THE NEW YEAR

THE NEW YEAR

By Domingo Soto

"How did his hand become crippled?", she had asked.  And just as if planned, the door came ajar and A Mom peeked in to check on The Kids. He noticed his wife, thought better of the answer but, characteristically, did it anyway. "In a knife fight."            The door shut quickly.           Footsteps scurried away.           "A night fight?" his little boy asked.  "A knife fight," the older girl corrected, anxious not to break the momentum.  The kids howled, wanting to know the details of a thing he had broached as a secret he would share with them. "Your daddy was in a knife fight?"           Here he was, sitting in the little boy's cocoon of a room irresponsibly assailing their guileless overprotected upper class sensibilities with stories from the underbelly of his life. Why?          They had stayed home on New Year's Eve just watching pay television and hanging out with the family. The holiday always made him maudlin about coasting down the other side of life's bell curve. It was a time when - as one friend put it - you found yourself reliving the top ten blunders of your life. The mistakes you made in your life, regrets with your parents and with your own kids seemed a cruel circle.           He had been okay until this transcendental death scene in Little Women where one of them had died and the lights had dimmed. It had blind-sided him, pushing him over the holiday edge and flooding him with images of his own mother's death. His terminally ill mother who had died that year had hung on for weeks past the doctor's estimates.           She had survived on droppers of water and morphine and grit, obviously terrified of what lay beyond and, characteristically, having her petulant way, refusing to go. She was staying, coño.            When death finally had overcome her last defiant act that night, she had blown out all of the lights in his brother's house and took the house next to it too, plunging the gathering of relatives into darkness and the now wailing mourners into a scene from Dante's Inferno.           Remembering that night and the events of those horrible weeks pushed him over the edge to his secret tears, sad memories and wells of regrets. He sat there watching the show through his tears. His wife and sister-in-law knew where he was. "I guess we'll just sit here and make believe we don't know that you're crying." They laughed nervously.           "Let me put Carlos to bed," he said, excusing himself.            The son, a five-year-old who had as of late taken to fantasizing himself to be different animals, had also taken to sleeping on a pallet made on top his bed. "Help me build my nest. I'll be the baby bird and you be the papa bird." They fluffed their pillows into a nest, laying in the darkness, a dim nightlight their campfire.           Sad and obsessed, blindsided by the reminders of life and his fear of mortality, he grasped for stories from the fountain of his youth - of fireflies in a Newark cemetery, of funerals for his sister's butterfly, of water balloon fights with his clan of cousins and brothers and sisters.           Their closeness was cemented by this firelight chat. His memories spewed out in a conspiracy of revelation. The boy was curious. But more than that, he was patient well beyond his years, a father to the man who told him about life in the Northeast, of universes far far away, in a time long forgotten but now shared in this their secret first communion.           The father mused at how much of his life had changed and how he had changed with it. "You know that when I was a kid Aunt Lydia didn't live with us? She lived with tia." The child thought a minute. "Was titi adopted?"           The man thought about his oldest sister who called their mother tia and their tia, momi. He didn't go into their special bond, each the product of a different failed marriage.           Not that his other brothers and sisters ever treated him differently, if anything they were reverential. It never occurred to any of them, including himself, that he was anything but a full-fledged brother. But, even though he was the oldest brother in a latino family, it was they who protected him from the old man's abuse.           His sister was special. She was the oldest. And she wasn't there. He always regretted not having had her with him all of the time. He understood the pain of her isolation and abandonment. He never forgave his mother for giving her away, for making all of the mistakes a peasant girl might make when she lands in another century, trades one jungle for another.           He didn't go into the violent fights that had always divided the family. Either his mother had abandoned his sister or his aunt had stolen her, he wasn't sure these days about anything. "No, baby, that's just the way things worked out." The child's face betrayed that he didn't understand but he said nothing.          He thought, too, about the first time he met his father's side of the family. Where the countryside houses had no running water, no glass in the windows, no floor coverings and had made him long to be back in the urbane squalor of the big "American" city. They lived in a parsela, an agrarian reform homestead reserved by the government to insure the very poor had land. Carved into the clay bluffs, it overlooked the sugarcane central. The kids were a wild bunch of urchins, his father's wife a shy and gentle lady.           The first day he met them he walked to see his grandmother. She lived next door in his uncle's house. From the minute he began the walk to her house he could feel the intensity of her stare. She waited for him on the veranda dressed in a simple cotton smock, her long gray hair pulled back in the Pentecostal style, her hair and aquiline nose the visage of an American  Indian chief.            And as he neared, she broke. She squirmed with obvious anticipation, jumping up and down like a snoopy-footed four-year-old. She cried immense tears of joy. "Hola, Abuelita ." "I've been waiting for you all my life," she said, crying tears of joy and hugging him tightly. "I swore I wouldn't die until I saw you." She made up for all of the years of failed grandmotherly doting and they loved each other for finally filling a void.           But he left her within a few months and never saw her again. Thinking about her made him angry and sad. And, then, of course, he focused on his dad. "You want me to tell you about the first time I ever met my father?" The darkness intensified. The boy's face became somber.           It was a flood of soporific memories, bad prose, a shitty Grade B movie script: The car dogging the street like the constant tropical sun that eventually burns away the impertinent morning chill; the license tag, its color, inscription, authorizing its languid movements in their uptight neighborhood of burglar bar decorated, bunker-looking concrete homes; the passengers craning their necks like tourists misplaced in this suburban geometry; one wearing a pava, a straw hat and the cultural equivalent of a Texan's Stetson. "It's a publico. They must be looking for a fare," the younger teenager said. They watched from the slab of their flat faux porch, two boys, twin gargoyles in canvas wingchairs....           He started his story. "I didn't meet my father until I was sixteen. I quit high school and joined my mother in..."           The door opened and his wife and niece entered. "What are ya'll doing?" Curtly he told her the obvious, that they were sharing a private moment.           "I'm telling Carlos stories about when I was kid." He was passive about the interruption.           "Can Grace join you guys?"           "Sure."           The birds made a space in the nest for her.           "Start the story again so Gracie can hear it," the little boy said.           "I never knew my dad when I was growing up." They were quiet and uneasy. "I only had a picture of him as a young man." "Was he my age?" the four-year-old boy asked. "He was a man, baby." "Was he fifty?," the girl asked. "Fifty? That's OLD," Carlos said. The father laughed. "You know what baby? I'm fifty." It was an admission of his youth, not his age.          "I guess he was somewhere between twenty and thirty years old. The photo was the only father that I knew". He remembered how he had carried the picture in his wallet like a valuable religious artifact. A saint who never answered his prayers, or his letters. The prodigal dad.           "When I was sixteen I moved to the island and sent my father a letter but I never got an answer. I was there six or seven months when a taxi pulled up in front of the house. The driver, a little white-haired man, asked for me. It was my dad."           He flashed on the real west side story, of accounts of weapons and fights, of his father climbing up a fire escape to drag his young bride home from the sanctuary she had taken with her sisters. Of the commotion when he went into his cousin's window. Of countless other stories.          "I didn't know a lot about my dad. I knew that he played the guitar and that his hand was crippled because he had been in a knife fight when he was a young man. He was a Romeo and supposedly a real man, un macho. He played the guitar with his barber's comb.           When the driver walked up he shook my hand and told me that he was my father but I already knew." "Because of his crippled hand, right?" The kids were excited. "I almost fainted. My knees got weak and I wanted to sit down. I waited for this moment all of my life and the whole thing didn't last more than five minutes."          "Did he come inside to meet your mom?" "We just stood out on the street. He asked me how I was. I said 'fine' and that was it. His car was full of people he was bringing to the airport from the other end of the island and everyone was looking at us. There I was out on the street feeling tiny and sad, happy and embarrassed. He told me I was always welcome at his house and that was it. He left. Later I got in a real big fight with my step-dad and I left the house to live with him and his family but that didn't last too long cause I left to join the Air Force. I was on my own by the time I was seventeen."           That's when they had asked him how his hand had gotten mangled and when he had told them about the "knife fight". He had neither the time nor the inclination to tell them the whole sordid story, that really would have been irresponsible. But it was a good beginning. It was time to share with the little guy just who he was and, maybe, help him understand how he'd gotten to the present.           Anyway, that's when their mothers burst into the room, a maternal swat team come to rescue the kiddies from the pervert who was telling them who knows what. "We came to find out just what it is that you're telling the kids." Each mother took protective custody of her child. Away they went for debriefings, a deprogramming, if need be.           The Dad laughed for a long time. Hysterically, almost. It wasn't that funny but he couldn't stop laughing. He laughed as he undressed for bed. He guffawed while he brushed his teeth and made the necessary preparations for his usually fitful sleep, for his encounter with the frightening chasm of the night.           But this time he had no room for the fear of the void. He was still terribly amused and upbeat about the whole affair - at himself, the kids, their moms, their wonderfully middle class lives. His family. He lay in bed, closed his eyes and for the first time in years remembered only the pleasant things about his parents, how much he owed them and how much like them he was. He remembered that he loved them and wished them a happy new year.           Then he slept.   permanent link to this story a wonderfully poignant related story Kathryn wrote Main Page

Advent Calendar: Noche Buena

Advent Calendar:

Dec 24
NOCHE BUENA

Noche Buena (the good night) is "Christmas Eve night", our traditional family and party night. It's also a "poinsettia", which is, of course, the Christmas flower. (Capicu.) It is usually kicked off with a traditional family dinner. In our Jersey days, the immediate families would have dinner at home and then trek off to Irvington to Tio Alfonso and Tia Celina's to party their asses off. But whether it was at Tia's or at home, the Christmas feast was probably keynoted by a Lechon (Roast Pig) and Arroz (rice) con Gandules (pigeon peas) or rice and beans (and, in keeping with Tio's Cuban heritage they would be black beans), pasteles, morcilla, and, for dessert, arroz con dulce and a ton of other sweets.

Advent Calendar: The holiday meal

Advent Calendar:

Dec 23
THE HOLIDAY MEAL

My step-father was called The Old Man as both an epithet and term or endearment, a comment on his age and on his status as the head of the house. My mother was a seamstress who worked at home. For pretty much all of our lives, he was our contact with the real world.

He worked as a letter carrier and had some sort of posh route on Madison Avenue in New York. He probably got the nice route by virtue of his responsible nature. You could hear him rattling pots and pans at 4 am as he set out from Jersey City to make the trek to New York. Even in a blizzard he'd still get there. I bet he never missed more than four days in the many many years he worked for them and this only because of some sort of city shutdown.

He had a habit of bringing things home that he might run into while at work. Interesting things, like horse meat. Just to try it. He loved gadgets and electronics (I remember one year he bought home a thing to make your television a color television which was actually a piece of acetate that you pasted on the front of the tv.) and especially his cars, which you could find him shining on any Saturday morning.

One holiday - I'm not sure if it was to cuts costs or if someone gave it to him - he brought home a live duck or a goose. Whatever it was, it was a huge animal. The plan was that they would have a fresh-killed dinner like the ones in PR. I must have been about 4 or 5, making Papo 3 or 2, Eddie one year less, etc.

At any rate we were really little kids, living with our parents in this small New York City apartment and so we set out to watch the spectacle of the old man killing this thing he had just brought home.

He puts it into the bathtub. And maybe it was because it was so huge you can't kill it like you kill a chicken, by wringing its neck, or maybe he just doesn't remember his campesino days. But, for whatever reason he takes an ax and whacks its head off.

All hell breaks loose. This thing starts jerking, squalling and shrieking so hard it surprises him and, in a panic, he let's go. It comes up out of the bathtub like some sort of Phoenix. My brother and I run away in terror, covering our heads as this thing flies around the apartment spewing blood, shit, and innards over everything, finally collapsing somewhere.

I miss my family. "The visit" was an at-least-once-weekly occurrence and, especially so during holidays. An ever-ubiquitous function was the sun around which our family orbited. So, during the holidays especially, I do a lot of reminiscing. This is one of my favorite and earliest anecdotes. Not because it went so swimmingly, because, obviously, it didn't. But because it's another vibrant memory of the many characters with whom I share a past. Along the way we all screw up, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not. But in the end, we're family and it's these memories, the good, the bad and the "EH", the makes my family so special to me.

Advent Calendar: Dancing

Advent Calendar:

Dec 22
DANCING

Well, where there is music there is a Puerto Rican dancing. We dance from early on. We are just as ubiquitous at parties as children.

CHECK THIS VIDEO OUT

Advent Calendar: Pudin

Advent Calendar:

Dec 21
PUDIN

Okay, my desserts chauvinsm is on much weaker grounds when it comes to bread pudding, especially since we have New Orleans in our back yard. That having been said, ours is better. It's smoother, has a creamier and sweeter consistency. It, like flan, is part of many a year round real meal but at Christmas, it is one of the staples. The rice and bread puddings baking completely tantalized us throughout the day. If we wheedled enough we might even get a mid-day snack. In PR the best pudin used to come from Oasis on the western end, I think Aguada.

Advent Calendar: Dominoes

Advent Calendar:

Dec 20
DOMINOES

I spent Sunday playing dominoes with my brother and brother-in-law. Dominoes aren't just for Christmas. They are for any spare time and it's a game we play from our earliest days. It is our national past time. "That's a capicu," he tells me, teaching me one more thing about our culture along the way. I just put a special finesse on him, he explains. A capicu is, at least where I'm concerned, a lucky accident, a lagniappe, a "win-win". When you "capicu" you get an extra hundred points. It's a coup de grace, the ultimate indignity you can put on your opponent, playing your tiles so synchronously that at the end your last tile can be played on either end. Capicu! I do not play the game well. Hell, at family functions they pass me along as a burden. "I can't play with him, he's stupid," they'll say. All in fun, of course, but nonetheless true. These guys play dominoes like it's some sort of high-level chess or bridge and I'm usually just bumbling around while they chortle at making me play so-and-so tile. Yeah, we play dominoes year round, but, at Christmastime when all the folks are home there are domino marathons involving every element of the family. It's a round robin where everyone gets to play, relax, and spend real quality time with each other. And that, my friends, is a real capicu.

Here's a great domino page

Advent Calendar: Parrandas

Advent Calendar:

Dec 17
PARRANDAS

We are music, you and I. And, I, the music, am especially raucous in the Caribbean where PRs (and Cubans and Dominicans), make up for more than a fair share of the sonic din. And at Christmas time - get this - we step it up. Salsa. Timba. Bachata. Merengue. They are all part of the frenzied party that is the holidays. But if you’re really lucky you are rewarded by being further sensually assaulted.
You’d be treated to a parranda that is. Part Mardi Gras, part hootenanny, a parranda or an asalto navideño (nativity assault) is an instantaneous party that is visited on you in the middle of the night. And, while the more typical musical forms might be played, it is a celebration of our agrarian roots. The instrumentation is purely Puerto Rican as are the forms of the music themselves, PR folk genres clearly associated with Christmas, like the Aguinaldo and the Decima.
As a young man I moved to Puerto Rico, finding myself one Christmas living on the rural west end of the island. My uncle, a musician, would be invited to partake in these instantaneous parties. A tremendous cuatro musician, he and his equally fabulous guitar-playing son Felix were in heavy demand. (We'd have to sneak Felix out so as not to infuriate my Pentacostal aunt.) People would anxiously confirm with him as to when they could schedule a parranda as a surprise for some loved one. And he was eager to please. Every night for a month we would haunt the barrios like some merry pranksters. Now, as a little rock and roll thug from New Jersey you wouldn't think this would interest me. You'd be wrong. This was so fascinating, culturally, musically, and in every possible way. We’d gather somewhere, park the cars, and silently schlep up some mountainside, springing our blitz festival. The host would beam because it is considered a compliment that someone thinks enough about you to do this. And it is. The host would bring out the food, the ron pitorro (white lightning) and IT WAS ON. The whole barrio would wake up and we’d party till the Roosters crowed. Best damned month of my life.

Advent Calendar: arroz con dulce

Advent Calendar:

Dec 17
ARROZ CON DULCE

At first blush it might be called rice pudding but that would be like equating Provo Utah with New Orleans, Louisiana. Yes, our rice pudding looks like your rice pudding. It has rice. But I think a fairer comparison would be to that sticky desert that you find in Thai restaurants. I have never cared for the rice pudding that we get here. I think the difference, like the Thai delicacy, is that - like most things Puerto Rican - ours is sticky sweet and has the extra ingredient of coconut and cloves. Yours comes off as some sort of gruel made to assuage a desperate hunger. No, at Christmastime our houses have been steaming all day with myriad smells and arroz con dulce is a main contributor: coconut (that, yes, your mom made grate, maybe even let you poke the coconut eyes out and drain his milk); burned coconut hair (after you’ve smashed the coconut you must still separate the meat from the shell. You burn the hair off the coconut on the stove and it becomes separated); cloves, raisins, cinnamon, and sugar. You’ve watched the cook, got shanghaied into helping, poured the concoction onto the plates, covered them with Saran wrap, put them in the fridge and waited for the evening meal, and, at last, dessert.

Advent Calendar: Anisette

Advent Calendar:

Dec 16
ANISETTE

For a family that is no stranger to drinking and drunks, the Tias were, almost universally, teetotalers. It's one of life's great ironies for me that my mom, who died of cirrhosis, probably had cumulatively consumed in her entire life no more alcohol than what is contained in a single case of cheap beer. But once a year she, Tia Vina, Tia Blanca, Tia Chela and others would join their vivacious sister Celina in having a shot of anisette. Anisette is a liqueur made from anise. It's the basis for other liquors like sambuca, ouzo and pastis. They'd make a big production about it, giggle at their naughtiness. And, we'd stop what we were doing and check it out. Mostly, because it was part of the familial ritual but also because after all there is prim and proper Tia Vina doing a shot. (A "shot" is an exaggeration. This ain't no Alabama 1.5 shot. These were little demitasse liqueur classes made to look like miniature wine glasses.) They'd have a merry time of it, acting like they were doing a line on the bar at some Bourbon Street dive.

Advent Calendar: morcilla

Advent Calendar:

Dec 14
MORCILLA

As kids we would get chicks for Easter and every year they would meet premature ends. Either Baby Eddie would squeeze them too hard or they would fail to survive his six-story flight indoctrinations. (We would take turns going downstairs to recover the lucky ones or report on their demise.) But one year, one of them was a survivor. His name was Gillo. (He was named for someone's ex boyfriend, Lydia's I think, maybe Mom's.) How Puerto Rican we were, we had a rooster in our apartment.
But, lo. Came the time that Gillo had to be relocated and he was moved to Tia Celina's house where we visited him on our weekly jaunts. He grew proud and tall and we loved him. We loved him so much we ate him. But we only found out about it when the Old Man told us about it at the dinner table. We all started crying and there was a big hullabaloo: everyone screaming at us, us crying, Mom pissed at the Old Man for being such a goober. I swore off chicken for many years.
My other childhood food crisis happened at Christmas. I was probably 10 years old and eating morcilla . Uncle Al asked me if I knew what it was, which, of course, I didn't. To me, they were these crunchy little sausages that went so well with rice and pasteles. "They're blood", he said. "Uh, Uh" I shot back, incredulous that he could propose such a stupid thing about one of my favorite Christmas delicacies. Tio was a notorious kidder and rascal and I just knew he was pulling my leg. I looked for some assurance from my Mom and she gave it to me. She assured me that "They are blood. Pig blood." I swore off morcilla that year. But it didn't last long. PR morcilla isn't like that wimpy Spanish morcilla or wussy-assed Boudain or, for that matter, like anything else that advertises itself as blood sausage. None of them compare to morcilla , This shit is real. It's part of the old country tradition of butchering the pig and saving the blood to make the sausage. And, like the pasteles, the morcilla has to be right and it's best if it comes from PR. Back when travel wasn't quite so restrictive, that would be one of the items someone returning from PR would bring you. Now, if I'm going to Tampa, I make it a point to have a cooler with me. (Janet jokes that I must have a trillion coolers at home since I end up buying one every time I visit.) It's like dope when I get back. If I'm lucky, I've scored some alcapurrias and pasteles , but If I'm really lucky I have me some morcilla and I don't have to share when I tell folks what it is, a sausage membrane clot of pig blood and rice.

Advent Calendar: pasteles

Advent Calendar:

Dec 13
PASTELES

Kathryn Miller: I couldn't get to the recipe...stop babbling, pendejo, and re-post the recipe!! I need to make some for this weekend!!

Domingo Soto: click on link, maricona!

Kathryn Miller: I don't need your damned link. I called Consuelo. She said to put raisins in it.

Domingo Soto: LOL

Camille Dauchez: Titi Connie told me to put in capers.
And prunes.

This Facebook exchange on yesterday's Coquito post encapsulates a lot of things about our family, not the least of which is that when you're in this family, it's hard to bail out. The style that we are is contagious, or maybe, as her language would indicate, we just attract kindred spirits. Both Donna and Kathryn are highly loved and continue to be counted as family members. Kathryn has been confronting some major issues on her own but has been a family stalwart, sharing with us all of our crap, good and bad. Our little sister Camille came into the family via Paris, where Carlos spent a summer as part of Kathryn's homespun exchange program. Connie, another ex-pat PPR (Pensacola Puerto Rican), I met through ISA many moons ago and we've been fighting (and loving each other) like brother and sister ever since. The references to raisins, capers, and prunes is about Pasteles. A pastel, as the name indicates, probably comes from the Spanish word for cake (and, probably, due to the coloring of the icing, but I'm just tripping here, don't really know, back to topic). We PRs don't call cakes Pastels. We call Pastels Pastels and cake bizcocho. (And tortas are something else completely, please!) Pastel-colored they are not. They are brown fecal-looking (oh, yum! maybe that's why a lot of kids hate them) tamales. They are made out of a plaintain, yuca, and green banana paste. They have a meat center and are wrapped in paper, banana leaves if you have them available. They are a laborious thing to make and they are usually prepared for the Christmas meal. Now, they have Cuisinarts but when we were little we conscripted into peeling, cutting, and scraping the plaintains, our knuckles bleeding from the rallador into the masa. The ordeal would last for hours. We'd whine and belly ache but it was always one of those meals we all shared with a sense of accomplishment. There's not a PR that doesn't see the pastel as an integral part of the Christmas meal. Pastel recipes are like Gumbo recipes and every family's pasteles are "the best". One year, we PPRs made pasteles and they came out great, except that Connie, Paulie and I would argue about the correct ingredients. Every year since the topic comes up and we revisit it. Connie's heathen family puts raisins (or prunes, can't remember which travesty they commit) in theirs. Some put garbanzos, My mom did them correctly, leaving all of those ingredients out.

Advent Calendar: coquito

Advent Calendar:

Dec 12
COQUITO

This is devolving into a daily snippet about some PR treat. Makes sense. Most Advent Calendars have little chocolates or other sweets in them and most of my memories are of my Mom and Tias baking their asses off to make sure we had really super holidays. Every year I make coquito for my folks at the bar where I hang out. (PS, this Thursday). Every year someone turns their nose up at it when they hear that it's "Puerto Rican Egg Nog" (I'm thinking because they don't like regular egg nog and take no personal or nationalistic affront at it). Someone will convince them that it "is good" (nod your head if you understand) and, invariably they love it.As my cousin Perry said: "That Puerto Rican Egg Nog goes good with my Mothers coconut candy. lol Once you ingested any of our family recipes its absorbed into your blood for ever. The craving never goes away. I dont know what they put in it. All I know it has to be 151 proof." Well, Perry (and Donna) here's how to bring a bit of PR warmth into your local clime:
1 can coco lopez
1 can condensed milk (optional)
2 cans evaporated milk
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2-3/4 litre white rum (don't use the good stuff)
6 egg yolks
1/2 -1 cup sugar
(clove also optional)

Advent Calendar: families

Advent Calendar:

Dec 11
My cousin Lizette's response to my post about orange peels was that "Mom says your full of it." The Mendez clan went to New York together and never separated. Lizette's mom, the youngest daughter of the oldest of the Mendez sisters and my mother, the youngest sibling of the 13 Mendez children were compatriots. She probably knows as much about my mother as anyone else and if she disagrees with something will, like they all will, call "bullshit!". (Mierda) . Male or female, there are few "B Personality" types in our family. I'm not sure if it's class or culture but we all have the same bawdy and raucous way of talking and, surprisingly, we get it from the women. The women are all so much alike. They are all strong, brook no nonsense, talk plainly and brusquely, are acerbic, and honest. So, I read the comment and chuckled, because it probably doesn't do justice to what and how she said it. What Puca probably said was something like "Que sabe ese pendejo?" (What's that jerk off know?)

Advent Calendar: fixins

Advent Calendar:

Dec 9
Those little crackers with the sugar flowers on them for Christmas. (Florecitas?) Those large tins of Sultanas (knock-off brand of Saltines) that we would manage to consume briskly. (Soaking them in coffee for breakfast) I have a memory of two of those tins out in the PR countryside. Some elderly family lady (probably a Soto), gaunt, in one of those little cotton dresses using those tins, one to wash clothes and the other to cook pig swill.

Advent Calendar: parenting

Advent Calendar:

Dec 7
I never realized it until I became one that a lot of parental teaching moments are done clandestinely and sometimes even without our even meaning to do them. You'll ask your kids what something means or ask them to look something up even though you know the answer, maybe let them make a mistake so that they can figure something out or whatever. If you had asked me who I was most like when I was a kid it would have been my real dad. That's because anyone who saw me would say I was his spitting image. I was dark like he was and my mom had the fair Mendez look. But it's only recently that I've come to see how much I look like my mom, especially around the eyes and how much of her and my step-father's ways I've subsumed. All those years of watching my mom toil away at constructing dresses and making things translated into my love of the arts. From the old man, I got his love of gadgets and his meticulous ways. From both of them a sense of moral indignation if I am right or something stands to me corrected. And, I guess that is our greatest legacy - the things we give to our kids and that our parents left with us - that we are set out on our paths and with a little guidance, sometimes from beyond, they guide our way.

Advent Calendar: family get-togethers

Advent Calendar:

Dec 8
The Alvarez family moved to Irvington when it was the boon docks. It was sylvan and suburban and was the family's first sojourn into real Middle Class life. This trickled down for the rest of of since we were all so tightly knit. We'd have raucous parties and spent just about every weekend "in the country". The house had a basement that was a party room and Tio would always have the latest toy, like a full-sized pin ball machine or a pool table, etc. One year we recreated the Christmas Nativity. Because I was the youngest - and over my strenuous protest - I played Melchoir, the black Magi. Al has the video of it somewhere. It shows Mary (Lydia) dragging the baby Jesus down the stair by his heels.

Advent Calendar: religion

Advent Calendar:

Dec 6
Because you think of Puerto Rico as a Latin country, it surprises a lot of my friends to find out that my mother and her siblings (as well as my step-father and real father) were protestants. Mami wasn't "spiritual". Even if it was just her way of playing along with her cultural background, she professed a belief in all sorts of spiritista nonsense. Her core belief was an abundant confidence in some sort of ethereal goodness and her sence of righteouness. And it was always grounded in the practical. I remember her telling the nuns, "You educate them and their souls are yours." That's how we became Catholics. Our mother sold our souls to the Sisters of Charity. When Sundays rolled around, conflicting with some family junket, she'd meet my protests that I had to go to mass or suffer damnation with the solution: go to confession on Friday. "But what if I die before then?" "Do you think God is really going to punish you for that?", she'd say. "Besides, tell him I made you. Now get in the car." It worked for me.

Advent Calendar: Santeria

Advent Calendar:

Dec 5
Dec 5: When I was a little boy I found coins all over the apartment where we were visiting. "Go put them back," Mami told me almost hush-toned. She was being gentle with me and uncharacteristically reverential. My mother was an amalgam of old and new worlds, especially where religion was concerned and she didn't brook much metaphysical nonsense but she was always, somehow, all about the supernatural. "Those are for good luck," she told me. It seems this was some sort of spiritista stuff and she knew all about it.

Advent Calendar: babies

Advent Calendar:

Dec 4
In the same vein, a pregnancy was always big and exciting news. The Tias were all harpees, in both a good and bad sense, and they were all about a new baby. New babies and weddings, those were the major celebratory events around which our family revolved and each Tia had a special calling. My mother's was sewing and party logistics. For weddings she made everything from the dresses down to the little organza bags of white almonds that they stuck in the plastic swans. But a baby was their own little secret girl doings. They would have had by now their wedding shower. Bawdy little events. By the time of the baby's impending arrival the Mendez coven would be in full conspiratorial swing. One of the things leading up to it would be finding out the sex of the child. The PR version of the ultrasound usually happened as a parlor game at a baby shower but also happened spontaneously, usually a Tia instigating it. The baby's mami would come into the room and pick a seat. Every cushion had a fork or a knife hidden in it. Depending on where she sat, that was the baby's sex.

Advent Calendar: culture

Advent Calendar:

Dec 3
When my mom was a little girl in PR they would peel an orange, trying to keep it one continuous strand, throwing it over their shoulder and seeing what the initial of their future husband was going to be.

Advent Calendar: mom

Advent Calendar:

Dec 2
As a kid I could always get a rise out of my mom. I would make a weird or contorted face and she'd almost automatically make one of those "Your Mom May Really Be Jewish" comments. She'd get all flustered and excited, maybe even slap me. "Stop. Your face will freeze and you'll look like that the rest of your life."

Advent Calendar: matriarchy

Advent Calendar:

Dec 1
A few years ago Lydia and I put together a family page. Some of the things that we said were, well, "unvarnished". In true Mendez fashion Tia Celina was outraged that we had said our grandfather was, well, "not a saint". She was on the warpath and took it out on Lydia, who implored me to change it. In typical Mendez fashion I responded that I was not and that she could kiss my ass. However, after a few days, (also very typically Mendez male-like) and because it was my beloved Tia, I caved in. I changed it.

NOING

NOING

Religiosity is not high up on my menu. I prefer to think of myself as indifferent about the weighty concept of the holy. And even “indifferent” doesn’t really describe it. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. I’m driven by the same fears of mortality, the tinyness of me and the sense of my vulnerability. Call it, maybe, exasperation or weakness. I guess at the end of the day I’m just left with the idea that the existence, or rather the question of the existence of God, is something futile, that it’s way above my head to prove or worry about and that putting a label on one’s disbelief is just the flip side of hubris, the other sect, the truly faithful, of The Knowing.


When I hear someone describe themselves as an agnostic or atheist (and they may mean something completely different when they use that term) I think about reincarnation. And not really incarnation per se but a quote I read a long time ago. As support for the idea of reincarnation the writer said that it was just as amazing to be born the first time as it is to be born again. It was a tour de force statement for me, rational/faithful jujitsu. I appreciated the cleverness and the depth of what was seemingly such a terse statement. And I was even more profoundly influenced by it when I witnessed the birth of my first son and could appreciate its implications in full.


That statement and the way that it cut through my insistence on just facially denying the idea of a god has always stuck with me. Comfort in any certainty is delusional. It’s dishonest to continue to deny the existence of some other power and, yet, constantly confront the contradictions that are all around us. I may be “science” guy or “rational” guy, but I can’t get my head around the enormity of reality, the illusory concreteness of science and the spongyness of real things, like the paradox of the beginning of infinity or the physical frontier of the universe.


That’s when I come back to that statement about reincarnation and the core of it’s message, that the miraculous doesn’t lose it’s edge because it happens frequently or because you can explain it on some visceral level. Life is still wondrous. I might question the existence of some higher power, but I might be wrong. The Me didn’t get here in a vacuum. I’ve flirted with ideas holy and red. And, maybe, that’s what we’re all doing. We’re a giant organism still trying to get it together. So, I claw from the entrails of most teachings what are, at base, their proscriptions of conduct (sins), trying to emulate what I think they seek to address, the character flaws and the selfishness of an individual to act at the expense of others. Believer or not, I try to do right and that’s all any of us can strive to do. If there is a God, She will love me for it.

Main Page

This 99% stuff is pretty interesting, so I've been posting on Facebook what I think are the more interesting positions and arguments, witness this below:
IS THAT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT?
Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?
Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week? Do you think you can? Because, let me tell you, kid, that’s not going to be as easy when you’re 50 as it was when you were 20.
(DAILY KOS)
But, because I felt guilty about posting more than my "fair share" of these items last night on FB, I've restarted my blog. This will mean some much-needed FB economy and less limitations on me about what I feel I can say.