juanzqui

August 17, 2013

IT’S BEEN A while since I’ve been on a plane — since December, I believe — and I didn’t realize how much I missed it. I’m on my way to Montreal aboard an Embrear 170, the larger of the jets made by the Brazilian company. This is the first time I’ve flown this type of small plane. Unlike the smaller version, the 170 has a first class, or business class, section, and that’s where I’m sitting, thanks to either United Airlines’ generosity or mistake.

It’s supposed to be a three hour-y-cacho flight but the captain said a while ago that because of strong tailwinds, we’ll be there about 40 minutes early, which means we’ll be in Montreal about 5:15 and I should be at my hotel by 6:30 or so. I’m eager to meet my friends, Rick and Zoe Cowan and their kids, Gabe and Sophie, for dinner. I haven’t seen them since I bid them a tearful goodbye in early January. They are staying in an apartment they found through AirB&B, but we’ll be staying in the same hotel in Quebec City.

I love flying. I have loved it since the first time I got on an American Airlines Boeing 707 from San Antonio to San Francisco back in the early 70s. I was teaching art at San Marcos High School and I guess I thought I was rich because I bought tickets for myself and my parents to fly to California to spend Christmas with my sisters, in Gilroy. I wore a tie on that first flight, as did my father. It was what men did back then when they flew.

We flew coach but the service we got was equivalent to what we get on first class these days (except that the booze wasn’t free). We got a full meal on real dishes and glasses and with metal silverware, and cloth napkins. I don’t remember what we were served, but it tasted heavenly. I chose the window seat because I wanted to see exactly where we were flying. By the time we got to San Francisco, my neck was hurting badly because I spent the entire three hours or so looking down at the earth below. The biggest thrill was being able to identify from 30,000 feet the roads we had driven over when we traveled to California over several summers to work in the food processing industry. The plane’s route pretty much followed I-10 to Los Angeles and then US 101 to San Francisco, so that I was able to identify the towns and cities I had driven through.

Before getting on the plane, my siblings and I had worried about how my parents would handle flying because they too had never flown before. My sister-in-law even gave my mother some sort of pill to take to calm her nerves should she need it. She never did. Both my father and mother acted as if they had flown all their lives. They traveled with dignity, authority and an almost-regal disposition. I was so in awe of them. They didn’t even flinch when, as we were approaching the San Francisco airport the plane started to shake and rattle. I looked out at the wings and they looked as if they were flapping, like a bird’s wings. I nearly shit in my pants for I was certain we were going to crash into the San Francisco Bay. Yet my parents set calmly, as if they were in front of their TV watching a telenovela.

THAT WAS THE beginning of my love affair with flying. Soon after that I discovered Braniff Airlines and its colors and vibrancy and air of excitement. I flew it to New York and Chicago and loved every minute of it, and I mourned mightily when it went under. I loved the 707s and hated it when the 737s began to replace them, but that didn’t keep me from flying. I was excited when the 747 was introduced and couldn’t wait to fly on it. I got my wish when I flew from JFK to LAX, with a stop in Phoenix, aboard one of those giant graceful birds.

In 1984, when I was assigned to work out of Barbados, I loved the idea that in order for me to get to Central America or much of the Caribbean from that island, I first had to fly to Miami, and I started racking up miles on the Eastern Airlines frequent flier program. The first password I ever had to memorize was for this program, and it is still a valid password for my United frequent flier program (Eastern was bought by Continental, which merged with United). I loved flying back to Barbados on the L1011 used on that route. There was a certain whir to that plane’s engines that I had not heard before and haven’t heard since that was just so soothing and reassuring. The flight took off in the late afternoon, which meant that if I sat on the right side, I could look out the window to witness some spectacular Caribbean sunsets. I made it a habit to play (on my Walkman) either Rimzky-Korzakov’s Scheherazade or The New World Symphony by Dvorak, both perfect soundtracks for that orgasmic visual feast.

In 1982, I was covering politics for The Houston Post and I got to travel a lot with candidates for statewide office. My favorite was Mark White, who was running for governor. He flew all over the state but he insisted on spending every night in Austin, and every day, after the last campaign stop when the plane’s nose was pointed towards the state capital, we knew it would be only a matter of minutes following takeoff before White would say, “It’s time for a drink.” The complete opposite was flying with dour, sour Jim Mattox, who was running for attorney general. He did not drink.

With White there also was the extra thrill of riding on a helicopter, LBJ-style, from campaign stop to campaign stop in the Rio Grande Valley.

In 1998 I got to travel with Michael Dukakis in the general election campaign. I flew in the press plane that followed the candidate’s plane. It was called the zoo plane, for good reason. On that plane, there were a number of flight attendants, but their jobs were not to tell you to sit down or to buckle your seat belts. Their job was to make sure you had all the food and drink you needed or wanted, when you wanted it. And if there was any booze left over at the end of the day, they would distribute those little liquor bottles to anyone who wanted them. I don’t think I bought any alcohol for several months after the election was over.

On the last Saturday of the campaign, we started in Milwaukee and made stops in Chicago and one other place before a giant rally in McAllen, from which we flew to Denver to spend the night. It was decided that this being our last Saturday together, we would have a margarita party, and the flight crew made it happen. As soon as we left the McAllen airport, the margaritas started flowing (we also had Tex-Mex food). It so happened that my seat was right across from the galley so I spent the entire couple of hours or so to Denver standing there, gulping down one margarita, placing my glass on the counter and picking up another one (luckily most of our stories had been filed for the day before we left Texas). By the time we got to Denver I was so drunk that I have no memory of getting to the hotel and to this day I am amazed that I didn’t lose my Trash 80 computer or any of my other stuff (one radio reporter did lose his equipment and I never found out if he ever located it).

Dukakis had an early morning rally in Colorado and so we all had very early wake-up calls. I woke up with the worst hangover I have ever had. The schedule called for rallies in Oregon, Seattle and San Francisco with an overnight stay in San Francisco. Sometime during the day, however, somebody in the campaign decided that Dukakis needed to travel to Ohio for a last-minute rally. I guess polling showed that an Ohio win was possible. Ha! We were told that we had an option: join Dukakis on a smaller plane from Seattle to Cleveland, where Dukakis would attend a breakfast rally, then fly back to San Francisco — or fly from Seattle to San Francisco. I called my editor, hoping he’d tell me to skip Cleveland but it was not to be.

So, still hung over, I flew halfway across the country (back then I couldn’t sleep on planes, so there was no hope of getting any sleep), covered the breakfast rally, got back on the plane and flew back halfway across the country to San Francisco. They took us to the hotel to join the rest of the press corps but we were only there long enough to take a shower before we were hustled back on the bus. That was probably the most expensive shower I’ve ever taken because the room cost something like $400 a night!

And there I was, still hung over and with almost no sleep, following the candidate as he made his final push in Southern California. After his last rally in San Diego that night we were supposed to fly straight back to Boston but another smart-ass in the campaign decided it would be a good idea to stop in Des Moines for a final, final rally — at 4 a.m.! We finally made it to Boston around 8 on Election Day, where I was at last able to get some sleep and get rid of the two-day hangover. (I really need to go back to look at my clips to read what I wrote on those last few campaign days!)

But of all my flying experiences, nothing beats flying aboard the Concorde. I was back in Houston, in 1984, when British Airways decided to join American Airlines in flying the Concorde from London to Dallas for the summer. They invited reporters for the inaugural flight but our aviation reporter wasn’t interested and I quickly said I would do it. We flew from Texas to London on a regular plane and spent the night there. The next day we got to go to the airport to look at the plane.

I have a photo of myself somewhere, kicking the tires of the Concorde. Then the next day we got aboard that beautiful bird and flew across the Atlantic to Washington Dulles then on to Dallas. The pilots allowed the reporters to fly in the cockpit for a while and it just so happened that my turn came when we were about to land in Dallas, and so I got to experience, first a flyover DFW, and then the actual landing, all while looking over the pilots’ shoulders. It was over way too soon, but it was an experience I will never forget.

While I doubt that any aviation experience can equal that one, other than maybe flying into space, which I have no desire of doing, I am still looking forward to new ones. I was really hoping, for instance, that this trip would involve a flight on the 787 Dreamliner, and I certainly would like to fly on the Airbus double decker plane.

THE ONE THING about flying that I’ve noticed is that it puts me in a reflective and writing mood. So, all those who have encouraged me to write more, maybe you might want to send a few bucks my way so I can afford to fly more and write more.

I’M SITTING IN a coffee shop, alone, at a table for four. Normally I take a smaller table but this is the only one unoccupied. I see a grandmother and her grandson, about four years old, come to a nearby two-person table that has just become available. They are carrying their drinks and grilled-cheese sandwiches. The grandmother is looking around with a pained look on her face and, after a while, asks if she can have one of the chairs at my table. I realize that her party is larger than just the two of them so I ask her if she’d like to switch tables.

 

She is grateful, very grateful, and tells her grandson that the nice gentleman has offered to switch tables and isn’t that nice, and so we begin the big switch. As this is going on, the woman’s daughter or daugher-in-law arrives carrying her sandwich and drink. The older woman tells her that I offered to trade tables. The younger woman says nothing, and instead begins to move my stuff out of the way so she can make room for her food and stuff. Because I was trying to hurry, I leave the black plastic coffee cup lid behind. She picks it up and unceremoniously drops it on my table.

 

I look up in disbelief and see a face that shouts out, “I’m entitled! Get over it!”

 

It’s a face I’ve seen many, many times in my life, and almost all of them have been white faces.

 

I’m entitled to hog this sidewalk or this hallway, and it’s your duty to move out of the way.

 

I’m entitled to get on that elevator and it’s your duty to hold the door open for me.

 

I’m entitled to get in front of you in this heavy traffic and it’s your duty to make room for me.

 

I’m entitled to walk through this doorway and it’s your duty to hold it open.

 

I’m entitled to have this last grocery cart and it’s your duty to wait for another one to come along.

 

I’m entitled to be waited on next at this coffee shop and it’s your duty to be patient while I get my coffee.

 

I’m entitled! I’m entitled! I’m entitled!

 

Several years ago I decided that I’d had enough and I forced myself to not hold doors open for white people even though not doing so went against all that my parents and my grandparents had taught me.

 

I decided that if I was walking down a hallway or a sidewalk and a white person came straight at me, I would hold my ground and force that person to detour around me.

 

I decided that if a white person near me accidentally dropped something, I would keep on walking and not pick it up for him or her.

 

I decided to not do all those nice things I had been doing for people because that is what good people do for others. I didn’t like it and I felt bad but eventually I began to get over it.

 

Sometimes I fail and forget my resolve, as I did today, and I do the right thing, only to get that putrid air of entitlement blown into my face.

 

I realize that a good percentage of the white people who read this won’t understand and might even be offended. I fully expect them to give me examples of how they have been treated similarly by Mexicans or blacks or other minorities. I will accept those examples and believe them because I know there are a lot of very angry/frustrated/fed up/etc. Mexicans/Blacks/Asians/Native American/etc. out there. They have had it with those airs of entitlement and have decided to fight back. Screw manners. Screw kindness. Screw love they neighbor. Screw turn the other cheek.

 

I also expect that some white readers will give me examples of how they too have had to move aside to accommodate other white people’s sense of entitlement. It’s not a race thing, they will assure me. That woman who wanted my table might have treated a white person exactly the same way, they will say.

 

Maybe. But when you grow up in a deeply racist society in deeply racist times when it seemed that the whole world conspired to make you believe that white people were indeed entitled to have what they wanted, when they wanted it, and it was up to you to step aside to let them have it, it’s very difficult to believe otherwise.

 

It’s very difficult not to rant.

 

I don’t expect you to understand. If you didn’t find yourself nodding in understanding when President Obama talked about walking into an elevator and seeing white women clutching their purses, you probably won’t understand what I’m talking about here. That’s OK.

 

I have been very fortunate in that I have many, many white friends and I have known many, many white people who have treated me with dignity and respect and have not let the color of my skin influence them. I appreciate them very, very much. It is because of them that I was able to temper much of the race-related anger and resentment I grew up with. But every once in a while something like this happens and a dark hand reaches down deep inside me and pulls at those painful, humiliating memories, making me want to scream. 

 

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.