juanzqui

April 28, 2012 | Crystal City, TX

When something is too good to be true, the observation is, Parece la mera verdad: it seems like the real truth. You use that phrase on late-spring mornings such as this, when you step outside and the air is cool and the steady southeasterly wind makes if a bit chillier. You enjoy the coolness and the cleanness of the morning – relish in it, even – because you know that in a few hours, summer-like heat will rudely push the coolness out and settle in, like boring relatives, until way past sunset.

Parece la mera verdad. You use it when your normally bratty kid is sitting still, minding his manners, every hair still in place, no spots or stains on his clothes. You enjoy his proper behavior because you know that in a few minutes the damn kid will have upset everything and everyone in your household.

Parece la mera verdad. You use it when your old carrucha purrs and hums as it rolls over mile after long tedious South Texas mile on your way to San Antonio or Eagle Pass. You appreciate its not misbehaving because you know that sooner or later, maybe on the trip there or the trip back or the next trip or the trip after that, the rusty clunker will say, ba, no más! and roll to the shoulder where it will gasp, sputter and choke as it dies meekly.

Parece la mera verdad. You use it when the out-of-town relatives come to visit and your borracho/marijuano of a husband behaves like the perfect mate and perfect host and perfect human. His behavior repulses you because it is so fake, but you embrace it because you know that as soon as la ralea leaves, or maybe even before that (if he can only behave like a human for so many hours) he will become his old obnoxious stinky self.

Parece la mera verdad. You use it when the neighborhood putita piously marches down the aisle to receive Holy Communion on Sunday morning, her hands clasped in silent prayer. You want to believe that this Sunday-morning-going-down-the-aisle person is the real thing – la mera verdad – but you know that before the week is over she will have snatched one more husband from an unsuspecting (or not) wife, only to return him a week or two later looking like a gata revolcada. (There’s an old expression, Es la misma gata nomas que revolcada – it’s the same old cat only after she’s been through a bit of the old dusting-up thing in the alley — to indicate that while a person’s appearance may be different, inside there is no change.)

Parece la mera verdad. You use when la comadre comes over for coffee and gossip, treating you as sweetly as pan dulce and you know that as soon as she walks out the door she’ll be trying to figure out which other comadre she’ll go see so she can talk about you.

Parece la mera verdad. You remember using it when the ranchero would come check up on your family as it was whacking away at the weeds in your sugar beet fields, and he acted so friendly, even uttering a few Spanish words (followed by a chuckle, always a chuckle). You embraced his generous demeanor even though you knew that everything else that came from him — pay, housing, working conditions — was anything but generous.

Parece la mera verdad. You use it when the slick politician comes knocking on your door, or greets you ever-so-warmly at the annual festival or outside your church, asking how your kids are, or how your sister is doing, and wanting to know if there is anything he can do for you. You are nice to him and return his warmth but you know that as soon as he goes back to Washington or Austin or the courthouse or city hall, he’ll be looking out for No. 1, and you know that you’re not No 1. You’re not even No. 1,000.

It’s time to go now. My sister is calling me to breakfast. It looks and smells so good. Parece la mera verdad. And it is.

April 27, 2012
After four days of wandering and roaming and visiting, I am in Crystal City, my hometown, in deep South Texas. I am sitting on a bench on my sister’s front porch, enjoying the cool southeasterly winds. They won’t be cool much longer; the weather people tell us it will heat up to 106 degrees this afternoon. I arrived around 6 yesterday, and almost as soon as I walked in my sister’s front door, the power went off. Apparently the whole town (8,200 population) lost it’s power. While yesterday was not as hot as today promises to be, it was hot. We stayed inside for a while but then decided it would be cooler outdoors so we moved to the patio. It wasn’t cooler, but it was still nice sitting outside as the late afternoon turned into evening. Fortunately, the lights came on after a couple of hours. I don’t know what we would have done if we’d had to sleep in the heat.
Survived, I guess, just as we did in the old days when AC was something the well-off families had.
Breakfast calls. Later.

At the Houston Museum of Fine Arts cafe patio earlier today, a woman ate her salad while reading and sending email on her iPhone. I don’t think she stopped to look at the salad a single time. If she enjoyed it, she didn’t show it. When she finished, she put her phone and other stuff in her purse and got up and left, leaving the tray with the salad bowl behind.
The bowl sat there undisturbed for about five minutes, then a bird discovered it and swooped down, landing on the rim of the bowl. The bird, a blackbird or grackle, examined the contents for a few seconds then dipped her head into it and came up with a long thin strand of pasta. He held on to it for a while, almost as if he couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I wondered if he perhaps thought the pasta strand was an albino worm. Whatever he thought it was, he didnt appear to like the taste, for he quickly flew to the nearby fountain, a series of pools, each one a bit higher than the other, with the water cascading from top to bottom until reaches the lower pool. The bird stood at the edge of the pool and then dipped the pasta in the water. He did that two or three more times then, apparently satisfied, he flew off with the strand of pasta in his beak.
A few minutes later, he returned. Or a bird that looked very much like him returned, and he did the same thing: pick, hold, fly to pool, dip, dip, dip and fly away. I wondered if it was feeding his young somewhere nearby, or perhaps using the pasta to build a nest. Then other birds started showing up, one female and several more males, and they all repeated the pick, dip and fly ritual until there was no more pasta. Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that somewhere near the MFA, there’s either a bunch of young blackbirds with bad tummy aches, or several nests partially constructed with pasta. Clean pasta.

Driving through Lake Charles, I managed to squeeze by Obama bumper-stickered car right in front of a humongous SUV with a “Don’t blame me, I voted Republican” bumper sticker right before the traffic came to a virtual standstill. We proceeded at about 4 miles an hour for about 20 minutes and the guy had to sit there and look at my Obama bumper sticker all that time! There is a God, and she’s a Democrat!

April 22, 2012

Birmingham, Alabama

I was called “honey” twice, once in Tennessee and once in Alabama. In Tennessee, it was a cashier at a Mobil gas station, who said, “Thank you, honey” when I paid her for a bag of Fritos after I’d filled up my gas tank. In Alabama it was a drugged out girl who was panhandling at a rest area, asking for “change or dollar bills to call a cab.” She too said, “Thank you, honey,” when I gave her two dollars.

It’s nice to be in the South. That is, until you remember you’re a brown-skinned person driving a car with DC license plates and an Obama bumper sticker on its back window. I made a wrong exit earlier this evening, in search of a hotel, and I ended up in a lonely stretch of a dark country road, and I kept thinking of those license plates and that bumper sticker as I made my way back to the interstate. I kept hearing banjo music in my head.

I drove some 750 miles in 13 hours today, stopping only to gas up – twice – and for pit stops. I made more pit stops than I needed because I kept fearing that the next rest stop might be too far away. I didn’t stop to eat, eating mainly junk food and some fruit that I had brought with me, and yogurt. I was going to go to a McDonald’s for an Eggs McMuffin when I stopped for gas the first time, but then I saw some Dunkin Donuts at the 7-Eleven where I bought my gas, and I couldn’t resist them. Best donuts I’ve ever tasted. At the 7-Eleven, while getting my coffee, I kept having to maneuver around a guy who was also getting coffee. He had a smile on his face all the time, and he turned to me and said, “Isn’t this a nice clean store?”  I agreed.  “So clean,” he repeated. If Andy Griffith and John Edwards could have gotten married and had kids, I think they would have all looked and acted like this guy. When he paid for his coffee, he told the cashier that he really admired how nice and clean the store was. When he drove away I noticed Connecticut tags on his SUV. I can only imagine what the convenient stores look like in Connecticut.

I started out listening to my iTunes music but I quickly switched to Sirius XM. What a great invention. I especially liked the Latino/salsa station. Great way to stay awake and alert while driving, but you can only take so much of it. After listening to music or talk for more than 10 hours, I finally decided, just south of Chattanooga, that I didn’t want to listen to anything anymore, so I reached out and pushed the off button. Silence never sounded so good. I left it off for about an hour and then decided to see what was playing on Willie’s Roadhouse. It was a weekly show featuring takes from and old Hank Williams (50s) radio show. His daughter hosts it, and in between the four- or five-minute segments, she talks about her dad. She was talking about his last days, and the speculation as to what may have happened to him. And she mentioned all these towns or cities or regions where he was on those last few days – towns, or cities or regions I had just driven through. I felt as if I was on a Hank Williams pilgrimage.

It’s about 10:15 now (11:15 Washington time) and I think I need to go to sleep. I have to get up early to hit the road very early if I’m going to make it to Houston in time for dinner with friends.

I love road trips.

[Note: I took a short FB post from a few days ago and came up with this.] 

HIS FEET HEAVY, his back aching and his head groggy from yet another night of not-enough sleep, the man stepped onto the stoop of his building in the early morning semi-darkness to look for his newspapers.

It was a cool and uncharacteristically serene dawn – no roaring, rumbling trucks or wailing sirens on the nearby thoroughfare. The eastern sky was already well into its black-to-blue transition. Pausing to take it all in, and to allow his back to adjust, he looked up, past the greening limbs of the trees, and marveled at the still-bright waning moon, which hovered starkly against the clear dark sky. His contemplation of the moon was interrupted by a subdued whisper-like rustling that seemed to originate somewhere in front of him, beneath the massive oak tree that has reigned in front of his building for generations.

Glancing down, the man’s eyes caught sight of a robin, bopping up and down and scurrying here and there in search of an early-morning meal. It was still too dark to see the bird’s red breast, but he knew immediately that it was a robin. It was no more than a few feet in front of him, just beyond the black metal gate, and he could clearly see the characteristically plump body of a robin. Seeming to sense the man’s presence, the bird stopped abruptly and froze. It held its pose, its silent silhouette offering a portrait in stillness.

“Good morning, Mr. Robin,” the man said softly. He spoke the words almost in a murmur, not wishing to scare the visitor away. And in a single quirky hop, the bird swiveled to face him. Standing still except for the ever-so-slight cocking of its chubby head, it seemed to be contemplating, for a second or two, the man’s being there, or his greeting. And then it bowed.

Common sense told the man that the bird had lowered its head, not in response to his greeting, but in order to peck at a bug, a seed or some other morsel of food. His heart, however, told him otherwise; it urged him to embrace the notion that on this chilly Washington April morning, this feathered visitor – this harbinger of the season – had indeed bowed in acknowledgment of his presence, of his being.

And so the man did what 65 years of living had taught him to do when in the presence of nobility: He bowed in return.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

FIFTY-FOUR RANDOM thoughts on the eve of my entering old geezerhood:

1. As a kid, I would read western comics and invariably I  came across the term, “old timer.” I read it as “old timmer.” I never could figure out what an old timmer was. Now I are one.
2. I often try to imagine what went through my mother’s mind 65 years ago when she gave birth to her, ninth child. Was there joy in her heart? Was there sorrow? Did she wonder, “How are we going to feed this kid?” Did she wonder what I would turn out to be like? Did she even imagine I could be anything but a farm worker, destined to live in perpetual poverty? Do mothers always believe that their newborn child is going to be the perfect child? Or do they wonder, is this going to be the president who is going to be impeached? Or the congressman who electronically exposes his thing to strange young women? Or the loser who goes to a mall to shoot a congresswoman and a judge and others?
3. There are no pictures of me as a baby. Not a single one.
4. As a kid, when I’d hear my mother exclaim, “Yo creo que me voy a volver loca,” as a result of my father’s abusive behavior, I really believed that she could go insane, and I feared that more than anything else in the world.
5. I’ve never been as sad as the first time I came home from school and my mother wasn’t there; she’d gone off to work.
6. I never dreamed that I would spend almost as many years in Washington as I did in my hometown.
7. There was a time when I believed I would spend the rest of my life in San Marcos.
8. I know hundreds of people; very few of them know me, and that’s never going to change.
9. Sixty-five feels no different than 60 and 60 feels no different than 50 and 50 feels no different than 40 and 40 feels no different than 30. That’s as far as I’m willing to go, although sometimes I feel as if I were 18.
10. I always thought that I don’t look very different as an old man than I did as a young man and that my high school classmates and friends would have no trouble recognizing me now. Not because I believed I’d stayed young-looking, but because I thought I had retained the same facial features from my youth. I know now that they would have trouble recognizing me.
11. I am in better shape, physically, now than I have ever been. Emotionally? Ditto. Mentally: that’s for you to decide.
12. “Our bodies change,” said the old guy sitting at the next table just now, to his wife. No shit.
13. I’m a good person, in general, but I am not very tolerant of fools. There are too many fools in the world.
14. I’m not very good with people who need me.
15. I can be very superficial.
16. I’m a snob at heart and you can blame my mother for that because she always taught us that we were better than others (even though I don’t think she ever put it that way) and that was why we couldn’t do some of the things others did.
17. If I were someone else I’m not sure I’d want to spend too much time with me. I’d be bored shitless.
18. I think I can safely say that the biggest thrill of my life was seeing Janis Joplin in concert on the UT campus, with my roommate Terry McCabe and his sister. The second was watching the full moon rise over the Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. The third was flying on the Concorde from London to Dallas. The fourth was the first time I put a handful of Fritos in my mouth then quickly took a swig of Coca Cola, with the salty chips still in my mouth.
19. The best pan dulce is from Canela’s in Crystal City.
20. I hate confrontation.
21. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 13, and I didn’t own one until I was in my late 20s, yet today I ride my bike almost everywhere in town. I can’t imagine my father riding a bike at 65.
22. I’m not afraid of dying and I don’t wonder what comes after death, primarily because I believe there’s nothing after we die, but I sure resent not being around to observe what happens. At the same time, I really don’t want to be around to see what’s going to happen to this world, given the way we’ve been behaving these past four or five decades.
23. I’ve never wanted children and I don’t regret never having had any and I think I’d be terribly depressed if I had had some because I’d be worried shitless every single hour of the day about what bad things could happen to them.
24. I’ve been intellectually lazy all my life. As a kid learning English, I’d come across a word that I didn’t know what it meant but I rarely bothered to look it up. I’d just wait, knowing that eventually the meaning would become clear.
25. That guy I just quoted a while ago? He just said, “There is always a light at the end of the tunnel.” Yeah, so? We spend most of our lives in the damn tunnel.
26. I have the best family in the world and I have the best friends in the world and most of my working life I’ve had the best colleagues in the world.
27. I don’t know of anybody who hates me or even dislikes me strongly, and I really would be surprised is such a person were to surface. I like that.
28. I have evolved from being passionate about politics to being almost completely repulsed by it.
29. I would rather unclog a stopped-up toilet than watch or listen to a talk show.
30. I used to watch every movie released and now I probably see no more than 10 or 12 movies a year at a theater, and about that many on TV or DVD. The last 3-D movie I saw was in the 1950s, at the Guild Theater in my hometown. I do not see sci-fi movies, fantasy movies, shoot-em-up movies, spy movies, adventure movies, documentaries or animated films. Woody Allen is still the best, along with Almadovar. And I believe they should make more westerns.
31. I learned to love newspapers when my brother-in-law, who lived next door, started subscribing to the San Antonio Express (or was it The News?). At first I’d borrow it to read the comics but then I started reading most of the paper. As a young adult I would read every newspaper I could get hold of, no matter where I was. Today, I couldn’t care less what the LA Times or the Chicago Tribune of the Boston Globe or the Dallas Morning News looks like.
32. The first newspaper I ever bought was a Sunday Grand Forks Herald (I think that’s its name); I bought it in Forest River, North Dakota.
33. The first razor I ever bought was in a small grocery store near Wautoma, Wisc. That was the summer my father had left us to go to Colorado with his girlfriend and so I could no longer borrow his razor to shave off my wisp of a moustache.
34. I love the moon but the stars don’t do much for me.
35. I envy anybody who can sing and/or play a musical instrument (except for flutes and harps: I find them irritating.)
36. I’m scared of snakes, spiders, lizards and snakes. And ghosts.
37. I love doctors, nurses, dentists and hospitals.
38. I love airplanes, architecture and bridges.
39. I love dancing and wish I could dance better than I do.
40. I do not believe anyone who says he/she can’t cook and I have little patience with anyone who says he/she is too tired to cook.
41. The first time I ever ate French fries was at Morton’s Seafood Restaurant in Green Lake, Wisc.
42. The first time I ever ate restaurant-made pizza was when I went away to college in San Marcos.
43. I’ve only gotten sick-drunk once in my entire life. It was on some Chivas Regal that a rich guy had bought to a San Marcos school board election victory party. To this day I cannot stand the taste or smell of scotch. But I’ll take your bourbon or your rum or your gin any time, thank you very much. Or your beer or wine.
44. If I could afford it I would get a facelift.
45. If I could afford it and I knew it wouldn’t look creepy, I’d get hair transplants.
46. Houston will always be one of my favorite cities.
47. I’m into cheap thrills. I can’t resist taking home those little hotel shampoo bottles, and I don’t want to throw them away when I use up the shampoo. I really believe most bottles are beautiful, be they plastic or glass. I like boxes, too – especially wooden boxes. I also find it difficult to throw out Popsicle sticks and whenever I go to the Chinese take-out, I always grab an extra set of chopsticks. I have hundreds of them.
48. I was a decent reporter and a good columnist, but I have no desire to be either.
49. I always knew Santa Clause was make-believe and nobody every tried to convince me that he was real, and for that I give thanks.
50. I do almost all my book reading on my iPad or my iPhone.
51. I have no idea when I’ll retire or where I’ll live when I do. I’ve seriously thought about joining the Peace Corps when I do retire.
52. Even though I’m not into religion, I’m glad I grew up Catholic.
53. I honestly, truly believe that, if there is a God, the greatest, most profound prayer anyone can utter is a simple, “I don’t know.”
54. Why am I sounding like Any Rooney? Of, that’s right: I’m an old geezer now.

Monday, July 5, 2011

THE DAY IS over and I think I can safely say that I’ve made it. I’m back on track. I had my usual breakfast (Trader Joe’s version of Cheerios, berries and milk, and toast and peach jam), and I had a big salad for lunch (with just a bit of chicken). In between I had fruit, fruit and more fruit, and some cherry tomatoes. I also had a small WW 2-point candy bar, and some Trader Joe thin almond biscotti, for a total of about 15 points (including breakfast). The real test, however, was whether I’d go on my 11-mile bike ride after work. I didn’t know if I would it until I turned my bike south on 11th Street, towards the National Mall. Up until that point, I was still tempted to ride home to take a nap, which used to be my normal after-work routine before I started all this. But I did it and I survived and I enjoyed it and I felt great when I got home all hot and sweaty, and I knew that I had ridden over the hump that normally is my undoing. I had leftovers for dinner, a rice dish I’d cooked last week, also with a small amount of chicken. It was more rice that I thought it would be, but still, the whole thing was probably no more than about 9 points. And then I had a large 2-pointer WW candy bar, so I ended using up all of about 22 points. Which means I still have about 17 more to go. No way I’m going to eat 17 points worth of food between now and bedtime, so I guess I’ll be making up for whatever extra points I consumed the last two days. I’m still doubtful that I’ll lose any pounds this week, given that I may only be able to squeeze in one more long bike ride before I weigh in on Saturday, but I am also confident that if I gain, it will be a small gain, and I’m OK with that. The thing is that I’m back on track, back on program. The rewards will come later. Actually, the rewards are already starting to come. People at work and elsewhere are beginning to notice that I’ve lost weight, and commenting on it. And that’s a damn good feeling.

Monday, July 4, 2011

BLESS ME, FATHER, for I have sinned.

Gosh, I wonder how many times I uttered those words in a dark confessional. Every Saturday for several years, then every other Saturday. Then once a month. Then every six months. Then, it was over. I don’t remember the last time I went to confession. I can’t remember the time I made a conscience decision not to. It was sometime in college, probably my senior year, when it all stopped making sense. Not just confession; the whole thing.

There was a lot of fear involved. The first few years, it was the fear that I wouldn’t have enough sins to confess to the priest who sat in the next cubicle, probably bored as hell. Often I’d make up sins. “I said five bad words,” for instance, which was a lie (and a sin, probably, but I never confessed that sin) because as a kid I never said carbron, chingado, pinche, puto, culero, and all the other cusswords that my friends, classmates, and even siblings used on a regular basis. Even now, I find it difficult to cuss in Spanish. It doesn’t seem or sound natural to me, so I don’t (I have no problem doing so in English; in fact, I probably do it a bit too much).

I rarely disobeyed my parents, teachers, nuns or any other authority figures, so I couldn’t very well tell the priest I failed to honor my father or mother. I did lie, but it was only to make people feel good, or to get a laugh from my sisters. I didn’t steal (well, I did once: I took a nice plastic ruler from a classmate’s desk in first grade once, but I returned it a few days later, so I couldn’t even count that one). I never missed Sunday mass, and many times I even went to daily masses, especially during Lent.

Later, when I finally discovered a particularly pleasurable sin, I ended up having to lie to the priest again. Not about doing it, but about how many times I did it. Surely, I thought, nobody else did it as often as I did, and it was more embarrassment than guilt that kept me from being honest. That and the terminology. I mean, why didn’t the priest tell me the first time that masturbation was the sin, not uttering the word? “Bless me father for I have sinned: I played with myself 14 times.” Talk about feeling small! Playing with myself? Rubbing my earlobes, fingering my toes. toeing my fingers – that’s playing with myself. That you can stop doing. Not that!

The four Our Fathers and six Hail Marys assigned as penitence may have been enough to wipe away the guilt, but not the embarrassment. (There’s the language thing again: why in the world did the nuns and priest insist on using “penitence” with six-year old Mexican kids whose primary language was Spanish? What was wrong with “punishment”? I don’t think I found out what the word meant until I was in junior high.)

BLESS ME, READERS, for I have strayed.

No, not that kind of straying; I’m through with sin. I mean the literary kind, as in this post was not supposed to be about whacking off. It’s supposed to be about eating and I wanted to get to this: “Bless me my Weight Watchers village, for I have sinned.”

If you’ve been reading my FaceBook posts the last few days you know that I hosted a small but elaborate brunch over the weekend. Much of the food I prepared and helped eat was healthy, but some of it wasn’t, and I ate more than I should have. And I didn’t even bother to keep count of the points, so I have no idea where I am, points-wise. And, aside from cooking and cleaning, I didn’t exercise.

Not a good way to start a week, especially one that is going to offer few opportunities to exercise and includes a birthday. But it’s OK. I made a willful decision to have a good time and enjoy a great meal with good friends. I have no regrets at all. If I gain a pound or two, that’s OK too, for this is not a speed race. It took a long time for me to gain this weight and it’s going to take a long time to lose what I want to lose.

In the past, this would have signaled the beginning of the end of my latest Weight Watchers attempt to lose pounds. At this point, I would be feeling defeated, dejected, depressed and very pissed at myself. I would probably have convinced myself that since I had already misbehaved for part of the week, I might as well go ahead and blow the rest of the week and start fresh the following Saturday, after weighing in. And I would proceed to make a pig of myself every hour of every day. And then, Saturday morning would arrive and I’d be so terrified of what the scale would say that I’d convince myself to stay home, and vow to be very, very good the next week so that when I did go weigh myself the following Saturday, all the pounds I’d gained would be gone. Of course, that would never happen and I’d keep on gaining and gaining and gaining.

As I said, that was the old days. That was when I didn’t have you. Today, even though I’ve not been true to the program the past two days, starting tomorrow morning with breakfast, I will go back on program.

How do I know that? Because tomorrow evening, those of you who care will ask me how I did, that’s why.

Thank you in advance.

So, indeed – and please — bless me, Village, bless me.