Paddington's alter ego, Part II

The changes to my ten year old life which flew in with my father when he engulfed my world were profound and almost instantaneous. Here is a small but telling example: until my father’s inaugural weekend with us me and Edwin followed a weekly ritual of watching Saturday morning cartoons from the living room couch while outfitted in our Underoos and pajamas. The very first time my father found us splayed out on the living room couch to watch our beloved Smurfs and Looney Tunes programs turned out to be the last time in our respective childhoods we ever did that. “Get your asses up right now” he barked at us in equivalent Spanish, after visually taking in this decidedly American tradition of Saturday morning cartoon watching enacted before him, “and come outside to help.”

To help. This became the dominant phrase of my youth that acquired a specific world weary connotation in my imagination. “To help” became my father’s unbreakable commandment. It was an ethos that my mother, heretofore so protective of me and Edwin, demurely allowed to become the unspoken law of our lives. “To help” meant to personally accompany our father on what became an endless run of different outside labor intensive projects, most of them related to fixing large decrepit mechanical contraptions or otherwise cleaning and retrofitting industrial artifacts in a host of metallic settings that most people never imagine exist.

The timing and pace of “helping” never let up. Every single weekend: usually all of Saturday until past dusk and most of the day Sunday. Every afternoon after school, often long into the evening. Four out of every five summer vacation days and every holiday except for Christmas, Thanksgiving Day, and New Year’s, I was tethered to my father, never more than ten feet away from him, out on a work project that usually involved the resurrection of rusted out iron ghosts, an undertaking more prosaically known as the mechanical fixing of other poor people’s old broken down cars.

Do you know the “new car smell” is such a distinct and apparently popular odor that you can buy auto air refreshners from stores scented with it, like so much customized perfume for upholstery? The defining smell of my life became its diamteric opposite, the “junk car’s whiff.” The pungent aroma of oxygen exposed gasoline, the olfacatory undertow of expended motor and transmission oil thickened into a muddy sludge by thousands of miles of overuse, the stench of human sweat produced by hours standing unshaded on grease stained asphalt in the broiling L.A. summer sun, the peculiar assault on the senses from oxidized steel tools that piled up around us like so many collections of metallic bones, all these became the prevailing scents of my life. This was the middle of my new reality and all of it flowed directly from something my father had done his whole life, improvisation.

Here is something I retrospectively understand about my father: he is the most brilliant uneducated man I have ever known. In terms of formal education he had only completed the fourth grade. But this was only true because of the impoverished family circumstances he himself had been born into. In terms of raw brain power my father’s natural intellectual capacity was stratospheric. But because he had not experienced what Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn character called the benefits of “sivlization”, my father’s genius was rough, uncultivated, and always channeled through the art of improvisation.

Since he had no formal schooling, spoke no English, and he came to live with us as a 49 year old immigrant to boot, he had to improvise a career for himself in his new California environment. So my father decided to become a free lance auto mechanic. And he became precisely that all right, collecting second hand auto repair tools where and when he could and turning the streets of L.A. county into one ginormous improvised auto repair shop without walls. He eventually succeeded in developing a local reputation as “el mechanico” of last resort for other economically desperate Latino immigrants struggling to keep their jalopies street worthy for future gasoline powered forays into the local seas of asphalt.

The work itself was sheer drudgery to me. On one level my duties largely entailed handing my father whatever repair tool he would need to disassemble or reassemble a given collection of nuts and bolts. I was also charged with organizing the dozens of said nuts and bolts, which came in all different sizes and shapes, into some schematic order. This theoretically allowed my father to concentrate on the mechanical aspects of what work he was doing. Other times the physical work we did was more dangerous and arduous, such as the numerous times Edwin and I crawled underneath a truck chassis and laid on our backs to assist our father guide a two hundred pound transmission three feet directly above us to the ground.

Yet, on another, more personally significant level, our “helping” duties entailed something related but completely different. All those thousands of hours we worked together doubled as time that my brother and I spent being our father’s dual member audience for an uncensored infinite loop of his lectures, prejudices, resentments, profanity strewn invectives, gossip, harassment, off color jokes, political theories, scientific speculations, religious bigotry, and just about everything else emphatic and controversial under the sun. More to the point we became a reliable respository to our father for all of his generalized anger, immigrant frustrations, and what I later came to understand was his intense sense of personal guilt.

Our role as our father’s “helpers” in listening and absorbing all of this emotional and intellectual displacement was a million times harder on me and Edwin than the physical work that we did. All the family legends that I heard about my father prior to his arrival had warned me of his strictness and the harshness of his parental punishments. But none of it prepared me for the almost feral nature---or the sheer explosiveness---of his barely latent anger.

He was always angry or ready to become angry, always criticizing, always finding fault with the way we dressed (shorts were for “homosexuals”), our grades (only A’s would do), our intelligence (idiot and imbecile were milder descriptive adjectives), my grandfather (senile and due for euthanization), my grandmother (gossipy and tiresome), my mother (absurdly guillible), God (probably didn’t exist), church (a fradulent enterprise), Bugs Bunny (rabbits don’t have voice boxes to talk), America (evil and degenerate), pizza (dog vomit), old people in general (see grandfather), and any number of other individuals and values that Edwin and I had grown up believing in or at the least not judging, not condemning, not stuffing into a bag filled with cynicism and ignorance.

My father rarely physically hit us. He physically lashed out at us like a Roman candle, dramatically but not devastatingly. His physical punishments were along the lines of literal kicks in the ass, a rare slap across the arm, an even rarer slap across the face, a screwdriver flung my way in sheer pissed off frustration that I accidentally dropped something like a wrench down an exposed radiator.

The truly devastating damage from my father’s parental limitations was emotional and psychological. That is where the scar tissue built up. After two years of our father’s role in our lives, Edwin and I were ourselves so angry and utterly estranged that we wished we were brazen enough to disconnect a brake line in his work truck and have him take a permanent road trip straight out of our lives. But there would be no such easy way out for us. We would have to survive our father’s petty traumas the hard way.

The cumulative result of my father’s role in my life from age 10 on was an extraordinarily tense upbringing, filled with moments of generational, interpersonal, and cultural alienation that criss crossed the span of my adolesence in an often bitterly visceral catharsis. This stayed true for me until immediately after my graduation from high school, when I enlisted in the Army National Guard so that I would not spend one last summer at home surviving my father’s vicious eccentricities.

Here in this electronic corner I will document some of those cross roads moments between me and my father, the ones that helped lead me to where I am today and which were part of the larger road we took collectively as a family. In the end, or maybe I should say, into the present, this arduous road took my father and I to a better, more grace filled place in terms of how we relate to each other now. Along the way, there are a few stories to tell about how this came to be.

Paddington's alter ego, Part I

In my entire life I have been formally introduced to my father on two different occasions. The first time my mother presented me to my dad I was less than ten days old. Of course I have no memory at all of that first meeting. The second time my mother introduced me to my father was the month after my tenth birthday. This second introduction is something I will remember for as long as I live.

On an overcast October weekday morning in 1982 my mom, Nona, my younger eight year old brother Edwin, an aunt named Carmen, and the fifth grade version of me made our collective way out to L.A.X. from our Pasadena confines to meet my long lost father, who had flown to southern California like a dramatically reimagined Paddington Bear, making his own way to my world from darkest Peru. Only, in what was to become my daily life experience for years thereafter and in outright contrast to the eminently approachable Paddington Bear of literary fame, there was nothing overtly cuddly, jolly endearing, or marmalade sandwich eating friendly about the father I was about to meet for the second time in my short life.

That gloomy October morning, as we walked our way through the steel and concrete of L.A.X. in search of my father, I knew him only by reputation. How does an absent parent acquire a reputation in the eyes of a child who has no memories of him? Through family legend, of course. My father’s reputation was an abjectly fearsome one that had been planted and nurtured in my mind by countless allusions from adults in my family to his supposed brutality and his exacting behavioral standards.

Here is an example: before this personally momentous day a two word phrase I often heard an exasperated Nona hiss to me and Edwin when in her eyes we misbehaved was “if only.” As in “if only your father was here to see you run through the kitchen like it was some kind of racetrack, then you would know what it really means to be punished.” Or, “if only your father could know you lost that winter jacket for the tenth time, he would smash you into a straight line.” Nona would then clasp her hands together and say aloud a quick prayer to God, exhorting His divine assistance in expediting the speedy arrival of my increasingly dreaded and seemingly world class strict father from (darkest) Peru.

At the time I could not quite decide if Nona’s abbreviated prayers were real petitions to God or more her way of dramatizing to me the point of how much my rather standard fare childhood misbehavior appalled her. Later on the answer was clearly the latter, but what I knew for certain at the time was that the cumulative effect of many “if onlys” achieved its intended purpose of scaring me to death of the man I imagined my father to be.

Variations on this “if only” sentiment was something I periodically heard throughout my early childhood from aunts, Nona, and even my mom. I profoundly believed these foreboding family warnings about my father, which comprised much of what I surmised that I understood about who my father was. I really did not have much to go on for the purpose of comprehending my father in a three dimensional way. Indeed, leading up to that memorable day at the airport, aside from a handful of international phone calls filled with fluctuating static, my father’s disembodied voice, and an awkward self consciousness on my part (and probably his as well), I had no other first person contact with my father at all.

I vividly remember those phone calls. The days those calls took place I would watch my mom in the living room talking softly into the phone to my father who listened from 1,500 miles away as she cried quietly at the enormous physical distance between him and us, pleading with him to come live with us, his family. She would then hand me the phone and earnestly instruct me to greet my father and ask him to “come home soon.” I would do as ordered, and even sniffle into the phone receiver, as my mom’s heartfelt tears moved me into an altogether sentimental spot. But even as I told this stranger to “come home” and expressed how much I “missed” him, what I really felt in my heart was that he could just as well stay right where he was in Peru, thanks very much.

In my child’s mind this unfathomably remote figure, of whom I had not a single conscious memory, was more a mythical boogeyman and a grotesquely inverted Paul Bunyan figure than any sort of idealized father. I had no illusion that his coming to live with us would be a welcome addition to what in my mind was an already complete family.

A shade of context: one day in 1974, for reasons I was not to understand until many years later, my forty year old mother (then pregnant with Edwin) packed her bags, bought airplane tickets for my older brother Hector and me, and abruptly left my father, her entire former life, and Peru to come to California. From that time forward until this day at the airport, my family life was, in terms of how I experienced it, blissfully fatherless. I was raised by two strong women in my mom and Nona and I had strong male role models in Hector and my grandfather. This was all I felt that I needed and all that I knew I wanted.

As the L.A.X. sidewalk stretched out before us that misty October morning, I instinctively knew my life as I had known, lived, and loved it was coming to an end and that something altogether different and most likely worse was starting in the place of everything I had ever experienced. I felt this deep in my child’s bones, but I did not know how to translate what I felt into words. In fact, I barely knew how to think through what I was feeling, but trepidation, if I had known the meaning of the word at the time, would have made a decent down payment on the mortgaged emotional state I found myself in.

When we finally found my father, it was Nona who noticed him first. “Alli esta”, she called out in her matter of fact way. “There he is", in Spanish. I turned in the direction she was looking at and my eyes settled on a hunched over figure sitting on a bench, staring at the sidewalk underneath him. My mind registered a surprisingly older looking man, with a deeply lined face, grey hair, and complexion a shade darker than burnt orange. We walked directly up to him, called out our greetings, and took turns embracing him. When I reached out to him I was not really sure what to call him but on this occasion I heard the word ‘Papi’ tumble out of my mouth. Then we gathered his packed bags and started back toward the parking garage to embark on what for me was destined to become an emotionally tumultuous eight years that would make all the rumors, scare stories, and family legends about my father look like child’s play compared to the real thing.

Becoming Nona: Little lady standing tall

Nona. To a platoon of us Americanized cousins that included my little brother and me our maternal grandmother was always Nona. "Nona" is not a common term for grandmother in Latino families. Abuelita is much more widely used, especially in Mexican families, but my grandmother trained a whole wave of her first- and second-generation immigrant grandchildren to use "Nona." This fact stemmed directly from the fact that we “americanos,” as Nona described those of our generation (even if technically we had been born in our original home country of Peru), spoke utterly broken Spanish.

Describing the Spanish that we used as “broken” is like saying water is wet. Our mangled word pronunciation, notoriously bungled syntax, and grammatical non-sequiturs were linguistic train wrecks in the making every other second that we opened our mouths to “articulate” our breathlessly pidgin Spanish. In contrast, Nona and her adult children spoke a sturdy and grammatically flawless Spanish. So all things considered, our grandmother had a world of patience for the linguistic disasters that we sent crashing her way during our everyday conversations with her.

There was one exception. In Peru, the term for grandmother is “mamavieja,” an affectionate if rather formal compound title comprising four syllables that translates into “Old Mother.” My older brother by nine years and his contemporary cousins enunciate this word perfectly. Alas, “mamavieja” was at least three if not four syllables too long for us latter born "americanos" to ever come within a Peruvian kilometer of pronouncing even semi-correctly.

So here our grandmother, one of the most practical people I have ever known, intervened at a point in time before I myself was out of diapers and drew the line with the then present and all future grandchildren. “Nona,” which means grandmother in French and other cultures, was so comparatively easy to say that not even we could blow the pronunciation. So “Nona” her title would be, and “Nona” she always was to us, even after her death in 2002.

Being that my grandparents lived with my mom, my brothers, and me, in an extended family household until I turned sixteen, Nona played a towering role in the world that I grew up in. Because my mom worked the night shift during my early grade school years, Nona was the one who got me up for school in the morning, and Nona was the one who waited for me when I ambled home from school, as my mom got in what rest she could before she would be off again to her night time job.

Nona was old school strict and old world tough. She grew up in the 1920s on a wind swept and isolated mountain ranch located in the nether reaches of the northern Peruvian Andes far above Peru’s second largest city of Trujillo. The glorified hamlet of about 150 people that was her ancestral home town carried a Quechua name, Paranday. Paranady in the 1920s more closely resembled say, Fargo, North Dakota circa. 1890 than the relatively antiseptic 1980s era California surroundings that I walked out to every time I left the family house. In fact, Paranday was so geographically and technologically shut off from the rest of the country that its entire location, along with all of the surrounding mountain ranches like Nona’s, were completely inaccessible by car until after 1981, nearly sixty five years after Nona was born. Until that year any hardy soul trying to reach Paranday from the nearest sizeable population center had to do so Old Testament style, traveling over six hours by donkey just to make it to the town limits.

Nona’s upbringing was forged in the crucible of this frontier like environment. She grew up living a utilitarian and hard scrabble life that put iron in her blood. Six of the seven children she gave birth to were born right on the ranch she grew up in, without the benefit of epidurals or any other kind of modern anesthetic. All things considered it is safe to say that Nona brought her frontier values with her everywhere she went and this was as true in how she raised me as it was for anything else. One thing that meant was nothing ever went to waste. Let me repeat: Nothing. Wasted. Ever.

This was most especially true in the area of food. Nona's rural upbringing, which meant she was intimately familiar with the back breaking manual labor involved in cultivating agricultural products, and Nona's legendary cooking wizardry in preparing her home-cooked meals, combined to form in Nona's heart an exalted appreciation for the sanctity of food. Thus, for Nona, throwing away food was akin to an insult against God’s benevolence and an affront to the starving Ethiopian children depicted in what at the time felt like an infinite loop of World Vision television commercials.

In my early grade school years I was often Nona’s captive audience for one of her home-cooked meals. Ever faithful to her Spartan values and rural heritage, Nona naturally considered me morally obligated to eat all of the food she served on my plate. This stayed true even if the designated meal-time consequently tumbled into an overtime period of interminable length because of my passive resistance to what I then considered Nona's culinary tyranny.

Those endless meal times often devolved into a test of wits between Nona and I. However, school morning breakfasts were especially perilous for my second-grade self because Nona insisted on serving me a daily bowl of Quaker Oats oatmeal and there was a school bus to catch, so I was up against the clock, in addition to Nona’s formidable resolve. Now, Nona always mispronounced this non-Spanish word for oatmeal as “Quack---errr”, dutifully left out the Oats part, and she saw it as her grandmotherly duty to make me ingest this particular kind of breakfast meal down to the last soggy oat. As for me, I was just as determined not to. In fact I felt I had a sacred responsibility to my kid palate not to drink the despised Quack--errr to anything like the bottom part of the bowl, where all the doomed soggy oats submerged to rest in watery oblivion.

However, I could not argue this point with Nona directly. I never did, as I had been raised not to. At this particular point in my family's immigrant experience the rules were so strict that young children could never for any reason so much as say the word "No" to any responsible adult. So despite my kid's eye view of the tragic injustice involved, no way and no how was I going to start the soundtrack of "No" with Nona around the consumption of Quack--errr.

Instead I employed subterfuge and tactical misdirection wrapped up in a metaphorical falafel of non-violent resistance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized historic sit-ins for racial integration. John Lennon choreographed a televised 1969 bed-in for peace. And at age seven I began staging spoon-ins for escaping the de facto jail that Nona's kitchen table was to me.

You may ask, what was a "spoon-in"? While Nona watched (or more accurately stated, pretended not to watch) me "finish" my breakfast from the business side of the kitchen (where the oven was), I dramatically and repeatedly buried my spoon deeply into the tilted bowl and pretended to scoop out every one of the surviving oats to eat them all, and thus in Nona's eyes justify my getting off the kitchen table. My goal was to sustain my spoon-in pantomime just convincingly and long enough so that Nona would soon be distracted by a phone call or a bathroom break or some other child's notion of a minor miracle that would result in me being outside her line of sight. This in turn would allow me to jog sight unseen to the kitchen sink and flush the offending Quack-errr oats down the drain before Nona would be the wiser.

My spoon-ins were occasionally successful but in truth, Nona usually achieved her goal of making me eat everything she set on my plate. She could and often would wait me out my spoon-ins because right after breakfast she walked me straight to the school bus stop. Even at age seven I knew the school bus waited on no one, not even anti-Quack-err kid crusaders like myself. And seeing as how Nona physically stood in the middle of the only possible route to the kitchen sink, unless Nona was distracted or otherwise called away from her ambush spot, my spoon-ins were doomed to fail. Of course, the quiet irony is that at this current point in my life I would gladly trade any number of material things in exchange for being able to again taste any and every part of Nona's cooking and to hear, even if only one more time, the soft grandmotherly laugh that she would so often share with me at the beginning of our meal times together.

Nona had a wonderful meal time laugh, I assure you. Her laugh was vibrant, infectious, and carried within it a love of life that found its original expression in Paranday and brought its resilience and generosity to my little childhood corner of Pasadena. No matter where I am, I can hear its echo in my memory and know how blessed a grandkid I am to have had her in my life. Nona’s laugh was graceful, loving, and communicated the elemental essence of who she was, how she lived, and where her truest treasure could be found.

Postscript:

At a writer's studio class I was asked to produce a brief character study of anybody I chose. The following is what I wrote:

“Ella siempre fue fiel a sus raizes provinciales.”

These Spanish words from my grandmother’s eulogy, spoken by my grieving older brother, still resound in my memory. Translated, the words mean she was always faithful to her provincial origins. When she died at the age of 85, truer words than those could not be spoken of my grandmother. To the long and complete life that she led, she brought the world of her rural beginnings. Hers was a world dominated by the turn of the seasons, the smell of softly tilled earth, the sweat of back breaking hard work, the joy of a simple and profound religious faith, and the enduring love that she bequeathed to a generation of seven children and their children’s children. Through the seven decades of her life my grandmother loved to be productive and she hated to waste. She cooked a world class Peruvian cuisine, she knitted more sweaters than a Bloomingdale’s rack could hold, and well into her seventies she traipsed her way to numerous parent teacher conferences for her grandchildren. She loved to laugh at a hilarious memory, she insisted we learn the Spanish of our home country, and she modeled to us all a quiet personal dignity timeless in the power of its example and humane in the decency of its origins. All this she accomplished across the span of two continents and two cultures so dissimilar as to be relative strangers to the other. But she bridged it all with a humble grace that always stayed true to itself, just as she always stayed true to herself.

Dream catching

There is a two word Spanish phrase from my early childhood that I remember my mom saying to me when she wanted to characterize something that had happened in her life long before and which she could not remember clearly. The words in Spanish were “entre suenos.” In English this translates into “between dreams”. As in, between dreams I remember from my childhood that such and such happened. Or, in this long ago place, between dreams, I remember this happened to that person.

I always loved the snapshot poetry involved in harnessing those two words together for recalling memories that linger somewhere in suspended animation between the truth and myth of our personal histories. Even as a grade schooler I remember feeling there was something at once wonderfully resonant and achingly distant about memories that endure in the gaps that separate dreams.

In this place I hope to capture and recapitulate lingering memories from my life and family before they spiral forever and away out of the space between my own dreams.