juanzqui

MY COUSIN DIED this week.

His name was José Rubén López, but we called him Pache (PAH-cheh). I have no idea how he got that name, but that’s how we knew him, although in school he was for a while called Joe Ruben (just as I was called John).

Pache was a year older than I, but we were in the same grade and, even though we grew up in the same town, less than a mile from each other, we didn’t attend the same school until we were in junior high. That was because Pache’s family was one of the few Crystal City Mexican families who didn’t go “up north” every summer to work in sugar beet/cucumber/ tomato/potato/onion fields of the Midwest.

His father, also named José Rubén, had a year-round job, first as a waiter and then as manager of what was perhaps the best restaurant in town, a place patronized primarily by the town’s Anglos (in later years he became the owner). His mother, Carmela, also had a year-round job as a receptionist for the local eye doctor. Because the López family did not go up north, Pache and his sister Sylvia were able to start school each year at the beginning of the school term, unlike the rest of us, who started school whenever our families returned from the north, sometimes as late as October or November.

That meant they were assured admittance to the town’s more prestigious elementary school, the Grammar School. Students, like me, who enrolled after the classes had filled up, were automatically sent to “El Campo,” the other elementary school way out on the other side of town, in a dilapidated barracks-like building that had been part of the U.S. government’s World War II Japanese/German/Italian internment camp.

Because of this, during those first few years, I rarely saw Pache outside family visits, like the time he and his mother came to our house and his mother, Tía Carmela, sought to get him to behave by bragging about what a good boy he was. Hearing this, Pache just had to prove her right. “Haber, háceme, Mami,” he told her. He wanted her to tell him to be a good boy so he could comply.

We did get together to play every once in a while and he invited me to spend the night at his house a couple of times. Going to their house was always an experience. They lived in a much nicer (if smaller) house that had an indoor bathroom and air-conditioning (evaporative coolers at first). It was at their house that I first saw a TV.

Unlike some of the other non-migrant Mexican kids in our community, Pache never gave the impression that he thought he was better than the rest of us. If we didn’t become close friends, it was because I was very much a loner as a kid and resisted any efforts by him and others to make me a more social person. Several times he invited me to boy-girl parties and tried mightily to get me to dance and to at least talk to the girls. And he had no qualms about inviting me to join him when an extremely good-looking, popular and suave out-of-town friend was in town.

I LEARNED A lot from him. It was from Pache that I first heard of the strange Halloween custom called Trick or Treat (although by then I was already in junior high and too old to do it more than that one time). It was Pache who taught me how to play pool. Or rather, he taught me the mechanics of pool; I never really learned how to make those damn balls go where I want them to go. He taught me how to play a pinball machine. He tried to teach me how to drink and smoke but I was always too scared to do any of that.

Once we got to high school, we saw less of each other outside school. Around my sophomore year, I had finally emerged from my shell and started hanging out with other guys, but they were boys who were not part of Pache’s circle. They were very much into fixing up cars and racing them out on the country roads and talking about cars. Even though I didn’t own a car and had no idea what a tappet or a “brocha” or a distributor did (I could barely fix a flat tire) and was scared shitless of speeding cars, I fit right in with that crowd. (I was the quiet one, and because I was quiet, I was deemed to have more wisdom and thus was constantly called upon to settle arguments.)

Eventually, when this group of boys discovered that girls were more fun than cars and when I moved on to junior college and they stayed in high school, I became part of another group, classmates at the college. They too were not part of Pache’s social circle. But throughout, Pache and I remained, if not close, then definitely connected. He never abused our friendship and he was always kind and always generous. There was a bond between us, even if we were polar opposites. While I was the quiet, studious one, Pache was the gregarious, funny one. The guys liked him, the girls loved him and the teachers envied him and only pretended to be bothered by his antics. He was never elected class president but he was definitely the leader.

He was loud. He was boisterous and he was funny. There was a time, for instance, when he got into demanding of girls that they not “be soflami” – his shorthand for “soflamera,” which means easily excitable. Most of the girls had no idea what he was saying, but they would swear, to his delight, that, “I’m not being flami!”

And he was confident.

I remember once when our English teacher assigned us to write a “theme” – an essay – he proudly showed me how he was ending his, with a variation of Tennyson’s “Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die.” No citation; no attribution. I was impressed, but then I looked at the rest of his essay. There was absolutely nothing in there that supported or led to such a closing sentence. It had just come into his head and he thought it was neat and so he used it, with no regard as to whether it fit or not. I tried to explain that to him but he wouldn’t listen. He turned the paper in to Mrs. Lunz, who returned it with a big red X through the sentence. Pache could never figure out why she did that, but he knew she was wrong. That’s how sure he was of his instincts.

Pache and I continued to be classmates through junior college but then I moved to San Marcos to finish my college work and he joined the Army. He served in Vietnam, came back and married his high school girlfriend. They moved to Central Texas and, after their divorce, he moved to New Orleans where, I heard, he was highly successful in business. I think we saw each other maybe once or twice after he came back from Vietnam. I didn’t go to his mother’s funeral and he didn’t attend the recent celebration of his father’s 90^th birthday. I tried to contact him several times when I went to New Orleans on business, but I was never successful.

Earlier this year I learned that he’d fallen into hard times and that that his health was failing him. Sylvia convinced him to move to San Antonio, where she lives, to seek medical care at the VA hospital. But it was too late. It was only a matter of time before his vital organs would stop functioning. And that’s what they did this week, and Pache is now gone.

I DIDN’T VISIT him, for the same reasons I’ve avoided visiting friends and relatives in similar situations in the past: because I’m a coward and I don’t deal well with death and the dying.

I don’t know what I would have said to Pache if I had gone to see him, nor what he would have said to me. I don’t know if he would have appreciated my visit and my feeble attempts to provide comfort or consolation. But that doesn’t matter: he was more than a cousin; he was a friend and I should have been as generous to him as he was to me.

MY THOUGHTS AFTER having seen “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” the beautiful and moving film about (mostly black) back-up singers:

I don’t believe in an after-life and I don’t believe in reincarnation. However, if I am completely wrong and I do have to come back to this earth after I hang up the ol’ tennis shoes, can I please, please, please put in a request? I would like to come back as a black person.

If you can’t give me that, let me be born a Mexican again, and if not that, at least make me poor white trash.

Here’s my reasoning: I believe that, on average, black people live life more fully and more intensely than the rest of us. I am convinced that a black person’s lifetime is packed with several times more living than the average non-black person’s – not because blacks know how to live a fuller, richer life, but because they really have no choice, at least in the Western world.

Almost every black child entering this earth brings with him a suitcase stuffed with hardships and obstacles and demands that he will carry with him the rest of his life and that will have to strive mightily to overcome every day until the day he dies. And most of those obstacles will be there simply because of the way that baby looks – because of the color of his skin.

I know I’m risking accusations of racism here, but I truly, honestly believe that white people, as a whole, are not born with such life-altering heavy luggage. Latinos – at least the dark-skinned ones – are somewhere in between. Yes, I know there are exceptions, and I know that geography and other factors also play important roles. I know, for instance, that Will Smith’s kid will sail through life never having to worry that his skin color will make his life difficult. And I know that a poor white kid born in Appalachia will have a very difficult life. But I don’t think that we can deny that the average person of color has a much more challenging existence than do other Americans. If nothing else, the death of Trayvon Martin told us that.

My mother was not a racist (she married a man who was darker than many black people). Yet, many times, when she would see black people (there weren’t that many in my hometown) she would sigh and say, “Pobrecitos. I wonder why God created them!”

She wasn’t bemoaning the existence of black people in our midst. What my mother was doing, rather, was wondering why God made black people black – dark-skinned – knowing full well how much suffering that dark skin would inflict on them. My mother was born in Mexico but spent most of her life in South Texas and the agricultural states in the Midwest, where we would go work every summer. She didn’t have to read about racism or hear about it in the news to know how mean and cruel it was.

While she was light-skinned, most of her children – like me – had darker skin, as did most of the people in her immediate world. She knew first-hand of the prejudice against her people and the misery and suffering that meant. She was well aware that even among Mexicans, a light-skinned person had it better than a dark-skinned one. When we were up north working in the sugar beet or cucumber fields under the summer sun, she made certain that we all covered ourselves so that we would be protected from the sun’s effect. I’m sure she was concerned about our health, but she was probably more concerned about our skin’s turning darker and what that would mean for us.

If being Mexican can make life so hard, how much more difficult must it be when your skin is much darker, she no doubt wondered.

So you see, her suspiro was not anti-black at all. Rather, it was a muted wailing against the unfairness inflicted on these people by a God who is supposed to be all-loving. What she was saying was: knowing how difficult it is to be dark-skinned in this world, why would this omniscient God give them dark skin? She would have wondered the same thing about a person born with no legs, or no arms. Why would God do that?

SO, WHAT DOES all this have to do with the movie? Well, let’s call it the eye factor. I am convinced that a person’s eyes can tell us a lot about the kind of life he or she has lived, and every one of those back-up singers featured in the film had eyes that proclaimed loudly, “Mine has been a rough life; mine has been a life that has seen sorrow and pain and misery.”

They sang beautifully and beamed with radiant smiles and their voices were joyful, most of the time. But there was also undeniable pain in their voices, and that pain is reflected in their soulful eyes, the kind of eyes you see only on the faces of people who have lived a challenging life.

I believe that most black people live such lives and I believe that all that suffering and all those challenges and all that overcoming enriches their lives, but also forces them to pack decades of living into one year. Kind of like dog years: a 60-year-old black person has probably lived 120 years in white man’s years.

But it’s more than just their own experiences that affect how they approach life and its challenges. I buy the idea that our souls are molded by the collective lives and experiences – the good, the bad and the horrible – of all those who have come before us. It is those earlier lives of generation after generation of people who have suffered and struggled mightily that can be seen in the eyes of those singers and can be heard in their voices.

A FRIEND RECENTLY sent me a copy of an obituary of the mother of a friend of his. Tim, my friend, knew that I was from Crystal City and he had noticed that his friend’s mother, Genevieve Burdwell Poindexter, had lived in that town and was the widow of Cary Poindexter, a longtime doctor in Crystal City. He asked if I knew of him and I replied that Dr. Poindexter was our family doctor.

Dr. Poindexter was, for a long time, I believe, the only doctor in Crystal City. He delivered my two younger sisters and would had delivered me had I not been born in North Dakota. And his clinic was the only medical facility in the county for decades. My sister Mariana says that our family first heard of Dr. Poindexter from our grandparents, Alejandro and Manuela Palomo. One of them had required medical attention and they had gone to visit him, returning with words of praise for the fine young doctor who had just arrived in town. Later, they would tell of how the young gringo doctor had seen them walking home from running an errand downtown and offered them a ride to the house. Imagine that! A white man offering a couple of Mexicans a ride; that was just unheard of in those days.

I have only vague memories of Genevieve Poindexter. I do recall seeing her around the hospital, directing the administrative staff. If I had to describe her these many years later, I would say she looked like a young and better-looking Madeleine Albright. But I may be wrong. It’s been way too long. I remember Dr. Poindexter a bit better, but not much. He was somewhat older than his wife. His hair was white, or nearly white, and in my mind I picture him as a cross between Santa Claus and an un-gruff Walter Matthau.

The hospital – a pink Spanish colonial-style building – was on East Maverick Street (the white folks, for the most part, lived east of the railroad tracks while the Mexicans lived on the west side), a couple of blocks from the town’s main streets, which ran parallel to each other on each side of the railroad tracks. The Poindexter resident was next door. My sister Carmen lives two blocks east of where the hospital was. It was a beautiful building but it is long gone; it was razed many years ago by whoever bought the land under it. The house is still there, but it is unoccupied and in a sad state of disrepair. It looks as if it will cave in on itself any day. One building remains in the rear of the lot where the hospital once stood, a two-story stone building that was probably a servants quarters or a guest house. Somebody recently renovated it but it is still vacant.

One of the most vivid memories of that hospital is of a bunch of us neighborhood kids getting together to walk over to the clinic to get our polio shots, probably in the late 1950s. I think it was a series of three shots that we had to take, and each time we made an adventure out of it. We did not look forward to having our arms pricked but we knew the polio horror stories and gladly put up with a small amount of pain to free ourselves of that fear.

I rarely got sick when I was a kid, so I didn’t see Dr. Poindexter often. In fact, I doubt seriously I ever did visit him in his office until 1966 or 1967, when a leg injury became badly infected and I ended up having to spend a couple of nights in his clinic. He treated me well and my leg healed quickly, just as he assured me it would. Other members of my family spent more time with Dr. Poindexter, who owned not only the clinic, but also the pharmacy that was housed in the clinic.

Our family had no medical insurance (I don’t think any Mexican family did), and we had no credit cards or checking accounts, and we rarely had cash. But we knew that we could go to the clinic and see Dr. Poindexter and get treated for whatever ailed us and get whatever medicine we needed, whenever we needed it. We were never turned away, as far as I know, we never got any threatening debt-collection letters or calls (we didn’t have a phone, so that would have been impossible). We had a cuenta – an account – with El Poindexter, as we called him, and that was all we needed. We would pay down that cuenta whenever we could, which was probably every fall when we came back to town with the money we’d earned in the North Dakota sugar beet and potato fields.

Not long after he treated me for my leg injury, Dr. Poindexter closed his facility. By that time a couple of new younger doctors had come to town and started their own clinic. They probably proved too much competition and Dr. Poindexter, who was getting up in age, probably decided to retire. His departure meant that we no longer had a family doctor. We were forced to go to the new doctors, or the others that followed them, but it was never the same.

I wish I had known Mrs. Poindexter was still alive all these years. I would have liked to chat with her, to ask her questions about her experience, and her husband’s, in Crystal City.

WELL, SO MUCH for the Great Camping Trip of July 2013. New knife or no knew knife, we ain’t agoin’, as Lorettie would say. The doctor said that while my sister’s knee wasn’t in that, going on a long trip simply would not be the prudent thing to do.

So we’re not. At least not this month. If things go well, we will try again in a little over a month, which is about the time during which we have done most of our camping forays in the past. It’s a disappointment, of course, but my sister’s health is more important. She feels bad that she’s holding the rest of us back but we have all been sincere in our assurances that it’s not that big of a deal.

In the meantime, I just have to figure out what I’m going to do with myself for the next five or six weeks. I will eventually have to make my way back to Houston, but I think first we’re going to try to make a short camping trip to the Hill Country north of here.

YOU KNOW WHAT they say about best-laid plans? True, very true. Our Great Western Adventure was to start on Monday but it seems that a bum knee has thrown a monkey into the wrench (I heard a guy say that on the radio the other day).

The knee in question belongs to my sister Carmen. She went on her daily morning walk earlier this week and fell, hurting her knee. She didn’t think it was anything serious because it didn’t hurt that much and she could walk OK. But she had a doctor’s appointment a couple of days ago and went ahead and had her knee X-rayed. The resulting photo showed a cracked knee cap. She’s supposed to see a specialist but because of the long holiday weekend, she has yet to be able to make an appointment. 

A relaxing Fourth. Morning at the Y followed by several hours in my friend’s pool.

If things go well, today will be my last day in Houston for a while. Tomorrow I’m heading south to meet up with two of my sisters and my brother-in-law to start our month-long trip out west. Driving straight through to California (Los Banos and Gilroy) to visit out two oldest sisters for a week or so, then heading north towards Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, then back down to Texas —  to camp out in state and national parks.

Unlike with previous such trips, I have done little planning and have no reservations at any of the parks. The only thing I really care about is seeing, at last, Glacier National Park. As I’ve done in past trips, I will be blogging about the trip at www.juanzqui.com. Some of you have enjoyed these posts in the past and I hope  that you enjoy these also.

I’m looking forward to this. I haven’t done much writing since my retirement. Have just not been in a writing mood. But travel has a way of bringing out the writer in me.

Trying to make important decisions on what to take with me. Electronic stuff, in particular. Definitely my iPhone. I may leave the iPad behind. I will need my Mac notebook computer (for downloading photo files), and I really would love to take my Microsoft Surface, because I love writing on it. But that’s a lot gear to carry, in addition to my cameras and lenses and other photo equipment. Decisions.

BOSTON IS A beautiful, wonderful city. It is special and different in the sense that every American city is special and different: it has things – history, demography, geography, architecture, etc. — that no other American city has. Like other cities, it has many wonderful people. It also has many not-so-wonderful people. Anyone who spent time in parts of Boston during the school segregation fights can attest to the reality that there are some ugly, ugly people in that town.

And while Boston may be all those things and more, it is not unique, not in the sense that many politicians and commentators have been trying to convince us over the past week. That is in how it reacted to the marathon bombings, and in how it will rebound. The bombers, President Obama told us, “picked the wrong city,” as if there is a right or easy city for terrorists to target. Would the bombers have been smarter by choosing Houston or Des Moines or Bismarck — because people there are wimps?

Many, including the president, have told us that Bostonians, because they are Bostonians, will not be deterred; they will pick up the pieces and march – or run – on. Others have raved about how civil and civic-minded Bostonians reacted to the bombings and the dramatic search for the killers. There were no calls for suspension of civil liberties, one writer marveled.

All of that is fine, except that their claim is that how Boston handled this crisis is unique because Boston is unique. And that is paired with the implication that no other city in the world would have done it that way. Which is utter nonsense. Many cities have dealt nobly, and with grander gestures, with similar – or worse – crises. New York, just a few short hours west of Boston, was tested mightily nearly 13 years ago when it was forced to deal with a man-made disaster few imagined possible, involving the deaths of thousands of innocent people. San Francisco, Chicago and Galveston were nearly destroyed by disasters, natural and man-made. West Coast cities have dealt with earthquakes, Midwest cities with tornadoes and flooding and Gulf and Atlantic Coast cities with hurricanes. In all cases, the people of those cities or towns have demonstrated immeasurable courage and resiliency and kindness and charity, and they have rebuilt their cities.

To say that Bostonians, because they are Bostonians and therefore unique and special, will fight back to restore normalcy in their city is to engage in dishonesty. They are fighting back and engaging in extraordinary acts of charity and community-building because they are people, just as people all over the country – and indeed, all over the world – do. Human beings are naturally wired to act in ways that ensures their survival, and if rebuilding, taking care of neighbors, and making certain that the rules of co-existence are observed is what will help ensure their survival, that’s what they will do. Not just in Boston, but everywhere.

I UNDERSTAND THAT in times of tragedy and loss we often feel compelled to stretch the truth a bit in the interest of helping survivors better cope with their grieving and shock over horrendous events. And, yes, I understand the need by many all over this country to reassure Bostonians that things will get better, that life will go on. But we can do that without lying to them and to ourselves. Things will get better, not because Bostonians are unique or stronger or more civic-minded than the rest of us, but because Bostonians are humans — and as humans they will do whatever is necessary to ensure that things will indeed get better. That is what we can and should celebrate and extol.

ONE OF MY college roommates was from West, site of the deadly explosion last night.

Larry loved to introduce himself to people with, “Hi, I’m from West Texas.”

Inevitably, he would get the response he expected to get: “Where in West Texas?”

That allowed him to laugh out loud and explain that he wasn’t from West Texas at all, but from West, the small town north of Waco.

I visited West once, with him and another friend. We were on our way to the East Coast for some national conference and we spent the night with his parents. Pleasant Czech people in a pleasant Czech town.

I’VE BEEN THINKING about Larry since I heard of the explosion last night and wondering if Larry is still living in West, and if he and his family are OK. I hope so.

The strange thing about this latest disaster is that, as horrendous as it is, I found myself almost breathing a sigh of relief that it was an accident, not the result of the actions of a madman or madmen, as in Boston, Newtown, Aurora, Tucson and many of the other scenes of the results of madmen gone wild.

Maybe I’m alone in feeling this way, but when we get to the point where even just one of us quietly feels a pang of gratitude or relief that the death of a dozen or so people in one single incident was the result of an accident or negligence or an act of nature – as in the tornados that we will soon start reading about – it is, unfortunately, a sad indication of how far we’ve fallen as a society.

Even as we are horrified and filled with rage over the mass killings by ideological, religious or racial extremists for whom human life has lost all vestiges of preciousness, I’m afraid that we may be on the verge of becoming inured to these acts of terror.

For starters, can anything equal the shear enormity of the 9-11 mass murders? Whether we want to or not, we find ourselves measuring every new incident since then with the yardstick established by the Twin Towers attacks.

And then there’s the sheer numbers and frequency of these insane incidents. We had barely begun to place the memory of Tucson in the back regions of our memory when we were hit by the stunning reality of the Aurora shootings. And just as we were making progress in moving beyond Aurora, we were hit by the brutality of the carnage at Newtown. And now, even as we are still talking and thinking of those children and school teachers and administrators, we are being slapped across the face with the bloody images of collapsing runners and legless spectators.

AND NOW WE are aching for Boston and trying mightily to control our rage. Will we have time to fully mourn, fully deal with our anger over this act before the next madman strikes?

How many more memorial services will our president have to attend to issue words of condolence and comfort and to assure the locals and the nation and the world that America will not be sidelined by these acts? Have we got to the point where the White House speechwriters already have remarks prepared for the next mass murder? Will these attacks become so common that the president will stop attending them because he won’t have the time?

Can we really believe the assurances that America will not be deterred by these madmen when we have precious little time to mourn the last act of terror — because we must brace ourselves for the next one?

And will we be so drained of empathy or sympathy or sorrow that we won’t have enough left over for the next West?

I know, I know. I’m not offering any answers here. I’m not pointing to solutions. I can’t talk about a better future. I’m sorry. I have none of that. All I have are words strung crudely together to express what all of us are feeling: anger, frustration and sadness. Profound sadness.