#21 - I Just Can't See It!

Three married couples gathered around my kitchen table. By now, it’s an old table with cheery hand-painted sunflower tiles.

Initially, I thought I could offer some coffee and pastries and enjoy the camaraderie that we had been building the times we had gathered before this Sunday afternoon.

I should have known better. Soon enough, on the table there were two bottles of fine tequila, a pot of coffee for me that I should not consume alcohol and an assortment of foods, mostly leftovers from the week.

After that time flies. Some of the adults drink unrestrained; a couple of them wait or start spacing out the sips they take from their caballito glass.

There is much laughter and jokes. The youngest of the couples stand and dance to a nortena song and then to a couple of salsa tunes, without stepping out of the breakfast room. I so wish I could just “up and dance” but I sigh to myself grateful for the high pleasure of being alive.

In our minds there is the awareness that when morning comes we’ll need to be at work. One of them convinces himself to call in sick and raises his caballito to everybody. The other two males remember that for one reason or another they don’t work that Monday. The women, well, they’re women and know they can handle a bit of a hangover and function well on a just a few hours of sleep.

So the party continues happily for everybody. The two kids are entertained watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower in the movie room. My daughter’s sixth time!

Before calling it a night well after a midnight, the two bottles of tequila are practically gone. One of the women proposes we take turns singing what she calls “tequila songs,” which I understand are songs you request or sing when you’re drunk remembering a “love gone done you wrong”, you’re probably resentful, hurt, still have feelings for him or her; it’s that unforgettable love that you can admit to through the song. The only completely sober one, me, raises her hand eagerly and says, “I’ll start.”

At this point I YouTube every song chosen in turns while the “singer” is busy looking up the lyrics on a smart phone.

So the musical “soiree” starts with José Alfredo’s “Maldición ranchera” sung by Amalia Mendoza which I sing with no shyness and to my heart’s content with the good Amalia. We each sing four or five songs.

While I’m actively participating and singing with everybody, in the back of my mind I’m thinking of the tequila I’m not drinking and my coffee mug that I raise to clink against the five caballito glasses that are raised regularly.

In my country alcohol is deeply ingrained in all our customs. We become happy, outgoing and extroverted when we drink our liquor in the right measure. But we rarely know how to stay put in that right measure. When we pass that point we become stubborn, despondent and even aggressive, we cry for that lost love. We become pretty silly and pitiful.

So ingrained is alcohol in our culture that I’m sure any of us can mention dear ones lost to alcoholism. My mother’s three brothers are victims of alcoholism. My uncle Jorge died from that; my uncle Humberto had the same lifestyle (though he died of brain tumors). And my uncle Ezequiel is in his sixties and a drunk.

But we’re not like that, of course not!

So there we were happy and cheering each other with our selected songs. Sometimes the faces of people from work would pop into my mind and I would wonder, “Do white folks get drunk like us? Do they take turns around a kitchen table, YouTube a song (say by Patsy Cline of Johnny Cash) and sing their heart out loud and very off key? Somehow I just can’t see it!

#20 - My Daughter at the Piano: My Duty as a Mother

To my daughter again

Last week I was pleasantly surprised by listening to my daughter playing the piano. This was unexpected since given our schedules I really don’t get to listen to her. I even had to tell Husband to put the TV on Mute so I could listen to the sweet sounds.

My daughter takes piano lesson since she was four or five. I acknowledge this is more about me than her. I will explain:

On one of our trips to Washington state for the apple harvest, we ended living in a cute small mobile home close to the beautiful residence of our kind and affectionate employers. They, the Sorensens, were four like us. Their youngest, Kelly, a boy of about 10, would come to us when my mom made flour tortillas and he would eat them with butter and jelly (!). Oh he devoured them! That is until it occurred to us to have him eat one with hot and spicy salsa. Kelly’s eyes overflowed with tears but he never gave up. Mrs. Sorensen asked my mother to teach her how to make those tortillas.

Her daughter, about 14 and whose name I can’t remember, studied piano. One day she taught me how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on three keys on the lustrous black grand piano they had in their living room. I was 12 and captivated by the then unknown and strange instrument and I would drum that little song, surely even in my sleep.

Once walking around downtown Wenatchee I felt myself pulled inside a music store, interested as I was in repeating on one of the pianos the little song our employers’ daughter had taught me. A very nice man, who I know suppose was the owner, came to the piano, took those three keys and using practically the entire keyboard played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” again transforming it to my captive ears into a marvelous symphonic experience.

The piano became a secret and impossible dream to me.

Almost three decades later living in San Antonio, in the laundry room of our apartment complex I saw an ad about a piano teacher Nancy. When I called her and told her of my interest but that I didn’t have a piano, she suggested we start on an electric keyboard. So I bought myself a cheap one and started my classes with Nancy who kindly would come to our apartment to teach me my class.

From Nancy I heard about a Hispanic neighbor whose name I can’t recall either. His apartment was a bazaar. His reduced space was filled with exotic and exquisite things he had for sale, among them a dark and tall upright piano that, let’s say Francisco, sold to me in installments.  He sold it to me for $500 and accepted that I pay him $50 each month.

I expected him to tell me to take the piano as soon as we established the terms of our agreement. I had to wait the 10 long months.

The most symptomatically neurotic thing about me was the day MY piano was brought down from his second level apartment to ours (I don’t recall how it happened). When the piano found a wall to stand against, feeling I-don’t-know-but-feeling-it-most-deeply, I sat on the floor sheltering myself under its keyboard and I cried my little immigrant heart out, touching its wood as if it were the skin of the most desirable man on earth (let’s think Pedro Infante).

That piano is still with me. But I do not know how to play it. I took classes here in Dallas with a couple of teachers for three or four years (not much in the world of music). Reading music is extremely difficult for me. Visually, it’s very hard to give value to those dots on paper.

From one of the tuners, I know this about my piano: it’s made with Honduran mahogany, its keys are actually ebony and ivory, the strings are copper and it turned 100 years old in 1997. Its former owner was either a vegetarian or did not play it much; apparently the skin of carnivores emits some type of oils that stain the keys; this given the condition of my piano’s keys back then that were a nice pearly white. He also said that because of the extension of its strings, in order for a piano to sound like mine, we would need a grand piano (the strings are set diagonally). Another tuner valued in $2,500.

I have never considered selling it (not even during hard times). It will be for Valentina. And since she takes lessons she, more or less, has taken ownership.

Valentina takes lessons very reluctantly. And I know I shouldn’t expect her to fulfill my frustrated wishes so I can live them vicariously. But when I read that learning music helps kids to better assimilate and understand the hard sciences, I decided that she could expect me to find ways to help her understand math.

And it’s only because of this that she studies piano. It’s my motherly duty!

#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…