New Year's Eve in Times Square

If you believe in 2012 time will truly be of the essence, considering the end of the world and all according to the Mayan calendar, then let’s just pretend this Bucket List is sort of a how to guide for putting your best foot forward in the next and final 12 months of life on earth. Think of it as all of the best advice your momma gave you growing up on how one should lead a good life! And hey, if we do live to see another year, this advice might just enrich your life anyway.

1. Haz Bien Sin Mirar A Quien – Do good for the sake of doing it, regardless of who might be on the receiving end of your good deeds. You don’t need to be thanked. You don’t need to be acknowledged. It will all be returned to you in the end. Read More About This Dicho Here.
2. Amor Con Amor Se Paga – Love is paid with Love. There’s no other way around it. If you really want to experience true love you have to learn how to love. How to love others, how to accept love, and most importantly, how to love yourself. Read More About This Dicho Here.
3. Mientras Hay Vida Hay Esperanza – So long as there is life there is hope. The last thing we should ever let go off is hope. There are going to be horribly painful moments in your life, when you probably won’t be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, when life might not even seem like it’s worth living. It is these moments when our faith is truly tested. No matter what the odds, know that tomorrow is another day and that things will inevitably get better.  Read More About This Dicho Here.
4.  No Hay Peor Ciego Que El Que No Quiere Ver – There is no one more blind than the one who chooses not to see. Or loosely translated could also be “you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves.” Regardless of how hard you attempt to deny your own truths, or those of others, life always has a way of bringing them to light and making you deal with them whether you want to or not. Remember that age old rule, honesty is the best policy. Read More About This Dicho Here.
5. En Boca Cerrada No Entran Moscas – If you don’t want drama, keep your mouth shut. Nobody likes a chismoso, especially if your gossip is intended to offend and hurt others. Of course life without a little harmless gossip just wouldn’t be as much fun. The key is in keeping it respectful and not humiliating anyone. Read More About This Dicho Here.
6. La Muerte Es Lo Único Seguro Que Tenemos En Esta Vida – The only sure thing in life is death. Sorry, but your momma was right. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, how much fame you might achieve, how luxurious of a life you might lead, at the end of it all you’re still headed towards the final truth we all share: death. Concentrate not on how much you can attain, but on how much you can affect the lives of others and how you will be remembered. Read More About This Dicho Here.
7. Dios Aprieta, Pero No Ahoga – God squeezes, but doesn’t choke (sort of a literal translation). Or if you prefer a less religious interpretation, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. When you’re at the brink of desperation, right about ready to just give up, always remember that life is precious and ALWAYS worth living because you never know what tomorrow could bring. Okay, so this dicho is very similar to number three, but it’s just such great advice! Read More About This Dicho Here.
8. Quien Bien Te Quiere Te Hará Llorar – You are going to cry and that’s okay! Sometimes letting go and just letting it all out is the best thing you can do for yourself. I’m telling you from personal experience, the more you have been holding in, the more relieved you are going to feel when you just stop and allow yourself to feel what you need to feel. It might be a little embarrassing,sure. Then again what’s more important? Peace in your heart and soul or saving face? Besides, it’s not like you can’t go lock yourself up in the restroom and cry your eyes out. Read More About This Dicho Here.
9. Más Vale Tarde Que Nunca – Better late than never. It truly never is too late to right a wrong, or make a change, especially if it means you will be happier. So often we are held back by our own insecurities and excuses, preferring to live with the consequences of our actions and decisions, that when we finally decide to accept that apology or offer our forgiveness we can’t help to wonder why we waited so long in the first place. Challenge yourself. Ask yourself what is holding you back. Read More About This Dicho Here.
10. De Noche Todos Los Gatos Son Pardos – Certainly we’re different. In so many ways. There wouldn’t be enough space on my poor little server to go through all of our differences, and the truth is they don’t even really matter. We are much more similar than we are different. Remember that when someone approaches you for help, when they are too scared and weak to speak up for themselves, when they are hopeless and helpless, when you yourself are under any of these distresses, that on a human level we are all the same. Read More About This Dicho Here.

Want even more Dichos? Click Here.

Padre e hijo

Suffice it to say when you get a renter make sure you know who you are renting to.  A lot easier said than done.  But hopefully now we’ve learned a very valuable lesson.

Anyway, when we came back from vacation, from making all of those great memories and spending so much quality time together, we had to face the reality that there was a whole lot of time and money that was going to be required to get this house back into shape.  Estabamos un poco dumbfounded at the bad luck.  I mean we hadn’t even taken a real vacation in years, but as they taught me in French class c’est la vie.  So off we went planning and budgeting to try to make things happen as soon as possible.  The very first thing we had to do was replace the back fence on the property.

Okay.  No problem!  Only contractors want way too much money to put up the fence and I haven’t the slightest clue about how to do it myself.  The last time I tried my fence started out pretty even on one side and progressively became more slanted along the 48 feet of property we had to cover.  By the time I noticed it was coming out crooked ya estaba bien cansado and my response was “oh well, fudge it,” which in hindsight is probably one of the main reasons we’re having to do it all over again… only this time under the supervision of mi papá.  I’d kind of been hinting around about him helping me, and by that I mean talking to my mom about it (she seems to have a way of getting him to do things, lol), without coming out and directly saying “can you help me?”

No sé porqué pero como me daba cosa to ask my dad who’s already in his sixties to give me a hand.  Finally, I just broke down and asked him.  He, of course, said yes.

The plan was that we’d show up on Sunday and knock out the fence in one day.  Go ahead and laugh.  It’s okay.  Llegamos temprano, and we started right off digging the holes for the 4×4’s we would need to put in to support the new fence – after we had already knocked down the old one.  My luck, desde luego, was that out of all of the rainless-drought-inducing days we’d had this summer – and we’ve had plenty believe me – this particular Sunday was the one day the rain would not let up.  Entre breaks in the heavy down pouring we tried our best to get as much done as we possibly could.  We did it… well at least put in the 4×4’s that is, but by the end of the day our shoes and pants were covered in mud, we’d both slipped in the mud trying to work, every single item of clothing we were wearing was drenched in very cold water, including my chones, and now we were facing the dilemma of how to cover up 48 feet of a barren property line.

We figured that one out too, and despite my complete exhaustion at the end of the night when I hit the bed, I was happier than I had been in a long time.  As a kid I’d always been more of a momma’s boy and rarely went out to do real hard labor with my father.  That was my older brother’s job and he was good at it.  Besides when was I ever going to need to know how to do all that stuff?  DOH!  This weekend, though, I really felt like we were making up for lost time.  No pude evitar feeling a little sad about having missed out on all this father-son comradery, but as we were working, having an actual conversation and telling jokes, I couldn’t help but feel a little extra joy in my heart.  I still feel it today, and the fact that we have to go back and work on it some more this week doesn’t even bother me at all.

In fact, I’m actually looking forward to it.

I might not be a kid anymore, but hey… it’s never too late to make up for lost time!

"Corazón Sagrado" by RAJANBAKYA

Sometimes there are no words that can be spoken, that should be spoken, or even that are necessary.  A deeper connection, innate in all of us, more animal instinct than anything else, I think, takes over and the only thing we are left to do is react to our own actions.

I’ve seen and experienced this heightened sense of human contact on a couple of occasions now and each time it’s left me speechless, in awe of what the mind and heart, el corazón especially, are capable of when uninhibited.  I’d dare say it’s a higher power acting within us, through us, where we are only the vessels to something much more grand taking place before our very eyes.

I’m not sure what got thinking about this now… maybe it is my recently-heightened sense of sensibility, or maybe I’m just thinking too long and too hard again.  I tend to do that a lot, as well as over-analyze situations and experiences to the point of even confusing myself beyond rationality at times, but that’s just the way I am.  I’ve always been that way, and sad as it to admit, I don’t really know how to be any other way.  Por alguna razon así me hicieron…

If I’m completely honest though, it really was one of my sisters that got me thinking about this subject this time.  I’ve blogged about it before, our tendency to just automatically embrace each other whenever we see one another – my siblings, parents, and I (Raising a Bilingual Kid: ¡Saluda!) – but the older I get the fewer words are necessary between us it seems.  Sure they make our conversations more interesting, not to mention actual conversations, but more often than not just sitting in the same house together, laughing together, sharing those little nothings together are enough to reiterate just how much we mean to one another.  There’s a certain sense of peace and happiness, a lifting of the spirit, in that.  I don’t know how else to accurately explain it.

Y definitivamente sé que no somos los únicos.  So today les dedico este post a todos los que como yo comparten este sentimiento.

Life is too short.  Let somebody know you love them!

Further proof of our never being alone, and always a little pick me up for me personally, Celia Cruz’s ‘La Vida es un Carnaval’.  You can’t hear this song and not feel more positive.  Happy Monday!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lArGoRhFr4E

Runaway Deer

One second we were playing, the next all of us stood frozen at attention, staring in disbelief at what it was we were witnessing.  There in the front yard, just a couple of feet away from us, well, on the other side of the barb wired fence to be exact, leaned my mother as hard as she could against her legs, pulling her body back with more force than I’d ever seen her use.  She was holding a rope in her hands and as my eyes made their way across it, there on the other side stood a full grown adult deer, pulling back as hard as she was, but apparently not as forcefully, because as we stood there in between the screen door, that by this time was creaking from my older sisters having run out of the house to witness what the rest of us were yelling about like maniacs, and the static propane tank that sat a couple of yards away from our pig pens and hen houses, my mother had managed to tie this wild beast against a wooden post from our same barb wired fence.

Before pulling up her handmade dress, just a tad in order to climb back into our yard through the barb wire, and turning back to scold us for not having even attempted to help during her more than three minute struggle with the deer in front of us, my mother let out a smile of satisfaction with herself.  She was proud of what she had just accomplished, and by the look on her face it was clear she was also imagining exactly how we would devour every last bit of meat on that rather plump deer.  We had never seen a venado this close, much less this size and height.  It must have been at least three feet high, four with its antlers, and pretty round around the stomach too.

Who knew what deer tasted like, but it was meat!

The rest of the day we all kept playing around the wild beast, talking about how it might taste in tacos, soup, barbecue, or even mixed in as ham or tosino with our regular eggs and beans.  This wasn’t like the time my uncle had tried to trick us into eating snake – we actually wanted to taste the deer in our front yard.  Bambi the movie had already been released, and we had all watched it by now, but despite that fact none of us really felt sorry for the animal in our front yard.  We were hungry… for something new.  For a feast of our own, maybe not as fancy as our closest neighbors, my cousins and uncles, would have, which for some reason our family was never invited to, but better than eggs and beans for breakfast, with spinach on the side or mixed in with our egg, and arroz y frijoles for lunch and dinner, over and over and over, again and again, everyday of the year.

All of us were practically salivating at the possibilities.

Little did we know that as soon as dad came home that night our gastronomic fantasies would all be over.  He practically leaped out of our house as soon as my mother proudly confessed her shining achievement for the day over dinner.  Yelling like a mad man he paced around the yard trying to figure out from my mother who had seen her drag the deer across the woods into our yard, if anyone had seen the animal tied up against our fence, and wondering if anybody had noticed that there was one less deer in the wilderness surrounding us tonight.  For as much as my mother argued that nobody would notice one more or less deer in all of that monte out there, or that it was only fair for us to keep and eat that animal as compensation for the little money my father earned for all of his hard work, all of fifteen dollars a day, he could not be convinced to slay that beast and stock up our refrigerator with meat for many, many weeks to come.  Instead, despite and over my mother’s yelling súplicas, he dutifully untied the deer and let it run away into the darkness.

The land we lived on was the property of my uncle’s boss.  We were there de arrimados, mojados at that, so my father didn’t want to make any waves, much less be accused of stealing one of their deer, at least that’s what he’s kept as his story until now.  Again, we stood in disbelief, this time as our delectable prey disappeared from our sight.

Every once in a while my mother still sarcastically brings up the deer, and how we would have had so much meat for such a long time had my father not been so scared.  He doesn’t say anything anymore.  Just sits there quietly and let’s her tell her story.

Okay, it wasn't nearly this bad... but it felt pretty close back then

“When the bell rings you better hurry up and make it to the car.  If you’re not there by the time I get there, I’m leaving you!”  That was the constant threat to my younger brother when we’d get to school in the mornings… that is when I wasn’t trying to get him to skip with me just to drive over to Burger King for a breakfast croissant.  I know, por eso estabamos como estabamos, but those little sandwiches of egg, melted cheese and ham were delicious.  My mouth still waters thinking about them.

I never actually had the nerve to leave him behind, however.

The bell would ring and we’d both race to the car like our lives literally depended on it.  We didn’t have time to talk to anyone, say goodbye, or take our time walking to our car like everyone else.  Whatever corner of the school we were in, we’d power walk, sometimes run, as fast as we could, which in reality was more like hobbling, with our jumbo-sized backpacks stuffed full of books – we were both a little nerdy even though neither one of us would have admitted it back then – and try to make it across the street from Eisenhower High School to the apartment complex next door where we’d park our car every morning before going to class.  They had an open parking lot that wasn’t gated and after so many months of our old beat up car being parked there the management probably just assumed it was one of the tenants.  It wasn’t, but it sure did make our lives a whole lot easier.

If we didn’t make it to the car in time, we’d stand against the railing of the nearest stairs, the ones leading to the upstairs apartments, throw our backpacks on the ground, behind the bushes on either side, and pretend we were just chilling, waiting for someone to come by, or just watching the school buses to pass by.  A few times we even waved into the air like someone in one of those yellow buses was actually acknowledging us, saying goodbye back.

Me:  “Laugh… pretend like you’re laughing!”

Him:  “For what?”

Me:  “Just do it… hurry up!”

The school buses had to pass directly in front of where our car was parked in order to exit the school campus and they were all tall enough to let their passengers, our schoolmates, peer directly over the six foot high wooden fence that shielded our vergüenza de carro from them, and the rest of the kids in their own one-solid-color-cars, when they weren’t riding so high above the ground.  What was worse was when we’d make it to the car, jump inside of it, and turn it on, just to see the first school bus driving by in front of us.  We couldn’t get out of the car and run to the stair railings anymore – there wasn’t enough time – so we’d just sink down into the seats as low as we possibly could and laugh our asses off.  All of the drama about the car was really an adrenaline rush.

The car itself was really quite the loyal little carcachita. My eldest sister had bought it for herself after high school and had fully paid it off before she gave it to me.  That’s right, gave it to me!  I didn’t pay her one single penny for the ride even though it was the first car she ever owned and I knew it was always going to be a little special to her.  The hood was a rusted dark blue, the driver’s side door an almost forest green color that looked faded and old, and the rest of the car was a creamy, very light green, almost like a lemon meringue tone that I had always admired… even when the car was not yet mine.  It was a Pontiac, four door sedan, that couldn’t have been younger than a 1991 model, but it got us where we needed to go and it left us both with so many cherished memories in that car.

I was so embarrassed and ashamed in those days that I never properly thanked my sister for the ride.  Thanks, Lola!  For letting me have your car and for giving me this story to tell. Maybe one day I can return the favor.

Man Tears by Artemis

In truth, there have only been a few times that I’ve seen my father cry.  A couple of times of joy, another handful of pura tristeza.  He’s always been a man of strength and bravery to me…  the one with arms of steel and shoulders capable of taking on the world.  When I think of him, instinctively my heart goes soft and something inside of me just makes it unavoidable to want to cry, at least a little bit for all the little things I think I know now that I didn’t know back then.

Ahora que yo soy el hombre de la casa it’s easier to recognize the hows and whys.  The things I hated in him once I now see and appreciate in myself.

The same things Edgar will probably grow up hating in me too.

La cosa es, that until I was teenager, I really did believe the myth that real men don’t cry.  That it was a sign of weakness, a symbol of having been defeated, to let even one single tear run down my face.  Even worse, to do so in the presence of others, because it made me look pathetic and stupid to them and to myself.  As far as I can remember though, nobody ever told me that “real men don’t cry.”  I guess I just assumed so because nunca in my childhood did I presence my father cry.  Maybe he did and I just didn’t pay attention… estaba demasiado ingenuo para entender. No sé.

The truth is we do, and sometimes it’s even good for us.  Personally, les puedo decir that up to now there have only been a few times when I’ve literally balled my eyes out, sobbing uncontrollably as an adult for things I literally had no control over.  Those memories are still too painful and fresh to talk about, but the happy tears I’ve shed… those, have left a lasting imprint on my soul.

I want to make father cry again.  Not tears of sadness, but tears of joy, because in the end he was the one that taught me this very important life lesson: que los hombres también lloran.

I hope I can do the same for Edgar.

Los dejo con la canción que fue la inspiración de este post.  Se llama “El Hombre Que Más Te Amo” y la canta Chente.  El otro día la escuche por primera vez en mi camioneta y al escuchar la letra se me salieron una cuantas lagrimillas porque me hizo pensar en mi padre.  Espero les guste también.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QntAiTCJjzA

So my wife was out to lunch with one of her sisters and she came across this contest, the 2011 Houston Web Awards.  Without telling me, she went ahead and nominated my humble little home on the net for one of the categories: Best Personal Blog, and well, the news was very well received when she finally sent me an email with the link to her nomination.  I haven’t the slightest idea how fierce the competition is, or if Juan of Words actually has any chance of winning in this category, or any other one for that matter, but just the idea of gaining any recognition for all my hard work is quite flattering and exciting to say the least.

And here is where YOU come in… LOL!  I generally don’t like to ask for things like this, but hell, I really would like to win!  It would be fun.  So, if you would PLEASE, follow the steps below and vote for my blog as the “Best Personal Blog” in the 2011 Houston Web Awards (ANYONE CAN VOTE)!

Desde lugeo ¡muchisimas gracias!

Step 1: Click to Enlarge

Step 1:  Click Here to access the 2011 Houston Web Awards Official website.

Step 2: Click to Enlarge

Step 2:  Next, click on the phrase BEST PERSONAL BLOG (highlighted here for your convenience).

Step 3: Click to Enlarge

Step 3:  Then enter your First and Last Name, and your Zip Code… an email is optional, but not required for a vote.

Step 4: Click to Enlarge

Step 4:  Next, find the category for “Best Personal Blog” and enter my blog address www.juanofwords.com (TIP: it’s category # 9).

Step 5: Click to Enlarge

Step 5:  And Finally, click through the “next” buttons at the bottom of the page until you reach the submit page (2 pages away) and click “Submit.”

And that’s it!  Nothing will be left but to find out the results on June 30, 2011.  Thank you all for taking the time to read this and for your continued support and friendship over the course of the last two years of this blog.

¡Los quiero un chingo!

Las piedras...

Las piedras en México tienen historia.  They’re jagged and rough.  Shapely in all sorts of colors and sizes.  Smooth to the touch.   Rough to the grasp.  Sturdy.  They tell the story of generations gone by, of old men playing their instruments and singing their música de vara, of old women walking by at the dawn of early morning, wrapped up against the cold in their rebozos, always in pairs, with their pails of fresh corn, heading to the molino, of huaraches de piel walking alongside mules, sheep and all sorts of other assortment of livestock, of children running to take care of mandados, of young men with their alcohol and cigarettes, laughing and carrying on, of young women giggling and smiling, trying their best to be proper while the objects of their affection walk by, of young boys and girls escaping from school, marching to the beat of el himno de independencia on Independence Day, of so many cousins showing us how to get from one place to the next without ever being seen.

That’s what I remember in those rocks.

I imagine Mamatule and Papanino, my grandparents, sitting at the front of their kitchen, wrapping up their tobacco in corn leaves, smoking it ever so peacefully in the dead air and silence of night, my father as a young man courting my mother, the young girl from Monterrey who showed up at the rancho every couple of months with her padrinos, wearing nice dresses and sensible shoes.  Shoes, in this place, where most girls walked around barefoot.  I imagine their conversations.  My mother playing hard to get, stern and dismissive, measuring every single one of her expressions ever so carefully, a half smile here, a look of agreement there, my father unrelenting, with his big smiles and nice words, staking out her every move from the tanque where pigs swam around to get refreshed and people carried pails of water to heat up for their baths, and slowly winning her over, one platica at a time.

I try to envision our land before the casita de escobas, that’s what they called the firmer shrubs they used to fill in the gaps between the frames of wooden sticks in those days, before the first room of cement blocks went up, when it was up to the people of the pueblo to decide whether the newly-wedded couple of my parents deserved to have this empty section of land donated to them, and then when they were there together for the first time, what conversations they might have had, what first moments they might have lived, welcoming my eldest sister, their firstborn, and then the ones that followed, the decision to leave home, first apart, cada quien a su tiempo, and then together, all of us together.

And I’m inspired.

It was there we began our journey.  The only place that ever felt like home, where even though it wasn’t my precise history that took place, it called out to me, made me feel one with the land, with the air, with the water, in a way that I’d never felt before.  Our apartments, houses here were mundane.

Those piedras, majestic.  Respectable.  Ours!

¡Ay, Ay, Ay!

At times I didn’t want to translate.  It was embarrassing to be the interpreter.  To not understand what that person was saying or how exactly it was my parents wanted me to convey their message.  It was unnerving, uncomfortable, even shameful.  The way people would look at me sometimes.  The tone they’d use.  The frustration in their voices.  In my own parents body language.  We knew the English language and we were supposed to be able to express their emotion and context all of the time!

But in all honesty, it was hard.  It still is.  I’d flutter around in half English words, half made up Spanish vocabulary, trying my best to dialogue in conversations far beyond my comprehension level, not to mention my age.  There was a lack of sophistication in my vocabulary.  I didn’t understand technical terms, industry specific terminology and much less indirectas or habladas.  My mother would finally just end up getting frustrated and either muster up as much of the English language as she could or resort to telling off the cashier at the grocery store in a very fast paced, pissed off Spanish.

This variety was always much harder to understand because it was all emotion, and most of it pure anger and frustration.  We’d storm out of the store, leaving all of the groceries behind, either in the cart as we had collected them, or on the register in bags and on the conveyor belt, my mom going on and on about how the cashier had tried to overcharge us and act like she didn’t know what we were saying.  I can’t tell you how many times we played out this same scenario, in multiple stores, over the years, but to my mother’s credit, it did take a hell of a lot to infuriate her to the point of leaving everything behind.  Especially since she was shopping for the entire household and didn’t have the time to go back through and pick everything out all over again one by one.  Though, to this day, she’s not above cursing someone out in Spanish and walking out on them if she feels she’s being wronged.

You can understand why as soon as I turned into a teenager I tried my hardest to avoid these confrontations.  With much more reason when one of my parents weren’t the ones requesting the interpretation.  If they had an appointment I’d run to the restroom right when they were about to get called in, I’d play dumb, like I didn’t understand what was being said, or I’d just plain refuse to be the official translator.  It’s a little embarrassing to admit now, but I did.  A few times I even allowed us to walk away with our heads bowed down in shame after somebody humiliated us for not being able to communicate “properly” in the English language.

If I felt degraded I can’t imagine what my parents were feeling.

It wasn’t until complete strangers began asking me, more often than not, if I spoke English, that it hit me: to a lot of people, not everyone, we Mexicans were all the same.  It didn’t matter if my parents had come to the United States as adults and I had been born and raised in this country, we were all Mexicans, Latinos, Hispanics… whatever they wanted to call us – a docile people who could be reproached, directed, reprimanded, and insulted, especially if we didn’t know the official language of the nation.  I decided to stop stepping down and stepping back.

Now I’m the first one to tell anybody to stick up for themselves however they can.  In English, Spanish, Spanglish, or whatever other vocabulary they can muster.  I guess being a pelionero runs in the family!

Mi Madre

My mother has always been a strong woman.  Much stronger than any of us could have ever imagined, I think.  She was the one who crossed the Rio Bravo with a child on each arm, my brother Chuy in one, me on the other, sitting on nothing more than a rubber tube as she made her way into this, the nation of opportunities. The one who less than 24 hours after being deported and separated from us for the first time at the Texas- Mexico border for not having legal documentation – leaving us all, her children, sobbing uncontrollably with her departure – called from a public phone to let us know she had once again crossed illegally into the United States.  The one who in her time scolded an immigration judge so severely, for not wanting to grant her a legal status under the 1986 amnesty, that she made her change her mind and allow her a permanent residence.

Aside from all her strength and courage, however, to me, my mother has always been the woman who’s taught me more about life than anyone else.  We never had much in our home, but thanks to her, we never really felt like we were missing anything.  If there wasn’t enough to eat she’d sit us all at the table to eat before she did, if we didn’t have enough money to make ends meet she’d go clean houses, iron clothes, make tortillas, gorditas or tamales to sell, and when, on more than one occasion, we felt that we had lost all hope, mamá would pray for and with us.  She is and has always been the strongest part of our family.  The one who never failed us, the one who never gave up, the one who’s always tried her best to find a way to help us, and the one who’s always proved to us, time and time again, that for any one of us, her seven children, she would do anything.

Through her love I learned that humility is worth much more than gold, that the only thing pride is good for is to make one miserable, that one should always have dignity, regardless of what we’re doing, that we are never more, or less, than the next person, that helping others is the same thing as helping oneself, and most importantly, that family is sacred.  That no matter how mad we get or how severely we fight, we’re still family.  The same body.  The same blood.

My mother has been many things in her life.  A daughter who was given away.  An abandoned teenager.  A young woman in love.  A wife.  A maid.  Even a “recogida”.  The one who cleaned my teachers’ homes.  The one who cleaned executive offices.  The one who as a young woman confronted her family in order to come to el Norte.  The one who never denied helping any of our family members once she was here, taking in as many of them as needed it.  The one who took care of my grandmother in her final years.  And the one who at our side, in her role of mother, has shed an infinite amount of tears in our happiest, saddest and most bitter moments.

It’s difficult for me to express just how much my mother has always meant to us.  There aren’t sufficient words to show her how important she is to me.  That even though sometimes it might feel like we’re growing farther apart, every day that passes I feel closer to her.  With time, and the weight of my years, I’ve come to understand so many things, and it’s with great pride that I do scream at the top of my lungs that “I am my mother’s son!”

Without you we would be nothing mamá.  I love you!

This is the English translation of the original blog post entry, ‘Las Lecciones De Mi Madre’, published in the Houston Chronicle’s Spanish-language publication La Voz de Houston.  To read the original post in Spanish Click Here.

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Lo bonito de la vida.

There’s something to be said about reader mail.  I’ve often thought this, but never had the nerve to write about it… until today.  You see, to hear myself utter the words “reader mail” in it of itself sounds pretentious to me.  Como aquel que se cree demasiado, o el otro que le hecha demasiado crema a sus tacos, like ‘who the hell are you to be thinking you’re big and bad enough to have reader mail?’  That’s what usually goes through my head when I start to even think about writing on this subject.

No offense to any of my good friends who have already written about this subject matter, quite well I might add.  Believe me.  There have been many idle moments spent in front of my computer reading over your very insightful thoughts… most of which I agree with.  Sure I’ve shared the occasional comment that made me feel extra nice, but from that, to pretending I have any right to demand anything at all, much less reader mail, from you good folks, is a tremendous stretch of la verdad. I am just grateful some of you keep coming back.  ¡En serio!

So why write about it all?  And why now?  It’s pretty simple really.  The other day… this weekend actually, in between grilling up a storm, puras fajitas para Easter you know, and knocking back as many Bud Light’s as I could get my hands on, I received a message from a friend, and a pretty regular reader of this blog, that really made me think.  Though we’ve never met in person, I assume we have pretty similar backgrounds from some of the communications we’ve had in the past.  She’s Mexican like me and pretty proud of her cultura también. Basically, her note was about another woman that she knows who is going through a rough time, and who, like many of our madrecitas once did, is doing as much of whatever she can to see her kids through.

I won’t go into the details of this woman’s life… porque no es mí lugar, but I did want to share a portion of the letter that, I’ll confess, made me tear up a little:

She shared with me about all the cooking and selling of her food (that she’s done) to keep her and her three children afloat. One of the sales items, of course, was tamales. It was the day after I read your post ¡No Te Rajes! I printed a copy for her to share with her children. She doesn’t speak English, but I think it would make her kids proud to know that a successful writer/blogger shared their same history.

I just want to thank you for sharing your personal history with us. And I want to let you know that it is more meaningful to some people than you will probably ever know.

I’m not to sure about the “successful writer/blogger” part, LOL… but I can honestly say, it is my complete honor and privilege to share this piece of my own personal history, and probably many other parts of it as well, with these three young children, and thousands of others out there también, who like many of us, are growing up in a reality, that we all know to well, very rarely offers much foresight beyond the day to day.  If my writing can be meaningful in that regard – in offering so much as a “hey I’ve been there too” to any one of these young kids – I’d feel pretty damn successful already!

Gracias por el mensaje.

Echandole ganas

This is not a sob story.  We were young.  We were poor.  And we were frugal.  We knew how to stretch a dollar.  And how to make a few dollars out of a dozen or so tortillas, tacos or tamales.  A little effort.  A little dose of creativity.  And most importantly our seeming innate sense of ingenuity.  If there was one thing we all walked away with, from the doors and memories of our childhood, it was the inability to ever truly give up.

In all honesty, we didn’t know any better.  We were bumpkins.  Country bumpkins.  In the truest form.  Too blinded by our ignorance.  Coming from a world of nothing but dirt roads and imagination.  Where all we knew was como salir adelante con el sudor de la frente… and by the occasional generosity of complete strangers.  No street cred.  Just wild curiosity and bewilderment well beneath our years.  Everything was new.  Every opportunity a chance to be amazed.

I’d like to say we were more sophisticated, but we weren’t.

We didn’t know how to give up.  Even now, though we’ve gotten much better at it, when it really counts, we just can’t seem to be able to lie down and take whatever comes in our direction.  Maybe it’s just human nature, not anything exclusive to our family of nine.  But every time I’m at the brink, right there about to give in, wanting to let go… wanting to not care anymore, I can’t.  I’m eight, nine and ten again, trailing door to door behind my mother, selling her tortillas, offering to clean houses, anything to make a few extra bucks.  I’m in the parking lots of Fiesta and Wal-Mart: tamales… ¿no quiere tamales? Would you like to buy tamales?, over and over again despite the dirty looks and rejection of our hard work.

And I’m reminded of just who I am and where I come from.

Mis padres nunca se han rajado. I’m hoping to do the same.

Low Ri-der!

He was Yin and I was Yang.  Since we were kids, it’s always been that way.  Just a whole 15 months apart, my older brother and I have always been polar opposites.  He, my father’s right hand, at his side pretty much from the very beginning. Me, always preferring the warmth of my mother’s comfort.

When apa would ask who wants to come to work with me today?, or ama would insist he take one of us with him to teach us the “real value of hard work,” he’d jump at the opportunity, I’d run and hide so I wouldn’t have to go.  The few times we did end up going together, Chuy was all energy and will – what do I do now apa? show me how to do it, let me try – I, on the other hand,  was more hands off.  Sitting on the wayside mostly, trying to stay cool, away from the sun, playing with whatever rocks and sticks I could find.

At home with mom, I had all the freedom in the world to make-believe and play in my imaginary world outside.  We were in the country so nature was my playground.

Over the years, though, we did begin to bond a lot more.  Probably more than anything because we were accomplices – I’d say there weren’t more than a handful of travesuras that he did without me, or I did without him.  We worked well together.  He was the mastermind.  I was the sidekick.  Like Batman and Robin, Fred Flinstone and Barney Rubble, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, or any other of the cartoon characters we grew up with.  Despite our differences our shared mischievousness brought us together.

Chuy taught me how to shoplift, how to skip, how to play cool, how to look hard, and how not to let anybody punk me.  Though I struggled with the latter through most of my middle school years anyway.  People knew he was my brother and I knew if it came down to it he’d always be willing to stick up for me, so we were cool.  Until we hit our teenage years.  Then once again he was the cool one… me just the nerdy younger brother.  “To each his own,” we thought, hardly ever meddling in the other’s business, except for when it came to girls.

That was the universal language we both spoke.  The one we could stay up hours talking about, joking about… him giving me tips on how to win over my crushes, although they hardly ever worked.  Chuy was always a lot smoother with the ladies than I was.

Outside of that, he’d take me to school and bring me back home in his low-rider-looking Chevy every day, but that was that.  He had his own friends.  I had mine.  Still, every once in a while, usually late at night in the summers, when it was particularly humid and hot, he’d come in and say hey, you want to go to Dairy Queen? To which I’d reply yeah.  We’d get in that car, which also had hydraulics – it was a shiny maroon color with custom rims and very low-riding tires that every once in a while he’d jump up and down for our amusement, and ride all the way to the fast food ice cream spot a good 15 minutes away from our house.  We’d order a couple of banana splits and just sit there talking about everything and anything.

I learned more about my brother in those conversations than during any other of our convivencias throughout the years.  In that low-rider I came to respect him, to admire him, and to look up to him.

I think, even if just a little, he learned to do the same for me.

Nervous beyond belief...

It’s an awful feeling, right there in the pit of your stomach, twisting and turning, telling you “something is wrong, something bad is about to happen,” although you haven’t a clue what, or two whom.

Nothing is worse!

You want to do something, stop something, or at the very least warn somebody, but can’t do anything but sit there and worry.  You know that if you start calling around asking people if they’re okay, if they are up to anything dangerous or unusual, you are only going to worry them too, and what’s the point of that?  So most times we just suck it up, hope for the best and pray a little, asking that somehow, someway whatever our presentimiento was about doesn’t actually happen.

I generally also try to convince myself that it is little more than silly superstition and that I don’t believe in that stuff… right before repeating my ritual once again: worrying, worrying some more, praying, praying again, and then thinking up everything in the world that “the universe” could be trying to warn me about, before going back to square one all over again.

Maybe it’s because my own mother’s presentimientos always seemed to be so accurate in my memories.  She’d get an “ugly feeling” and all of a sudden, BAM, something was wrong!  It was unnerving to hear her say tengo un presentimiento.  My skin would crawl and I would just start bracing myself.  Then I got to thinking, maybe it was just that whole theory that if you believe something strongly enough it will come true.  I guess that we are channeling negative energy into our lives and that we are really the ones making bad things happen to ourselves.

A little bit too new age, modern thinking for me… so in the years since I’ve adopted my own “Anti-Presentimiento Remedio-Ritual”.  Like when I dream a bad dream, I really do believe that if I repeat it out loud, share it with someone else, I am preventing the dream, or the presentimiento, from actually coming true.  That somehow I’m putting a block on it, stopping it dead in its tracks.

It sounds silly, but it is kind of comforting… some of the time.

'Retrato de Mujer' de Diego Rivera

My uncle had a friend whose name was Calletana.  She was short and dark with medium length hair, black, with a wave right at the spot where it ran into her shoulders, straight, but kind of crazy at the same time.  The rest of her features, just as feminine and she was petite:  big eyes, curvy lips, like a miniature Barbie doll, except shorter and fuller, with lots of personality, and speaking only in Spanish.

Her clothes weren’t as nice as Barbie’s though.  My uncle was a coyote, what you’d call somebody who crossed mexicanos illegally from one side of the border to the other, and Calletana, I assumed, was his business partner, so whenever they showed up at our house they were dressed down more than anything, like they’d just been nervously driving for hours, because they had.  Warm ups and big tee-shirts, her hair pulled back in a nappy pony tail, my uncle in blue jeans or brown poly-cotton pants, with a dark colored polo shirt, almost always.  He must have been at least 10 or 15 years older than her.

I was 10, and I adored her.

As they’d pull into our driveway she’d yank back the sliding door of that vintage gray van, jumping out to greet me with just as much excitement as I’d jump around with before running into her arms.  Something about her just made me feel special.  Like I was the center of the world when Calletana was around.  She never yelled at me for trying to get my little brother in trouble.  She didn’t tell me I was annoying.  And she never, ever ran around our house and yard trying to hide from me.  Instead, Calletana and I would sit on the floor of my uncle’s van with its sliding door open, just talking about nothing, laughing and carrying on like we were family.  We weren’t.

From the smirk on my father’s face when he told us what a coyote was I knew that word meant danger, doing something you weren’t supposed to, doing a bad thing and getting away with it, like when I had grabbed a handful of candy at the Valley Mart and ate it all up before anyone saw me.  I knew it was wrong, but I felt like such a rebel because I didn’t get caught.

Maybe that’s what it was like for Calletana?

She wasn’t bad.  I liked her, and even if she had done a bad thing on purpose and gotten away with it, why should that matter?

I still wanted her to come around and be my friend.

I definitely didn’t want her to get in trouble.

For years they’d come around like that, just showing up unexpectedly at any random moment, and every time my excitement was just as huge.  My mother and everyone else’s not so much;  yeah they were happy to see them, but they weren’t bursting out of the seams  to have another silly conversation at the footsteps of that beat up old truck with Calletana like I was.

Years later all I’d remember would be the pickles.  Small and crunchy, with just the right amount of sour – the kind you could eat one right after the other without ever getting tired of them.  Like we would.

I didn’t know why she always carried pickles, but she did.