own gender. When I read on the backcover that a She was loving a Her, I thought it was a typo.

So Elsa reminded me of Terry. Elsa wasn’t blatantly masculine, but whatever femininity she had was a bit virile. She was not a vain person. Her hair was already silvery. Silver and wavy. Short. Her skin was pale and translucent. She wasn’t overweight nor was she thin, but somehow the word stocky comes to mind. Very simple in her way of dressing. Always in pants and tops. No high heels or makeup; very occasionally maybe a smudge of pink lipstick. There was an endearing gap between her two top teeth that gave her smile a mischievous expression.

We clicked, but I must admit that I worked harder than her at our friendship, after all she was the teacher. She read and photography was her biggest hobby. She still lived with her parents, had a younger brother whom I believe is a lawyer, Carlos. She absolutely loved traveling. She was a world traveler. In the course of her life she had found a friend with whom she traveled. I always thought she was in love with this woman.

Elsa was extremely private and quiet. It was not easy to hold a conversation with her. By the time she was no longer my teacher, every now and then I would visit her at her home.

When I got married the first time, she accepted to be one of my witnesses (we did not have a religious ceremony). She showed up in her regular simple attire (I loved her for that) and with her camera.

With the pictures she took of Alejandro and I, she made a photo album she gave to me (something I treasure and still have).

When I came back to the States, I would write to her and sometimes call her. When she found out that I had a postcard collection of antique dolls (a gift from my second husband), she started taking photos of the dolls she bought as souvenirs from her trips around the world. She would pose them on a bed with a white background and mail them to me. She sent me maybe six photos in all and I framed them as a set and today they’re hanging on the hall that goes to my bedroom.

She was not a constant pen pal. By the time I found out about her passing, a couple of years had already passed. I found a notice on a newspaper announcing her death.

I miss my teacher. I miss her dry wit and scientific, cool mind. She was a sensitive woman, born maybe too early given the intolerant, vicious and cruel race we still are. She had a sweet and respectful soul, and a noble heart. If she was a lesbian, she probably lived a life of quiet and dignified self-denial. I hope she had the secret audacity to find in her traveling mate some semblance of love and intimacy.

And if after death her rambling spirit lived on, I hope she made it to the pyramids in Egypt, one of the few places she had yet to visit.

She never traveled to the United States. I do not know if that was for political and social reasons, but I do know that is was very much on purpose.