juanzqui

Sept. 7, 2012

The airline giveth and the airline taketh away.  Just as I was about to sing United’s praises for having upgraded me to first class between BWI and Houston, I get to my assigned seat on the plane that is taking me to San Antonio, an Embrair pretend jet. I’m on the very last row. On the aisle seat. If I recline my seat I could likely hit whoever is in the bathroom behind me. To top it off, my row mate, on the aisle seat is Tip O’Neal, complete with a red face framed by a shock of white hair and 500 pounds of whatever wrapped in a light blue shirt and a linen coat.  He really does look like O’Neill  
Tip is nice and so I can’t be rude to him, but he’s also talkative, so I am forced to be a bit rude to him. I take out my iPad and begin reading my book, but that doesn’t seem to have any effect on him, and I resort to  taking out my headphones, plug them in and begin listening to Tony De La Rosa.  If Tip continued talking to me, I didn’t hear. 
He no longer is. I know that for a fact because he is now in the middle of an intense conversation with an an attractive off-duty flight attendant sitting next to him. In the aisle. No, not the aisle seat, but in a pull-down seat that is actually in the aisle! The regular flight attendant came back here a while a go and looked at us ,smiling.
“Like peas in a pod,” he said, making a sweeping motion with his left hand. 
Try sardines. 
Tip has now taken out his iPad and is showing his new friend some photos. She appears to be engrossed by the photos and Tip is immensely pleases
Tip apologized when he got to our row. “I’m really sorry to have to do this to you,” he said, looking at my not-so-tiny bulk of brownness. 
“that’s OK,” I assured him.  “it’s only a 45-minute flight.”
And I was being sincere. How can I be upset with him for being overweight when there’s nothing underweight about me?
So I squeezed in to my seat and leaned against the window. Fortunately, these planes have plenty of elbow room on the window side, so the situation is bearable. Or it should be for 45 minutes. So, take it away, Flaco. Play that accordion version of “San Antonio Rose” once more. Dale gas!

August 28, 2012

I USED TO BE disdainful of those who immerse themselves in genealogy, who spend much of their lives searching for that one drop of royal blood that will validate their own existence, as if their own lives were meaningless without a connection to someone noble or great decades or centuries ago.

I don’t feel that way anymore. At least not that strongly. I still believe that many people are into genealogy for the wrong reasons. They have somehow convinced themselves that their friends or acquaintances will hold them in higher esteem if they can prove that a great, great, great grandfather was a cousin to the king of England’s butler, or that a great, great grandmother belonged to a great Indian tribe.

But I’ve also come to know people who are very much interested in genealogy simply because they are curious, or because they like the challenge of getting through the numerous obstacles to be encountered in a genealogical quest. One of my nieces is a serious genealogy buff. She has earned a PhD. and has accomplished much, professionally and personally, so she doesn’t need any connection to a great or famous ancestor to validate her life. She has done a lot of work because she enjoys doing the research, and I have thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in the names and dates she has found that connect me all the way back to a poor Mexican Indian couple near San Luis Potosi sometime in the mid-1600s. I am grateful for her work; I don’t think I’d have the patience and persistence she has.

At the same time, I find myself more drawn to more recent history, to the lives and stories of the people I knew as a child, or heard about when growing up. I am fascinated by their lives and I regret that I didn’t spend more time trying to learn more about them while they were still on this earth. But it’s the same thing. Some people are interested in distant past, others in more recent ancestors.

And I think it’s good. I think it has value, not because we can find glory or honor in the past, and not because it will validate our worth. We are worth something. Here. Today. We have value in our own right. We have honor, and it matters little whether our ancestors were kings or slaves, captains of industry or peons.

Knowing who our ancestors were and what they did does help put our lives in perspective. It helps us understand where we fit in the whole scheme of things. But there is a danger in becoming too involved in genealogy, or even in the recent past. We run the risk of living in the past, not in the present, of yearning for the things that were and not learning how to deal with the things that are.

And, as I said, we end up with a misplaced sense of pride, or even shame: I am great because my great-great something-or-other was of noble blood. Or, I can’t possibly be great because all my ancestors were nobodies.

I have always maintained that the only things that we can be proud of are the things that we did ourselves, or that we helped accomplish. That’s why I’ve always avoided boasts such as, “I am proud to be an American,” or, “I am proud to be Mexican.” I am damn glad I have Mexican blood in my veins and I will forever be grateful to my parents for having decided – for whatever reason – to move to this country, making it possible for me to be to be born on American soil, but I am not proud of it. I had absolutely nothing to do with either of those two things.

Again, we can’t take pride in things we didn’t create or cause. But we can take pride in what we do with the knowledge we gain about our past, about those who came before us, and how we use that knowledge to better ourselves – and our world.

If our ancestors’ struggle for freedom and dignity – or just simply survival – can help us gain the strength to do the same, for ourselves and for others, then the knowledge of their struggle is clearly worth something. If, however, all we do with that knowledge is brag about it, then we haven’t put it to good use and, in fact, wasted a lot of valuable time (our own time and the time of those who must listen to our stories).

Let me give you an example. Another relative has done extensive genealogical research on my mother’s side of the family. She talks excitedly about a story she has heard but hasn’t been able to verify. It’s about a distant relative who was in the Mexican army and was assigned to be part of the firing squad that was to execute the emperor Maximilian.

According to the story, this distant uncle/cousin/whatever simply could not allow himself to take part in the killing of defenseless man, and so he refused. And for that he faced the firing squad himself. What a great story! This is a story that I would really – really! — love to be true. I mean, here is a man who supposedly did what I would love to believe I would do in a similar situation.

But we’ll probably never know if that story is true. And even if it did turn out to be true, what good will it do me? Will it make me a better person? A nobler person? Will it make me better than my colleagues or neighbors of friends? No. Not one bit.

If, however, I were to keep that knowledge of that brave and principled ancestor in my heart and use it to strengthen my backbone the next time circumstances demand that I speak up or act, then that knowledge will have been worthwhile.

The simple truth is that our heritage is not what makes us better than those around us. It may make us different, or set us apart, but it doesn’t make us better. Only when we figure out how to apply the differences for the greater good can we say that we are truly paying tribute to our ancestors.

And the simple imperative is that we should not spend our present concentrating on the past while ignoring today and avoiding the future. That would be like driving while looking only at the rear-view mirror. A rear-view mirror is essential, but only because it allows us to move forward. And if we really insist on looking behind us, we should look at our more recent past. We should not concentrate on the distant past while ignoring the lives of our older folks who are still with us today and who carry with them much knowledge and wisdom. We should not ignore the lives of our parents and grandparents. Their words – which are infused with life and soul – are much more important, much more meaningful than stuffy, dusty old books crammed with facts and faceless names and numbers.

I worry that the children and grandchildren of my nephews and nieces have almost no knowledge or appreciation of the lives of their grandparents and great grandparents, of the struggles and obstacles they had to overcome to allow them to give their children the lives they have today.

Even worse, I worry that some of them, those who were born into a life of relative privilege, might believe that they earned what was given to them and now look down their noses at those who are less privileged – the new immigrants, the welfare or food stamp recipients (I am reminded of Ann Richards’ observation about George Bush: he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple).

We owe it to our children to connect them to those who came before them. We should not let any one of those old people go to their graves without recording their stories. If we do, our children and grandchildren will one day wonder why in the world we failed to do that for them.

(I wrote this for USA Today and it appeared on March 3, 1997)

Not long ago, I was at the 88th birthday celebration of my Tía Chavela – Isabel Espinoza Palomo. Ever since, I have been haunted by the scene of her wiping away tears from that wonderfully wrinkled face as she sat in her wheel-chair in front of a multi-candled cake while her children and grandchildren sang “Las Mañanitas.“

I marveled at her beauty, and I was struck by the realization of just how much this widow of a long-dead uncle had affected my life, and how she and others in my community helped make me who I am. I have many memories of Tía Chavela, but two will forever stand out. The first is of a day 31 years ago when my mother and I were finishing cleaning up our old family house, the one my grandfather had built, because we were moving across town after Urban Renewal decided to run a street through our property.

As we loaded the last few things in the car, Tía Chavela walked from her house across the street and said to my mother, in Spanish, “Woman, why hadn’t you told me that you are leaving me alone already?)?”

With that, the two sisters-in-law threw their arms around each other and just stood there, crying.

They were to continue visiting for another quarter century until my mother died, but it would never be the same, for never were they able to see each other simply by strolling across the street. The bond had been broken; our little village – which had included other various aunts and uncles and their families – had been dissolved.

The second memory is from when I was 5 years old when I went her house and she talked me into giving her a preview of my upcoming dance performance at my kindergarten’s play. She laughed with much delight and applauded when I finished, but she never reached out to touch me. And that, as those who are familiar with the Mexican culture know, is a huge mistake, for failing to touch those things and people we admire is a sure way to give them what we call, “el mal de ojo.”

“Mal de ojo” has often been translated as “‘The Evil Eye,” but it is nothing of the sort. It is, literally, the disease caused by the eye. It is the illness that results when we fail to follow through on our initial approving impulse. It is the result of our stinginess, of our holding back of praise and of our unwillingness or inability to communicate our admiration.

In essence, mal de ojo is a disease caused by selfishness, by pride. It is a reminder that, as members of society, we have an obligation to become involved, to reach out and touch someone – to offer not only our approval, but also our warmth and our nurturing.

Sure enough, the very next day, I became ill, and it wasn’t until she performed her mysterious and beautiful sorcery with a raw egg and supplications to God that I started to feel better.

I relate this story to point out the importance of family, neighbors and friends – our village, if you will – in determining who we are, how we react to what life has given us and what we do to make this world a better place.

One of the tragic things about modem life is that too many of us buy into the myth that we are self-made. And that, being self-made, we owe nothing to those who have come before us and those still with us, influencing our thoughts and our actions. An even grander tragedy is our impulse to erect walls around us – walls to keep people away from us, walls to keep us from seeing what is around us that makes us or might make us, uncomfortable. No longer content to build fences around our homes, we now need the extra barrier of a wall, complete with a guarded gate, around our communities.

Many of us don’t even know our neighbors. Worse, we don’t even want to know them because we don’t want to become involved in their lives and their problems.

In insulating ourselves from the ugliness around us, we deprive ourselves of the benefits of the kind and caring caresses of the Tía Chavelas that offer us at least some protection from the self-centered impulses around us.

Last month Tía Chavela’s children and grandchildren once again gathered around her. This time, they gathered not to sing “Las Mañanitas,” but to bury her, and to celebrate her life. A few weeks earlier she had said no to treatment that would have prolonged her life.

“I’ve lived long enough,” she said in defense of her decision. And so she died, with her daughters at her bedside.

It’s her decision, of course, but for me, people like Tía Chavela never live long enough.

[This is part of a column I wrote sometime in the 1970s for the Hays County Citizen, with some edits.]

BACK WHEN URBAN Renewal first came to Crystal City it decided that it was going to put a road right through our yard. Because my bedroom was in the way, El Riniú decided that our house would have to be torn down and we would have to build one somewhere else.

Our house was old and it evidenced the scars of termites that had invaded several years earlier. The white paint job it had received in the 1950s was mostly gone by then, and its floors were warped from the numerous floods that over the years had periodically slowly crept up from the bayuque – or bayouqui, as the white folks called the low-lying area to the west of town. But it was one of the better homes in the neighborhood – and it was ours. We didn’t owe anybody any money for it.

It was one of those homes that you read about that begin with a single room and a kitchen and, as the family grows, it gradually becomes larger, with rooms being added as they are needed. By the time it was torn down, it had four bedrooms, a living room-dining room area and a kitchen, all large rooms. The only thing it lacked was an indoor bathroom, which was somewhat inconvenient – especially in very cold or very hot weather.

My grandfather had built it for us. He was not a fantastic carpenter but he knew what he was doing. He never used blue-prints or any other kind of plans. All we had to do was tell him in very general terms what we wanted and he would build it.

I guess that if anybody should get any credit for that house, it should be my two older sisters, who quit school while they were still quite young and lied about their age so that they could get a job at the local Del Monte cannery.

It was María Luisa’s and Delfina’s hard work – and their unselfishness – that built that house. And, of course, it was the rest of us and our parents who maintained it and added the last two rooms.

And yet, when Urban Renewal came along they told us it was worth only $4,000. As a piece of property it no doubt was worth only $4,000, but as a home – our home – to us it was worth a lot more. Not only could $4.000 not pay for a new home and a new lot, it could not ever purchase the memories of the good times and the sad times that were created in that old house.

I can imagine what it must have been like for my mother, in particular: except for me, who was born in North Dakota, all of her children were born into that house and all of us grew up there. Her second child died there when he was seven years old and she herself lay there for weeks near death while a quack doctor told her there was nothing wrong with her and my oldest sister, only six years old at the time, took care of the other children and the household. It was to that house that my two older brothers came home from the service in the middle of the night for happy, tearful reunions.

But there was not much we could do about it. You couldn’t fight Urban Renewal. We settled for the $4,000 and arranged to have another house built clear across town for some $10.000. It was a much smaller house but that’s all we could afford. That may sound like very little money today, but back then – the mid-1960s – it was a lot, especially for two people who were about to rely solely on Social Security for their income.  

The thing that kept bothering me as we moved our stuff from the old house to the new one (I was the only one left at home by then, everyone else having gotten married) was the fact that if it hadn’t been for Urban Renewal, there would not have had to be that need to go into debt to purchase a new house. Probably for a little over $1,000 we could have added the bathroom and repaired it enough to make it livable for a lot more years.

But even more important: there would have never been the scattering of Palomos all over Crystal City. Before Urban Renewal, all three Palomo families lived within shouting distance of each other. Tío Adrián and his family lived next door while Tía Chavela, my other uncle’s widow, and her family lived just across the street. Other relatives and close friends also lived close by.

That last day in our old house, as we were loading up the last few of our possessions onto a truck, only Tía Chavela was still holding out against Urban Renewal. Among all the commotion and confusion of packing and moving, we had somehow forgotten to tell her that we were moving on that day, and when she looked out the window and saw us loading the truck she slowly made her way across the street. She stopped by the truck and, as my mother emerged from the house, she said, “Mujer, por qué no me habías dicho que ya me ibas a dejar sola?” (Woman, why hadn’t you told me that you are leaving me alone already?)

Tears were streaming down her face as she spoke. My mother dropped whatever she was carrying and went to her and, the two women embraced and cried together, their bodies shaking. Watching them, I could do was curse El Riniú and all it stood for.

It was one of the saddest scenes I had ever witnessed. There they were, these two grown women, related only through marriage, crying their eyes out because they would no longer be neighbors.

They had lived near each other for so many years. They had worked side by side in the fields of North Dakota. They had enjoyed the good times together and consoled each other through the bad times, and they had helped each other out through periods of poverty. They had watched each other’s children grow up. They had helped each other as their children got sick and they had held each other when they both lost children to illnesses. They had come from different regions and cultures in Mexico but they became like sisters.

And now they could no longer be neighbors because Urban Renewal had decided that they would be better off in new houses with indoor bathrooms, and because Urban Renewal decided that a street should run right through my bedroom.

So they now both have good houses with indoor bathrooms and with floors that do not creak as much and walls that do not shake as much and windows that do not rattle as much. Except that one is at one end of town while the other is at the other end.

They do see each other occasionally, when their children can find the time to drive them for a visit. They talk briefly after Mass or at the church bingo each Sunday evening and they converse over the phone every once in a while.

The rest of the time, they sit in front of their television sets and watch their historias, soap operas on the Spanish channel as they patch together a quilt for the latest grandchild.

And when there aren’t any good telenovelas to watch, they stand there, leaning against the walls that do not shake as much and looking out the windows that do not rattle as much, hoping to see one of their children coming to visit.

And the children do come, but they can only stay for a short period for they have their own lives to live. And so, when the children leave, they stand out on the porch and wave goodbye to them as they drive off. They hold back the tears until the children have turned the corner are out of sight because they don’t want their children to be hurt or to feel guilty.

Then they cry until there are no more tears left in their tear ducts. And they go back to their television, and to their quilts – and to staring out the windows.  

But they have good houses in which they can cry and do those other things old people do. If it hadn’t been for Urban Renewal, they would only have old, “sub-standard” houses. And if it hadn’t been for Urban Renewal, they would also have their friends and neighbors nearby to talk to and share their loneliness.

(I wrote this for The Austin American Statesman in the late 1990s)

My mother was a hummer.
Except when she was visiting with somebody – or listening to her historias on the radio – she was humming. She hummed as she patched together her quilts. She hummed as she sewed, crocheted or knitted. She hummed as she cooked or washed dishes. She hummed as she watered her plants.
In the summertime, when we were up north working in the sugar beet fields, she hummed as she hacked away at the weeds with her hoe, the muted murmur flowing sweetly from beneath the flaps of her garsole – the long-hooded bonnet that protected her from the sun.
And she hummed as she ironed. Especially when she ironed.
The tunes were more often than not nameless and unrecognizable, but at times she hummed familiar hymns – slow-paced ones like “Viva María,” “Bendito,” or “O María, Madre Mía.”
Mamá never used a steam iron. To moisten the clothes, she dipped her fingers into a small bowl of water. Forming a tentative fist, she shook her hand slightly as she passed it over the shirt or dress, much like a priest blessing his flock with holy water.
The splish-splish-splishing of the water escaping her clutch was like a muted snare drum that provided the tempo for her simple symphony.
We never asked her why she hummed, perhaps because it never seemed that odd. We assumed all mothers did so, that humming was in their job description.
And it was such a soothing sound. As we lay or sat nearby, reading or doing other things, we were at peace.
Inevitably, however, the humming stopped and, after a short pause, we heard El Suspiro – The Sigh. The Sigh started with an extended sibilant intake of air, came to a brief silent rest when all the world’s activities seemed to cease, then reached its tremulous end with that same air innervating the inevitable words that supplied the obligatory exclamation point.
“Ay, mamacita,” was the most common. We read that as a plea to her long-departed mother, whose death when my mother was 4 years old was the beginning of a life of hardship that included an abusive stepmother, an unfaithful and drunken husband, long periods of harsh poverty, backbreaking work at starvation wages, life-threatening illness and injuries and the death of two sons.
But there were other pleadings. and these were almost always exhortations to her God:
“Ay, Diosito.”
Or, “Ay, Dios mío.”
None lasted more than a second or two, and then after a few minutes, the humming would start again, but not before it stoked our ever-present reservoir of fear. Like minor temblors, her suspirations shook the soothing, nurturing hammock her humming had weaved. And it always took a while for the calm to return.
What, we wondered, can be going through her mind? How much pain must be tearing at her soul? We loved our mother, truly believing that loving her was our only purpose, so any of distress in her voice was disconcerting.
Mamá was a strong woman. That was her role in life, and she played it to near perfection. Yes, she cried, but only when it was absolutely unavoidable. When we grew up and started making our homes away from her, we knew that each time we drove off she cried silently, but we never way those tears, for she held them in until our car turned the corner.
We depended on that woman’s strength, for it made our scary world seem a bit safer. So when her suspiros revealed the tiniest crack in the tough shell of stoicism that protected her – and us – there was a terrifying moment of angst in our hearts.
About nine years ago, my mother’s humming stopped. Her body, already weakened by a decade of fighting a losing battle against the effects of Parkinson’s disease, was ravaged by a stroke that left her incapacitated and virtually mute.
For almost four years, until she died in her bed on New Year’s Day 1991, she lay there, her eyes telegraphing the frustration, even anger, that her communication was limited to grunts and gibberish.
Her suspiros were also silenced.
Today, when my siblings and I get together, we often talk about my mother. We tell ourselves that we should have asked her about those suspiros, that we should have insisted she share her sorrows with us.
Perhaps we should have. However, over the past few weeks, as I have talked to people about spirituality, and as I have listened to them speak of their constant communication with God, my mind goes back to my mother’s humming, and her suspiros.
And it occurs to me that maybe they were not signs of agony or suffering, or of longing for the mother she barely remembered. Maybe it was nothing more than her way of getting in touch with her inner being.
We are told that spirituality involves, among other things, a connectedness with past experiences, a recognition of the influence of others who have walked this earth before us.
Maybe Mamá, in invoking her own mother, was simply trying to make that connection to the one person in her life she viewed as closest to Perfection.
Maybe, in her calls to God, she wasn’t asking for anything after all. Maybe all she was saying was, “Here I am.”
And maybe the answer she was hearing as she hummed was, “Yes, I know.”

June 27, 2012 | Washington
I SAW MYSELF today, in the park near my office where I went to eat my humus/cucumber/tomato sandwich. More accurately, I saw myself a little more than six decades ago. I was with a group of about eight or nine nursery school children, accompanied by three adults. Some of the children, the older ones, were running around on the grass, chasing each other or chasing pigeons. The younger ones stayed close to their caretakers. Two of the girls busied themselves creating colored-chalk art on a sidewalk. And one little boy, of about 3 or 4 and Asian, stood apart from the rest, his hands inside the pockets of his sagging brown shorts. He had a look of satisfied aloneness on his face. There was no anger or pouting or resentment or envy on that face, just peace. And wonder. And contentment.
After a while, the little boy moved to an unoccupied bench, climbed onto it and lay, face down, peering through the slats at the grass beneath him. The two girls eventually grew tired of their art and ran off to join the other kids, who were now at the water fountain marveling at the sprouting jets of water. The boy, however, stayed behind (one of the adults was on a nearby bench) and after a while he moved to the sidewalk that been colored.
The girls had taken the chalk with them, so he had nothing to work with. Nothing, that is, except his hands. Slowly, he began to run his fingertips, then his palms, across the colors on the concrete and then rubbing them on his shirt and shorts in different patterns. Then he did the same on the bench, staring with a look of approval at what he had created. Eventually he decided he needed a new canvas. So he repeated the procedure, except that this time he pulled up his shirt and rubbed pastel colors on his tummy and chest. Then he did his legs.
When his guardians decided it was time to go, one of them called to him and he quickly moved toward her, reached for the finger that had been offered to him. Grasping it tightly, he walked away with the group, leaving me to ponder about how that was me, as a kid, then as a teen-ager and, finally, as an adult: always fascinated by the intricacy created by the leaves of grass, by the endlessness of the sky and the depth of colors on a canvas of brown skin – and feeling no great desire to abandon any of those things of beauty to be with other people.

A FULL PAGE ad in the New York Times this week by the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships lists this year’s recipients of the foundations fellows. The fellowships program seeks to highlight and further the enormous contributions of new Americans — immigrants and children of immigrants == to the economy and culture of the United States. All 30 of the fellow have impressive qualifications, but I naturally focused on the ones from Latin America:

Cesar Lopez Angel, who has an MD and a Ph.D from Stanford, was born in Mexico and came to the US when he was 4 years old. He’s a graduate of Harvard and conducts research on the influece of age on T-cell function.

Marisol Leon got her JD degree from Berkeley. She was born in Los Angeles to parents who migrated here from rural mexico. She got a BA from Yale and her MA in Urban Education from Layola Marymount University.

Karina Gonzalez-Herrea got her Ph.D. in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard. She was born in Guatemala and came to the US as a refugee when she was 11 and successfully fought a government deportation effort.

Mario Giron-Abrego received an MA in archeology at Cal State-LA. He was born in Guatemala and transited Mexico to enter the S at age 14. He studied May glyphs in Belize and specializes in hieroglyphic decipherment of Maya texts.

Pablo Barrera got his MA in East Asian studies at Harvard. He was born in Mexico and came to Texas undocumented. He worked for 8 years to support his family before getting a BA from Penn and becoming a Fulbright Scholar in Korea specialties.

Impressive accomplishments by impressive people who no doubt will contribute greatly to this country and help make our society better. Yet, if it were up to Mitt Romney, all these people would have been sent back to where they come from long ago.

Saturday will be the two-year anniversary of the execution by the state of Texas of my friend, Rogelio Reyes Cannady. I’d like to share something he wrote while on death row:

“IF I COULD choose which life would be mine at this moment, I’m sure it would not be the one I have now. Or would it? How easy it is to conjure up a satisfying dream with the best house, car and lots of money, although hope, love and happiness – to live – is what I want, in truth.

“I find myself incarcerated, under a sentence of death. The reality of existence here is hard indeed. Emotionally, if you open up, the environment is unforgiving. It gets crazy in here, if you can imagine it. Along with downcast eyes and desperation, there is, however, laughter and joy. How else does one explain hope in this synthetic world, than by laughter in the face of possible defeat?

“When you live with death so close, you begin to understand and appreciate life all the more. I accept the feeling that whatever happens in life, whether it’s pain or pleasure, there must be a purpose – that my soul must experience loss in order to better rejoice in the joy of understanding, the gift of life and happiness.

“When walking the paths of life, regardless of where you walk, you find friends and common souls to share the days. You know then that you are in the right moment. The right life.

“Although my situation and future do not look so promising now, today I live a beautiful reality where again I look to understand the meaning of hope, love and happiness of love.

“I may walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but need only remind myself to reach and feel the warmth of those who hope and love with me. Truly, the Lord has not allowed me to walk alone. I feel the love that God has placed on me and I choose to enjoy this divine love and human experience. I choose to understand life for all it’s worth.”

I miss you, friend, and I’m still trying to understand life.