Of moms and memories

Among the earliest conscious memories I have of my mother involved my first late night jail break. Bedroom break is a more literal way to describe what happened but the effect was the same: one late night at age five I had escaped the confines of the bedroom that I shared with my younger brother and mom and thus found myself enjoying the forbidden freedom of staying up several hours past my Mom-decreed bed time. Unfortunately, on this particular late evening my mother came home unexpectedly early from her night time shift and found me wide awake and sunk deeply into the contours of a sofa tucked against the wall of our darkened living room. There I sat, nestled obliviously and quietly between my two grandparents, Nona and Papasito, who were then in their sixties and timelessly ancient to me in a Treebeard sort of way.

On this bedroom break evening the television set my grandparents and I gazed upon was projecting pastel 1970s images and a mono stereo Spanish language blare that engulfed the living room with a silver electronic glow and an acoustically dull din that were as mysteriously vibrant to me as any cave man’s fire from prehistoric times. I sat staring so intently at the television’s flickering blur that by the time my mom burst in to the living room I had no time to think of flashing an escaped fugitive’s dash for a likely looking hidden corner. “Get up!!” my mother hissed at me in Dolby Digital surround sound quality Spanish. The tone of her voice and the emphatic body language she used revealed a maternal anger I had rarely heard or seen from her. “Go to bed!” she yelled more forcefully as she gesticulated in the direction of the bedroom. “You know you have school in the morning and you know you’re not supposed to be up this late!”

I blasted off from the living room couch, zooming past her as fast as my child’s adrenaline filled legs could carry me, and burst in to the darkness of the hall way behind her. As I did so I simultaneously hoped to avoid a pulled ear or a pinched arm or a slapped noggin courtesy of my justifiably ticked off mom even as I rued how so few secrets could ever be kept from my mother for long. Still just a kindergartner I was already learning from direct experience the universal truth that a good mother and the survival of her child’s flimsy secrets no more go together in Real Life than a cascade of otherwise delicious ketchup poured over a stack of pristine IHOP restaurant flapjacks.

A good mother. In my entire life I do not remember that my mom ever used those two words in tandem to characterize herself. This is not all that personally surprising to me as she was an eminently modest person: humble to a fault. My mother was neither a perfect mom nor a perfect person and yet her actions over the course of my life testified to the authentically best kind of mom that she really was. I will consider myself lucky if my written words in this or any future electronic space can capture a small fraction of the intangible qualities that defined my mom’s character and distilled her Mom-ness.

By the year that she died I had long since convinced myself that in a hypothetical Battle of the Chefs my mom could cook any erstwhile competing chef on the planet right under the table. She daily concocted an aromatic Peruvian cuisine that I grew up wishing I could somehow commercialize into the world’s finest T.V. dinners, a feat that by age 16 I was sure would set our impoverished family on the path to billions. But my mother did not start out so gastronomically accomplished. From her teen age years onwards she had been a working woman and until she turned 51 she had largely left the household cooking details to her own mother, my grandmother Nona. Embedded in this fact was the reality that my mom and Nona lived together under the same roof for over half of what turned out to be the total length of my mom’s life.

Living with different generations in the same house defined my upbringing and formed the gravitational laws governing the many orbits of the world I grew up to call Brownotopia. As a practical matter, however, having my grandparents available to watch over me and my younger brother day and night also enabled my mom to work the jobs and attendant work shifts necessary for our family to economically scrape by just long enough to make it to her next biweekly paycheck.

Looking back on those early first years after our arrival in California, I recognize how materially poor our family really was and how my mom struggled day and night to provide for us. We never lacked for food or clothes or a roof but beyond these necessities nothing else rated a slam dunk as a guaranteed given. A certain summer time recreational activity me and my little brother Edwin participated in can perhaps illustrate this point.

The old Lake Avenue house that we grew up in was not air conditioned and turned furnace levels of hot under the Southern California summer sun. To cool ourselves off, unlike some of my Pasadena area cousins, who seemed to have innumerable bevies of goodies including the super fun and super unaffordable Slip N’ Slide and even actual backyard swimming pools, all we had at our old house was a beat up sprinkler that still (mostly) worked when connected to its leaky decrepit front lawn faucet. One long summer, in addition to not having a Slip N’ Slide, me and my brother, then aged seven and five respectively, also did not have actual swimming trunks that fit, as my mom had no money to buy us any.

Not yet old enough to know any better, anxious not to waste precious sun drenched hot afternoons, and no swimming trunks notwithstanding, we regularly cranked up the old leaky faucet anyway, stripped ourselves down to our low cut Superman and Captain America Underoos (which were as near full monty style threaded fabric as could cling on to the fannies of little boys) and for hours happily took turns jumping through the sprinkler on a sloping front lawn directly facing four lanes of opposing traffic carrying hundreds of cars, trucks, and pedestrians.

Even at this young age, while joyously pretending the feeble splashed sprinkler water to be Malibu class ocean waves, we noticed adults with astonished looks on their faces staring at us from inside their cars. We also noticed they talked to each other while pointing at us. Edwin and I were just old enough to be a little self conscious about the stares and pointing but young enough to not let that self consciousness stop us for even one second from frog jumping endlessly over the muddy crab grass and sprinkler water in our clingy Underoos.

The first job that I remember my mom having was a night shift position at a film processing company in Glendale. My grandparents always regretted that my mom needed to work a night shift job. “Pobresita tu madre” [your poor mom] is what Nona and Papasito would frequently sigh as they reflected in Spanish on the long overnight hours my mom put in to make a living. During the many occasions Nona called me out on my various boyhood transgressions and chore completion screw ups, she frequently reminded me how hard and how long my mom had to work “de noche” (Spanish for at night) in order to provide for us and how this needed to motivate me to behave better. In reality, I only had the dimmest of understandings regarding what my mom had to undergo to provide for us. By age 6 all I really know was that her job took her out of the house a lot and when I was awake in the day she often had to be sleeping to rest up for her night shift.

So naturally I was thrilled one evening when I found myself in the kitchen and overheard my mom speaking anxiously in to the family’s rotary phone as the news was broken to her that the film processing company she worked at was shutting down and that she’d just lost her job. Now Mom’s going to be home all day!! I remember thinking joyously. Hooray!

Of course, in the weeks and months that followed there was no economic hooray for my Mom. Blocky government cheese (which was actually rather tasty) became a staple of our daily diet. During super market trips I saw my mom pull out food stamps to pay for groceries and at doctor’s visits my Mom pulled out the Medi-Cal cards with the little removable green stickers in order to pay for our medical appointments. The old Lake Avenue house, with its chipped white paint and falling shingles, looked more forlorn than ever and should trails of ants march in to a pot of boiled dinner broth, as several times they would in those months, Nona refused to throw out the resulting ant and vegetable soup and insisted on serving this hybrid brew to our stomach turned kid palates, saying the “protein” was good for us.

One enduring constant that my mother and grandmother modeled to us through this economic crisis and so much more that was to come our way in life was their Christian faith. Every Sunday morning during my grade school years Mom and Nona loaded me and Edwin in to my Mom’s old blue 1962 Plymouth Valiant. In those pre seat belt law days, Edwin and I would then scrunch ourselves against the car floor to listen to the gravelly asphalt of the road whiz by below us as the Valiant whooshed its way toward a first generation immigrant Latino church in far away Los Angeles that was ministered to by a man named Pastor Brady.

Pastor Brady’s church was huge. The pews me and Edwin sat on lifted us so far up off the floor that that our feet dangled in the air, not touching the carpet underneath. At every service Pastor Brady would call for an offering, saying to the congregation that the offering (ofrenda in Spanish) was “for God” and that God would “count” every penny of every dollar given to Him. I saw that my mom and Nona gave money at every service they attended and that their brows would furl in deep concentration as they prayed for a blessing on the day’s ofrenda. Deeply impressed by Pastor Brady’s pronouncements, I also closely observed how and when the offerings were passed by the church ushers around the pews inside woven baskets with long handles. I noted that after the ushers took the offering baskets to the church foyer behind the sanctuary, they then entered a door opening to a steep flight of stairs leading skywards. I always wanted to follow the ushers up those stairs because I just knew that on the second floor they met up with an angel who would literally count and collect the weekly offering. I was positive the ushers met with an angel because I was quite sure God Himself was too busy to go to every church on the planet to collect offerings in person. Several times I considered telling Mom my theory about how the “ofrendas” made their way to Heaven but I held back, thinking she probably already knew this herself.

For my mom and Nona faith was not just lived out on Sundays. Every night at home they gathered me and Edwin to the master bedroom, turned off the lights, and with all of us kneeling along the edges of the large bed, they led us in taking turns earnestly praying to God in Spanish, thanking Him for the blessings in our lives and asking for His grace in having my Mom find a new job, curing my grandparents of their arthritis, helping me with math, and meeting any other pressing need that we could think of. Both Mom and Nona prayed with conviction and humility, modeling to me and Edwin a defiantly vibrant faith, the light of which illuminated their lives and guided them through the tempest of joblessness that my Mom had to navigate for the time being and which was destined to see us all through more painful crucibles in the then unknowable future. The light from their maternal faith burns through the mists of the interceding years to remind me what my mother and her mother held closest to their hearts in teaching us how to struggle, how to endure, and how to prevail.

Reanimating remembered reimaginings

The living room walls of the old Lake Avenue house that I grew up in featured wallpaper depicting hundreds of little yellow flowers splayed against a white background. Having not seen similar flowery wall paper in a house since those hazy childhood years, I imagine the style would probably not be considered fashionable in the 21st century. However, I am not a hundred percent sure, because as a garden variety issue bachelor, I am convinced that I am congenitally incapable of competent discernment in the realm of interior decorating style and design.

In any case, the Lake Avenue living room was more notable to my childhood self for its its distinctive brown furry carpet as opposed to its botanically bedecked walls. Given prevailing 1970s standards, the living room carpet strands were not quite shag style but in 2010 they would have definitely stood out for their stringy length and the fact that they collectively featured the darkest shade of brown that you can imagine visualizing in carpet form.

As a six year old boy I loved that old carpet for one principal reason. This was due to how I mentally repurposed a visible permanent crease that ran down the expansive carpet’s full length. The crease was a visual legacy effect from when this dark brown expanse of collective fiber threads had been folded precisely in half during its time in retail storage. The two indentations forming the outline of the dividing crease were some six inches wide and over fifteen feet long. The crease was so pronounced that it was visible to the naked eye from any vantage point in the living room.

To my six year old mind, these defining features made the carpet crease absolute perfection because its dimensions served as the ideal fascimile for the Death Star trench from the movie Star Wars. This mental repurposing illustrates the depths to which my young child’s imagination had to compensate for my family's lack of money to buy me toys that came out of actual boxes (a la genuine Star Wars action figures).

Imagination. Margery Williams Bianco, the author of classic children’s books like Velveteen Rabbit and Poor Cecco, once said that imagination is simply another word for the interpretation of life. Since a child’s play is itself nothing but imagination in motion, then you could say that as a little kid I assigned a very aerodynamic form factor to my interpretation of life.

This is because in lieu of playing with store bought plastic toys, the following is what I did for days and evenings on end: while hopping and ducking over the living room crease cum reimagined Death Star trench, I balled up my left hand into a tight fist with the thumb sticking out to simulate a Tie fighter, flattened my palm straight with the right hand to represent an X-wing fighter, and then proceeded to repeatedly reenact the climactic final Death Star battle over and over again. I also provided my own personal soundtrack as I very loudly hummed the Star Wars orchestral theme and shrieked the simulated sounds of roaring star fighter engines, blazing laser cannons, the screams of doomed Rebel and Imperial pilots corkscrewing their respective ways into fiery oblivion, and the resulting exploded space ship debris.

I played this decidedly abstract version of Star Wars with a young boy's ferocity and while I am sure I must have looked quite bizarre to my mom and grandparents as I excitedly crouched and hopped all over the middle of the living room and flailed my balled up fist and open palm in inexplicable gyrations, to their credit, they never thought I belonged in a "sitio de locos" (insane asylum). Well, if they did, at least they were nice enough to never tell me.

In fact, my mom may have actually felt sorry for me because poor as we were—and our branch of the family cornered the market on the poor church mice category in those years—she did manage to send me and Edwin to see The Empire Strikes Back over five times when that iconic film had its theatrical release in 1980. Five trips to the same movie meant she shelled out some twenty five dollars in about a two month time span for us to see Empire. Twenty five bucks represented a small fortune to our family in those years, a fact that I was more than a little aware of even then. I have always been grateful to my mom for having understood how personally and monumentally important this sci-fi sliver of American pop culture was to me.

Growing up it wasn’t only about space opera talismans for me though. One day around Christmas time, when I was about seven, my mom bought me and Edwin two stuffed animal toys from the local super market, a soft brown teddy bear for me that I imaginitively enough christened “Teddy” and a tanned and luxuriously tailed stuffed squirrel that Edwin designated “Squirrely.” Teddy sported a cashmere soft black cloth, had two shiny plastic balls for eyes, and he was exactly the right size and weight of an archetypal teddy bear. He quickly became my all time favorite toy.

One day soon after my mom had brought us our stuffed animals, during an especially rowdy round of BOOM! BANG! style sibling wrestling encounters, I ill advisedly assaulted Edwin’s “Squirelly”. In a fit of sibing pique, I manhandeld Squirelly until its upright tail became mostly detached and hung back off of him like a very loosely attached appendage. Screeching a vow of revenge Edwin, in retaliation, “bearnapped” defenseless Teddy and then repeatedly slammed him by his stubby legs against a long vanity mirror hanging in the house until Teddy’s plastic button-like nose flew right off. Distressed at this turn of events, I abruptly stopped our not so brotherly play and took my wounded friend directly to my mom. She performed emergency surgery on Teddy by promptly sewing a new nose for him. Teddy’s surgically replaced proboscis was a square brown patch made from an old pair of courdory pants that I had recently outgrown. Teddy was again good to go.

At some point early in our time in each other’s lives, I decided to accessorize Teddy because I wanted to him look both unique and uniquely mine. I outfitted him with a rather fluffy pink yarn strand that was tied all the way around his neck. This pink collar had the effect of making Teddy more distinctive but also unintentionally incurred the risk factor of making him, in my child’s line of reasoning, more “girly.” I remember thinking that since it wouldn’t do to have him be overly wimpy, and since I most definitely imagined him as a “boy” bear, I needed to counterbalance the whimsically shaded collar I had secured for him.

So I rummaged through my existing collection of toys until I found a battle ship made out of grey die cast metal. This war like toy became Teddy’s own talisman: a transitional object of sorts, that I decreed Teddy would carry with him everywhere that he went, to show what a “tough” bear he was, pink collar notwithstanding. To rationalize why Teddy always carried his totem with him, I further decreed by order of the Imagination Sheriff (me) that the battleship was made out of honey, sort of like a freeze dried apricot, and that this vessel was Teddy’s “honey battleship.” The logic completely breaks down here, of course, because there is no real life equivalent for a vat of honey dehydrated into a toy battleship’s form factor, but whatever. I was seven years old, so the yin yang symbolism of a pink collar and a grey battleship for my beloved stuffed bear canceling each other out was sufficiently sensical for my second grade self, illogical to the rest of the world or not.

Teddy and me were good friends. He sat by me while we played forts with my brother. Unlike seemingly every adult in my life, he never yelled at me for being bad at math. He faithfully slept next to me every evening and late at night I would whisper a young boy’s secrets into his ears, while he silently listened and took all that in. Hours after I should have been sound asleep, I would gaze out the bedroom window towards the Pasadena night time skyline with a pair of binoculars that I had “temporarily relocated” from my grandpop’s stash of Cool Stuff he kept by his bed. I scanned the sky for many long minutes at a time, hoping to spot a stray UFO space ship so that I could report to Teddy that, yes, there was alien life Out There, floating just above us. The UFO flying saucers never did fly by across the view from my bedroom window, but Teddy humored me just the same, waiting patiently until my eye lids grew heavy and I stumbled back into bed by his side and down under the covers. In my memory of him now, as in how I experienced him then, he was a really cool bear......as cool a bear as a kid ever befriended, and as real a toy as a boy ever imagined.

Priestly Proteus

My family’s history demonstrates that a veneer of walking human irony wrapped in flowing black cloth can transmit life in more ways than one. Four generations ago a fair skinned Roman Catholic priest, a Spaniard who had recently made the epic transatlantic sojourn from Espana to darkest Peru by ship, arrived at a northern Peruvian federal district called La Libertad. He journeyed all this distance so he could minister to the pious local populace. This priest’s name was Benjamin Taboada and the fact that he is my great great grandfather and that he sired great great grandchildren from at least ten different matriarchal lines is all the evidence an amateur family genealogist requires in order to understand that old Padre Benjamin had, as it were, peculiarly literal notions about how to spread the seed of his pastoral outreach.

How did the all too literally titled Padre Benjamin go about this? Maybe it was the authoritative black cloth he sported or the extended gaze of his celebrated blue eyes in a society tragically subservient to the notion that blue eyes and fair skin are necessarily the epitome of human beauty. Perhaps it was the exotic cluck of his guttural Castilian accent. Possibly the sheer mental acuity that is required of any classically trained Roman Catholic priest combined with a wanton recklessness that was specifically part of his moral DNA helped to make him such a perversely successful Lothario. Most likely a convergence of different such factors cumulatively left it so that Padre Benjamin experienced little difficulty in intellectually seducing and physically bedding many provincial and naive young women in the sundry hamlets that dot La Libertad.

At the geographical epicenter of La Libertad is my family’s ancestral hamlet Paranday. My father’s bloodline traces its way multiple generations into the past through Paranday’s outskirts until antiquity’s mists permanently obscure the named identities of my forebears. Paranday is just one of the isolated villages in the region at large where my priestly ancestor lived out one of those subversively ironic examples from real life that illustrate the way nomenclature can pun itself silly: for indeed “Padre” Benjamin left a minor galaxy of padre-less runts in his genetic wake.

Notably, Benjamin did not move into the homes of any of the female parishioners with whom he became physically intimate to play either the official or unofficial role of a husband, father, or titular head of household. The reasons for this were three fold and interconnected. One was due to the sheer number of liaisons Benjamin carried on simultaneously. Two, all other things being equal, a priest from this time could survive many unpriestly personal faults and foibles, but no priest could become legally married and still remain a priest. Three, Benjamin’s renegade local priest status notwithstanding, his ministerial mandate was to run the parish circuit of his day. In other words, since the provincial Catholic parishes were so miniscule in the size of their congregations and so physically spread out over a dispersed geographical area, this meant no individual local parish among them could retain the services of a full time priest. Thus Benjamin was required to travel an infinite loop of different parishes every two to three days at a time in order to discharge his more conventional priestly duties before he would again be on the road in donkey powered transit to another distant hamlet’s church. If anything, this itinerant life style helped facilitate for Benjamin the Don Juan alter ego that he pursued so notoriously.

The notoriety piece puzzled me some ninety years later as I would quiz my by now elderly parents regarding how Benjamin got away with his proto-Wilt Chamberlain lifestyle (well, proto-Wilt Chamberlain for an ordained priest anyway). “Why didn’t the Church catch on and bust him for having all these babies with all these women?” I bewilderedly asked. My parents maintained that the local auxiliary bishop sinverguenzas (Spanish for shameless ones) in the regional capital city of Trujillo and federal capital Lima surely knew of Benjamin’s sexual shenanigans, but systematically looked the other way.

My parents claimed that “el Vaticano” itself would “probably” have taken some punitive action if properly apprised of Benjamin’s Priests Gone Wild routine, but back then “there was no such things as phones or faxes” to expeditiously send word back across the Atlantic Ocean to the Vatican vicars of what was happening in geographical boondocks like La Libertad. Besides, my parents added, Benjamin was not the only such rogue priest in the frontier hinterlands. Rascally minded and acting priests apparently abounded in the region at large and together they constituted an old padre network that protected its members from any sort of organized backlash for their decidedly unchaste misdeeds up and down the Andean countryside.

“Church prerogative”, my father answered when I commented to him that it still felt as if Benjamin had taken the word brazen to an absurdly comic level. Priests back then, my dad elaborated, were held in such high local esteem that they were referred to as “Doctor” at least as often as “Padre” by deferential village believers. In addition, he added, the Church at this time owned large lots of land in the countryside. Catholic clergy leveraged this land wealth in ways that helped them maintain their power and prestige. My father surmised that most likely old Benjamin supported a good number of his pious paramours with the granting of minor land grants from larger Church property lots that allowed these single mothers to maintain a measure of subsistence living for themselves and their children.

So Benjamin, who died around the year 1920, lived out a long life in La Libertad as an unchaste priest. In so doing it came to be that my dad’s grandfather Eliseo Taboada and his nine locally known half brothers and sisters sprinkled throughout different villages in La Libertad like so many cherries in a pitcher of sangria, were raised by their respective mothers without a real father’s presence in their lives. Fatherlessness was the prevailing legacy of the moment and it was into fatherlessness that Eliseo marched through the provincial childhood of his day. As future writings will show, fatherlessness was destined to be a recurrent fact of life for the next next three family generations.