For Krista

 On this the threshold of your first of many future special days, I want to be the first to wish you a happy Mother's Day and tell you a bit about my mother and that special status that you, too, shall soon share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Irma Mendez de De Jesus was the thirteenth child born of the union of Mario and Porfelia Mendez.

 

 

They lived on a family farm in Utuado, but she ultimately moved to Aguadilla. (You've been there.) They were moderately comfortable by PR standards because our grandfather was actually a property owner but they were by no means well-off. Those of us that knew my mother can see her resemblance to her mom, especially those vibrant eyes, something we've all inherited from her. One side of the Mendez clan is blond like him and the other is brunette like her but they are all very "European" and fair looking.

My grandmother died while talking to my mom and this had a profound impact on her. She was the baby and they were very close (as we in matriarchal societies are anyway). This, and the things that happened in the rest of her life left her with a pretty histrionic personality.

She got knocked up by Pepe, a man she would for the rest of her life openly call her “one true love.” They married but soon divorced because he was a philanderer. Unable to fend for herself, she relinquished her daughter to her sister and, although she couldn't speak English and had no education to speak of, she followed her family and the rest of the cinnamon hoard to New York City.

She arrived in New York in 1946. And, Oh yeah, she was toting me, a 40-day infant. She was running from economic privation and from her abusive second marriage to Domingo, a young island man. He followed her to New York with nothing more than his barber's skills and the main accoutrements of the young Latin “macho”: brashness, good looks and an arrogant confidence. A snappy dresser, he was a singer, dancer, musician, and gadabout who played the guitar using a comb, his hand having been crippled in a machete fight. He had a mercurial and violent temper and a willingness to act out on this anger. He did so with society in general and with Irma specifically.

By the time the dust settled, she had married Armando, a much older man who was nonetheless "steady" and had the security of a job as a postman. Like Irma and Domingo, Armando was also the product of their rural and backward country. But unlike them, he was much older and spent his formative years in the mother country as a homeless child. Like Domingo, he was armed with chutzpah. A family friend and distant cousin of her sister's husband, he had sought out the young woman, charmed her, and ultimately convinced her to marry him.

She was very quickly saddled with four more children and a host of dysfunctional life and poverty problems: an alcoholic husband who squandered their money and hated her kid, family squabbles about the abandoned daughter, a child who contracted polio at a very early age, another stricken with chronic asthma, poverty, ghetto life. Her life was over-the-top the color purple.

But while she had plenty of melodrama in her life, she also had an indomitable spirit. A plain-spoken, vivacious woman with a quick wit, she fluctuated between crying the blues and fighting the fight. She was both tender and tough, complex and simple, bawdy and righteous, meek and brazen: and she was our champion.

And it’s within the backdrop of that story that I learned about being a parent. Parenting is a cycle of "them" becoming "us" (and vice versa). It seems that this whole process of development of the self becomes entangled in the crunch of living in the vortex of the lives of the people we call our family. While all that I’ve learned I credit to my mom, it was a lesson late in its realization: it wasn’t until I had my kids that I came to understand how the parent molds the child and how, in turn, the child teaches the parent.

When one becomes the parent the cycle makes the turn from one's inner centered self-development to the altruistic act of helping another. Zack's birth was a "Trinitron," instant-on, 100-percent, love event, experience. I credit his birth with putting me on the path to making me a full and loving person. I've beaten myself up for the times I've let him and Carlos down. I should. But, I've learned that the only way to come back from those mistakes is to keep on going and, hopefully, let love cure your ills.

My mom was constantly looking for something horrible to happen. She was seldom disavowed of her paranoia. Because she was strong-willed and because of these events, she had a tendency to be overly protective. Naturally, I resented her: She meddled in my shop-lifting, my gang activities, my relationships, gave me curfews, made be study, do chores, etc.

As the oldest male in an Hispanic household, I was privileged to act like a turd and did so. It wasn’t till Zack was born - when I cared for someone so much that I thought my heart would burst, when I needed to clothe and feed his helpless little ass, when I started truly worrying about all of the mundane shit, when I became his champion - that her heroic status became clear to me and that I started trying to make amends to her for the rotten shit I had put her through.

Dysfunctional families and communities, economies, etc. might make it worse, but it seems to affect everyone. The people that loom largest for us are the ones we spent our early life with, the ones we have shared all of our important first moments with, at a time we were "less significant." But, that part of the development of a child, the development of self and the first ones we react with are our parents and siblings, the ones we are most comfortable with, the ones we think we understand the best, the ones that disappoint our expectations first, that make us do things that we don't want to do, etc.

I had a rough childhood and somehow my mother had become the foil for my self-pity. With Zack's birth I came to realize that she was who she was and was no better prepared for dealing with all of the problems in her life merely because she was my mother.

These weren't the superheroes of my infantile ignorance. They were people. My mother was a peasant girl living in New York. My stepfather was a homeless unloved child born within the Spanish empire. It’s only when you have children of your own that you realize how much your parents loved you and that nothing that you ever do could diminish their love for you. There's a corollary to that: It’s only when you are a parent, now trying to read this stupid life manual and, naturally, fucking up along the way, that you learn to forgive your parents for whatever horrendous things they did or you imagined they did. You realize that the gravity of their “errors” is the exaggerated status that you’ve given them. They are the gods in your universe and it’s hard to believe that they can have feet of clay, until you walk a few miles in their sandals.

I stopped blaming my mother for all of the issues that I had going on with me and started giving her credit for loving me, for being my parent, for having the guts to make me tow the line, for climbing the hills with the heavy loads and bringing all of us along, on her back. From there I grew to understand the same thing about my father and then I even grew to know the same thing about my stepfather. And when I feel guilty about how I acted, I take comfort in knowing something else I learned from being a parent - my mother knew I loved her even before I started making amends with her and that nothing that I could ever do would diminish the love she had for me.

Zack is an adult now and soon you two will start the cycle running anew. Both of my kids know I love them and I know that they love me. We get so wrapped up in our universe that we forget what we only learn later, when we have our own kids, when we experience true unselfish love - theirs and ours - that there is no one in the world that you love as much as your kids. That is the lesson our kids teach us and that we learn as parents.

Had you 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. We are both dark 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.

[Some of this was pirated from previous comments I’ve made about my mom and about parenthood.

My Mother Wasn't Perfect

You might also want to check out The Day Dona Irma Died a beautifully written piece by Kathryn and The New Year]

Main Page

THE PASSED

The Passed

I just ran across this piece I did probably 35 years ago on the little intersection over there in Baldwin County where the Malbis Motel used to be and what is now a Lowe's, what the interstate's signs now call "Spanish Fort" but what used to be the Malbis exit. It's now just more typical urban sprawl with an upscale mall and Mellow Mushrooms and Olive Gardens the flora and fauna, but I used to love to ride out here:

We look at the present through a rear view mirror, looking at where we have just been instead of looking at where we are going, McLuhan’s Medium is the Message tells us. He, like the Tao pundits, can find cosmic messages betrayed in their mundane hiding places, but you can find them through a joy ride on our highways.

Ride east from Mobile through the time warp of the old tunnel out over the Bay Way to the Malbis exit and Highway 90. History is enmeshed here at this corner of the Malbis plantation and the restaurant. Riding through late 19th century Loxley toward Spanish Pensacola, your perception of time changes. A few years ago the Causeway was the only way to get to this corner of the old “Mobile Highway,” now it is the Bay way.

The Bay Way, capped off by the Wallace tunnel is symbolic of the New Engineering that has been overtaking our society. It marks its official arrival in Mobile, although it probably began with Mobile Greyhound Park and can be traced most recently to the new Hilton. Mobile is “growing up.” New Money, with its innovation and daring is here. The old ways have outlived some of their usefulness, but life on the new mental interstates can be so fast we only catch a glimmer of them from our mirrors as they go by.

The Bay Way is sleek, an extension of the interstate mentality of getting from here to there, the fast road to some place else. Highways are concrete artifacts of our sentiments, our priorities, and history. The Bay Way is not only the major artery now, it has imposed its reality on the causeway by killing it. survivor of so many natural catastrophes, it has merely been circumvented. The road goes on.

The interstate used to be a mindless 70 mph jaunt. The only thing that’s changed is that it is now a nerve-racking 65 mph as we worry about gas shortages and state troopers. Back on these desolate miles between Malbis and Spanish Fort - the trees and woods, the straight-ahead two-lane blacktop, the timeless little cities - we get a reprieve from this imposition. We can enjoy the road for what it is.

But at the end of the road where it hooks back onto the main artery there are the cosmic and real signs announcing the multi-million-dollar shopping complex. The Woods give way to bulldozers as developers create the need for a mall out here in the wilderness that borders the pioneer Lake Forest complex. The stretch of road is a microcosm of the passage of time, the old forced to give way to the new.

We’re on the road to Catch Up and it seems natural that we make our way - be it a ethereal or tangible - as straight ahead, as clearly delineated, as powerful and as efficiently as possible. But let’s not forget the lesson of the Causeway, or this little loop of highway here at Malbis, or the intersection at Grand Bay or the beauty that once was a charming Fairhope. Let’s go down these highways with our face full forward, knowing where we have been and where we’re going. The mind set of future potential must not overshadow the debt we owe to the past or we will be doomed, as McLuhan says, to attach ourselves to the objects, to only the flavor of the most recent past as we march backwards into the future.

Main Page

Family trip to PR Album

Here is the google album of our family trip:

Main Page

WHAT MY KIDS TAUGHT ME

I was having this conversation with a friend recently about parents and parenthood and, coincidentally, ran across this old webpage piece:

WHAT MY KIDS TAUGHT ME

I have never had a different language for my children. I rarely censored what they heard or what they saw. I never shielded them from where I hang out, like bars. Zack was 17 or 18 before he ever uttered even a "Damn", at least in front of me. By the age of six Carlos had broken every sound barrier. They're both so very much alike and so very different. I couldn't love them more. They're perfect.

Recently, someone commented that they liked the fact that I am super affectionate with Carlos and that I always validate him and tell him I love him. Children constantly need to be reminded that you love them. Right now Carlos thinks I hung the moon. But later, if we enter the stage of development where there is competition and acrimony, I trust that our love will get us through it.

Parenting is a cycle of "them" becoming "us" (and vice-versa). It seems that this whole process of development of the self becomes entangled in the crunch of living in the vortex of the lives of the people we call our family.

Dysfunctional families and communities, economies, etc. might make it worse, but it seems to affect everyone. The people that loom largest for us are the ones we spent our early life with, the ones we have shared all of our important first moments with, at a time we were "less significant".

Carlos is at that age where he really is enjoyable. He is no longer completely reliant on me and he is starting to make the bridge between child and adult. It's very interesting to experience the development of his self. He is pleasant and witty and sensitive and a complete pleasure to be with. And, of course, that makes the impossible happen, you love him all the more. He is still quite young but the intellectual connections he makes are quite fascinating and he makes me want to be around him for a long time just to see where he will go.

It's a bittersweet thing, but his guile, although still underdeveloped, is beginning to materialize. His ego, his need to assert himself, is not yet at the point but it might just be a natural progression of the self the he will break away from his parents by demonizing or ridiculing them. We are still important to him in a real sense and not just by the birth history he shares with us. I hear him repeat things from my discussions with others, things that I hadn't realized he had even heard. I am still his authority for the truth. He thinks I am "a famous lawyer". He is proud of me. His mom and I are the suns in his solar system.

But, that is part of the development of a child, the development of self and the first ones we react with are our parents and siblings, the ones we are most comfortable with, the ones we think we understand the best, the ones that disappoint our expectations first, that make us do things that we don't want to do, etc.

When one becomes the parent the cycle makes the turn from one's inner centered self-development to the altruistic act of helping another. Zack's birth was a "Trinitron," instant-on, 100 percent, love event, experience. I credit his birth with putting me on the path to making up with my mother. I had a rough childhood and somehow she had become the foil for my self-pity.

It was only after Zack's birth that I realized that she was who she was and was no better prepared for dealing with all of the problems in her life merely because she was my mother. These weren't the superheroes of my infantile ignorance. They were people. My mother was a peasant girl living in New York. My stepfather was a homeless child born within the Spanish empire.

I stopped blaming my mother for all of the issues that I had going on with me and started giving her credit for loving me, for being my parent. For climbing the hills with the heavy loads and bringing all of us along, on her back. From there I grew to understand the same thing about my father and then I even grew to know the same thing about my stepfather.

Zack is an adult now and I get the feeling that the roles are reversed, the cycle runs anew. All I can do is try to show him I love him, suggest things he might do differently (at this point I can no longer impose my wishes on him), be there when I can for him, and live my life. I tell him that I'm trying to correct the mistakes that I made with him in dealing with Carlos but I'm probably just making new mistakes.

One thing I know, now, though - my mother knew I loved her even before I started making amends with her. These guys know I love them and I know that they love me. We get so narcissistically wrapped up in our universe that we forget what we only learn later, when we have our own kids, when we experience true unselfish love - theirs and ours - that there is no one in the world that you love as much as your kids. That is the lesson our kids teach us and that we learn as parents.

(October, 2000)

Main Page

How Carlos got his name

HOW CARLOS GOT HIS NAME

Carlos is named after Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. How he got his name was a process that was related to his big brother and bears some repeating on this, his birthday.
I don't know why the naming of a male child should be such a larger chore than the naming of a female child, but the naming of my firstborn turned into quite a conundrum. 
For both of my children there had been girls' names at the ready, names we both really liked. But all of the male names suggested had reminded me of some negative role model. "No," I would say, "that reminds me of so and so" and the process would begin anew.
Then, Suzanne Thomas suggested "Zachary". Other than an obscure President I didn't know anyone named Zachary. It was all quite perfunctory but it seemed right . "Okay, Zachary it is." 
It turned out to be a good choice. And, it seemed to signal a trend of biblical proportions. Zacks and Calebs, Joshes, and Damians soon populated the land. I really loved the name for my first baby.
Fifteen years later, and having another firstborn, I was fully aware of the wholly serendipitous manner in which Zack had been named and became committed to putting some real thought into this child's name. 
Again, women's names were no problem. "She" would be "Lily". But a boy's name? What? I balked when "Julian" was seriously suggested. And with all due apologies to my friends and family Julians out there, I thought the name "Too chi-chi". His name must be more, well, relevant. (And it should keep him from getting pummeled on the schoolyard.)
My child would have a Spanish name. Now, I am culturally chauvinistic. As my brother has recently noticed, I have "become" a Puerto Rican. There was something, too, in this conundrum about a name that centered around my childhood guilt and insecurities.
I had hated my own name and culture. As a child I thought my name "weird". It called attention to my ethnicity at a time in my life when I wanted to assimilate. Like most children, I didn't like being different or bringing attention to myself and that's what my name had done. 
"Domingo", I would only later find out, is not a weird name, it's just not heard here. "Mohammed" and "Carlos", not "John" are the world's dominant names. But, I had spent my life as "Don" or "Dominick" and would now atone. It was only after I started the web page that I found out that ALL of my cousins have Spanish names. (Duh!)
Had we liked the name "Eugene" that would have been Carlos' name. Eugene Victor Debs, is a fantastic historical and socialist figure, and my mentor. I looked for a name that would follow the formula his parents had used in naming him. Debs was named after Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo, prominent socially conscious authors of his time. Our child's name should be relevant to this century and to Hispanic culture. 
Domingo de Soto was the confessor of Carlos V of Spain. He was, along with Bartholome de las Casas, one of the champions of human rights for the indigenous peoples of the New World. It seemed like a great irony. 
At about the same time that we were trying to find a name for "Julian", I was trying the federal case of Alfredo Garcia, a wonderful man who found himself in an Orwellian drama far from his native Bolivia. We became good friends. His thoughts and his poetry, which he wrote under the nom de plume of "Carlos", he shared with me. 
The judge trying the case was named Charles. What else could this child be called? From the choice of Carlos it followed, naturally, that he would be named after Fuentes, a person both Kathryn and I admire greatly. And, Garcia Marquez? Why not be named after the two greatest Latin authors? The choices aligned themselves. And so, on January 11, Carlos Gabriel Soto was born.

Main Page

Loving hands

LOVING HANDS

        Everything painted one of those scenes of moment. The heat of the day. The wine. The Gulf spread out before us tranquil and sultry. We were as languid and limp as that Spanish Moss on those ponderous oaks of that gorgeous estate. We walked along the shoreline. Soaked in the blossoming of a stolen day on our expansive bay. The candle flames of sailboats danced. Pleasure boats droned and darted about like persistent water bugs. And - further out - sea barges plowed. Even the scale of the sky you found to be wondrously open.

    And you surprised me by grabbing my hand. You seized the moment because you knew that I never would and it felt right and powerful and tender and comfortable and loving. And I dared wonder, now that we were holding hands, how you would be. And we? An Us? That wonderful hand. Reassuring hand. Welcoming hand. Sensuous. Inviting. Lady, give me your hand, part of you, all of you. Caress me you. Caress me, you. Explore me you. This way, you. You. 

    My hand coupled with yours, and I loved it voraciously, hungrily climbing its lithe spine, languishing on your bony mound, plunging down the side to its pristine valley and up again to a sister summit, rousing each slumbering follicle, discovering the length of every tip and nook and cranny, returning to the pliant underside and, finally, squeezing the ultimate comfort and absolute invitation of your now open palm, exchanging and rubbing it with my oils, drinking your moisture, coupling in our heat and bathing in the warmth of the sun and the sting of the sweat and the grit as it rolled off my brow and into my pleasure-burned eyes, here, on this Alabama summer afternoon with the Point Clear breeze, our hands dancing slowly.

Main Page

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.