Do I have a Monday Blues Buster for you!!! Never mind that these two don’t smile, the important part is this: can they make you get up and shake your booty?
Enjoy your week, people!!!
Archive for the 'Personal Essay' Category
Dems HC Summit: The WH McCain Strategy
Published February 27, 2010 Personal Essay Leave a CommentTags: HCR, Health Care Summit
Everything Changed Then
Published February 20, 2010 Cuba , Cuban-American , Family , Personal Essay , Work in Progress Leave a CommentTags: Cuba, Cuba Travel, Cuban-American, Fathers and Sons
(Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a work in progress, From Mountain Road to Easy Street, a fictionalized memoir. This is the final scene in this chapter. These are the most difficult words I’ve ever written. The action being described by the narrator corresponds to events that happened on a day like today thirty one-years ago. The 1,800 + paragraph without a break is no accident. It felt as if I wrote it without breathing. The previous installments can be found HERE, HERE and HERE. Thanks for reading).
“The drive west to San Juan y Martinez would normally take a little over two hours. It lasted a lot longer. At times I feel that I am still driving the Carretera Central, the distances measured in inches not kilometers, its stretches and turns, holding, but refusing to release, the answers to the central questions of my life, the original destination continuing to elude me. Continue reading ‘Everything Changed Then’
Visiting Grandpa
Published February 20, 2010 Cuba , Cuban-American , Family , Personal Essay , Work in Progress Leave a CommentTags: Cuba, Cuba Travel, Cuban-American, Fathers and Sons
(Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a work in progress, From Mountain Road to Easy Street, a fictionalized memoir. This is a first draft so I hope you can excuse any typos or imperfections. The action being described by the narrator corresponds to events that happened on a day like today thirty one-years ago. Tomorrow I will post the final chapter. The previous installment can be found HERE. Thanks for reading).
“I heard my father’s voice talking to my Aunt in the kitchen when I first opened my eyes. I stumbled to the bathroom and threw cold water on my face and changed my shirt before joining them. My Aunt had a buttered piece of Cuban bread and a couple of hard-boiled eggs sitting on the counter for me. I couldn’t eat eggs with the kind of night I had. My Dad told her that my Uncle Heriberto was waiting downstairs to go to the cemetery and we didn’t have time for breakfast. My Aunt Eloisa wrapped the bread in a piece of brown paper after she gave me a cup of black coffee to help me wake up. We would take the eggs as a back up on our trip later that morning to San Juan, just in case we didn’t find any food store open on the road. “Go visit your grandfather,” she said, as she handed me the bread.
A Havana Welcome
Published February 19, 2010 Cuba , Cuban-American , Family , Personal Essay , Work in Progress Leave a CommentTags: Cuba, Cuba Travel, Cuban-American
(Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a work in progress, From Mountain Road to Easy Street, a fictionalized memoir. This is a first draft so I hope you can excuse any typos or imperfections. The action being described by the narrator corresponds to events that happened on a day like today thirty one-years ago. For the next couple of days I will post the corresponding chapter. The previous installment can be found HERE. Thanks for reading).
“The next day we flew to Havana and the crew on the flight was the most serious crew of stewardesses I had ever seen. Attentive, but serious, like they didn’t care if you ever flew their airline again.
But when we landed and they opened the cabin door and I started walking down the steps and the Caribbean breeze hit my face and the smell of Cuba hit my nostrils like the aroma of an attic full of memories that you haven’t visited in a decade, I found myself crying and the emotion I felt wasn’t one of sadness or joy either, it was a mixture of the two, almost in equal proportion. I looked around and I saw tears rolling down my father’s face and the other passengers were no different and I saw a black stewardess pretending that she had something caught in her eye but I suspected that, forgetting the instructions she had received, she was caught in the enormity of the moment for a group of returning members of a dysfunctional family searching for meaning, and connections and some peace under the blue of tropical sky.
“The same tension we had felt in Mexico followed us through customs. The fact that most people we came in contact with wore the olive green of the Cuban law enforcement apparatus –- which had not been the case in Merida -– was a stark reminder that we were back, voluntarily, in the island-prison everyone had fought hard to escape. I noticed how the older members of our traveling party grew more apprehensive, especially when it was time to open up the bags to be inspected before proceeding. Again, the demeanor of those responsible for examining the contents was striking in its seriousness. Not a smile, not a word, except the very necessary, not even a look into our eyes as if we were all dangerously contagious and a friendly exchange of any sort would be fatal.
What Happened?
Published February 17, 2010 Cuba , Family , Personal Essay , Work in Progress Leave a CommentTags: Cuba, Cuba Travel, Cuban-American
(Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a work in progress, a novel. From Mountain Road to Easy Street is the working title. This is a first draft so I hope you can excuse any typos or imperfections. The action being described by the narrator corresponds in the calendar to events that happened on a day like today thirty one-years ago. I will post each day — if I can find the fortitude — the corresponding chapter. Thanks for reading).
“What happened?”
“A fucking car accident happened. We were visiting Cuba, year before last. Someone came back and told him to hurry if he wanted to see his Mom alive. He jumped at the opportunity when the government opened up travel. If you didn’t have any problem with the law there when you left, then they would allow you to visit. Castro called it the Family Reunification something or other but this wasn’t about the family, it was about dollars Cubans bringing dollars to prop up the economy after the Russians couldn’t help anymore. We had to pay for the hotel in Havana as part of the deal, even if you were staying with relatives. We were registered at the Habana Libre which used to be the Hilton back in the day, before the Revolution.
“So we made the arrangements through a family friend and off we went. I was floundering at work, jumping from job to job, unhappy as a motherfucker and my Dad asked me to go with him. He said it could clear my head, you know, help with the process and besides I wanted to see the family and my friends from when I was a kid. Hadn’t seen them in almost ten years. My childhood sweetheart, Rosie. I said yes. It didn’t take much to convince me. I gave notice at work when they wouldn’t give me time off –- I had just started there, so I kind of understood — no lost love between us, anyway.
“My Mom owns a sewing factory, right around the corner, on Mountain Road and Cliff. We all pitched in, my sister and me and my Dad would also help before he went to work everyday and after work and weekends. Dad was very concerned about leaving my Mom alone for a whole week, so as soon as he found a friend of the family to come by and help Mom, he made the plans to travel. He was worried leaving her alone for a week, ten days, can you believe it? It’s been almost two years since she’s been alone. She got her driving license at the end of the first. I guess she realized that she was going to have to drive herself places, ‘cause he wasn’t going to no more.
“It was in February when we left for Cuba. There was snow on the ground, I remember. Continue reading ‘What Happened?’
A Valentine’s Day Like No Other
Published February 14, 2010 Cuba , Cuban-American , Family , Personal Essay Leave a CommentTags: Cuba, Cuban-American, Exile, Valentine's Day
Forty years ago today I became an exile.
I left Cuba on a day like today as a fourteen-year-old with my seventeen-year-old sister, traveling through Spain to get to the promised land: Southern California. This is where our cousins — the one’s that sent for us — had settled. An American friend of theirs from church had donated the money to pay for my airfare. My cousins had paid for my sister’s.
In Spain we stayed with friends that were making the same trip but who were ahead of us by a couple of months. My parents were to join us later in Los Angeles, if everything worked out. It was not until years later that I was able to comprehend how big an if that had been.
Unintended Benefits of the Current Recession
Published February 5, 2010 Personal Essay , Personal Finances Leave a CommentTags: Recession, Personal Finances
It has been almost two years since I decided to close my six year-old business because the economic realities were all pointing in one direction: downward. At the end of the line, I felt about my business as I felt at the end of my previous marriage: sad, disappointed and frustrated but I was convinced that I had done all that I could to save them both. It just had not worked. On both instances, when I walked away, I felt that I was not going to look back, except occasionally, to see if there was something to be learned that would help me navigate the current waters.
I make it a habit of not complaining about my situation because I know that there are so many more families that face equal or worst problems than mine. Besides complaining never got me anything, unless I was dealing with Costumer Service at a department store, and even then…
What I have tried to do instead is look for the silver lining — not in a pollyannish, but a practical way — in this economic Waterloo.
I’ve come up with some evidence of silver. I would love to share it in the hope that it might help some of you deal with your own storm clouds. I know that it will certainly help me to talk about it as I move forward.
I never suspected, when I closed the doors to my business, that I would be almost two years without employment and that I would be facing the dire financial difficulties I have faced.
I’ve heard the expression “Every cloud has a silver lining” a thousand times and I’ve never looked up its meaning or origin until I sat down to write this. According to Wikipedia:
The origin of the phrase is traced to John Milton’s Comus (1634) with the lines, “Was I deceiv’d, or did a sable cloud turn forth her silver lining on the night?”
I am not going to talk much about the cloud part of the expression because I don’t want to bore anybody. Besides, we all have our own misery quota. I want to talk about the silver lining component instead, as I have come to understand it.
Continue reading ‘Unintended Benefits of the Current Recession’
Cartooning for Fidel
Published January 25, 2010 Cartoons , Cuba , Personal Essay , The Arts Leave a CommentTags: Cuba, Cuban Art
The man I most admired in my Cuban hometown — second only to my father and to the native son who played center field for the national baseball team — was someone that could make magic with a brush, some oil colors and a canvas. Or charcoal and a blank piece of paper. Wherever he’d set up to sketch or paint, kids and adults alike gathered around him, watching in quiet reverence as his visions came to life. He was a few years older than me and I never knew his real name, only his nickname: El Gongui.
One day I got up the courage to ask him to teach me how to draw. He asked if I had ever done it. I hemmed and hawed and said that I had done some cartoons and caricatures. When he convinced me to show them to him, he was very complementary. I probably doubted his sincerity, I’m not sure. It’s been a long time. But El Gongui offered me some tips and told me that I could ask him anything I wanted about painting. I never did, of course. I was a shy twelve year-old. But I continued drawing and shadowing him whenever he’d set up outside and secretly wishing his talent would wash over me.
No one in town was surprised when El Gongui was accepted to the National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. He went away to study and I continued sketching and drawing and hoping to one day paint like him.
—
Even before the all-clear was sounded, during the October Missile Crisis in ‘62, my parents had applied for a visa to travel to the U. S. I was seven at the time. It would take eight years for the exit permit to come through. It felt like growing up at an airline terminal or a train station. There’s not much living to be done because you’re always waiting for your trip to be announced.
I woke up feeling a bit lousy. I think the Mass Mess triggered it.
That on top of the unbearable disaster in Haiti, the recent death of a good friend followed by the death of a family member followed by the news of the illnesses of two dear friends. That on top of a choking financial situation brought about by almost two years of nearly zero income and a two foot-high pile of bills. That on top of…
At around 10 this morning I had the first clear thought of the day: “What’s your excuses for not getting off your ass and doing something positive for yourself? At least you don’t have a ton concrete rubble on top of you preventing you.”
I started by cleaning the kitchen counters, then the floor. I shaved. I made some phone calls. I asked for help. I called a friend.
Before 12 noon I was feeling “surprisingly plucky,” according to my Twitter entry. I stayed away form the self-pitying for the rest of the day.
I offered my help to someone who needed it. I contributed $5.00 to OFA and $20.00 to Haiti relief. I called another friend. I made myself a cup of espresso. I played Pandora instead of listening to pundits on TV. I took some income-producing actions.
Some optimism returned by the early afternoon.
Sometimes, or maybe always, what saves a day is the willingness to act on that first clear, positive thought.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
Pooch 911
Published January 9, 2010 Parenting , Personal Essay Leave a CommentTags: Dog First Aid, Parenting
I have a new, deep appreciation for the mysterious life-saving power of hydrogen peroxide. Pooch life-saving power, that is.
There are three things I know that can make a dog very sick and could potentially be fatal: Grapes, raisins and chocolate. The gravity of the situation depends on the size of the dog, the amount consumed and the speed with which first aid is administered.
This past week I had an incident involving my dog Celeste and a handful of raisins that had me praying to the pet gods and begging doggie to throw up. I’ll tell you how it all started, the 45 minute high-drama and the happy ending.
It all starts with an afternoon snack I offered my son Nicolas that I could not be certain he had not shared with his best friend, pictured here.
Three o’clock is Curious George time. Well, almost anytime at our house is Curious George time. There is always a request for crackers at the beginning of the show. “Cracker’ means a number of things. It could be Veggie Sticks, or corn chips or actual crackers, either cheese or wheat. Occasionally it also means raisins.
That was my offering this past Wednesday afternoon.
Our dog Celeste likes to be close by around snack time. She’s discovered that toddlers are really messy eaters and they tend to drop a lot of the stuff they’re supposed to be eating. Nicolas also likes to share his food and Celeste , who always seems to be hungry, is very appreciative of his generosity.
After I put some raisins in a cup and I walked back into the kitchen to tend to my cortadito — the version of cafe con leche that I’ve nearly mastered. I walked back into the living room not more than five minutes later by my calculation. Nicky asked for more raisins. He was extending the empty cup in my general direction without taking his eyes off his favorite monkey.
“Buddy, that was fast. Did you eat all these raisins?”
Without missing a beat, he points to the dog.
“Este!” he said.
“Did Celeste eat the raisins?”
He smiles and goes back to watching the show.
“Nicky, did Celeste eat the raisins?” This time my voice is a little louder.
Another smile but not definitive answer.
Panic interrupts our afternoon routine like an unexpected breaking news bulletin. I google “can dogs eat raisins?” even though I already know the answer. I click on a Snoopes link and get the confirmation I was afraid was out there: Raisins and Grapes Harmful to Dogs.
Terrifying reading!
Next I find a video that suggest making the dog vomit as quickly as possible is the suggested first aid. Hydrogen peroxide is the preferred method. Suddenly, this has become a life and death situation.
I call the vet’s office. Some desperation is setting in. They tell me to call Poison Control.
As I listen to the recorded greeting, I hear that this service has been available since 1975. Then it says that due to budgetary realities it will now cost sixty five dollars to talk to a vet. Please have your Visa, Master Card or American Express ready.
Anguish joins the desperation. I don’t have sixty five dollars.
I stay on the line. I lady vet comes on the line and I blurt out the financial reality first and the emergency situation next. She wants me to detail what happened. In some cases, she says, pet pharma might cover the fee.
I explain that part of the problem I have is that I don’t know for sure if the raisins were indeed “ingested” by the worried looking dog (dogs, like kids are really good at picking up on cues. They see you worried, they will worry. Especially if you’re looking at them when you’re doing the worrying). She agrees that I can’t take the risk of assuming it was baby who ate the raisins. Lady Vet agrees with the internet info. Given the weight of the dog, three (3) teaspoons of hydrogen peroxide — 3% solution — is what they recommend as well.
“Wait five minutes,” she says, “if the dog does not vomit, then give her another three teaspoons. Call us back if you need us.”
I am grateful for the generosity, and for the confirmation of the method to be used but mostly for the fact that we have the solution on the bathroom shelf. I also have a syringe that we use to administer baby medicine.
Holding down a 90 pound dog by yourself, to inject a nasty tasting liquid into the inside of the cheek is the kind of procedure for which I’ve had no training and no preparation. You do it because you believe your dog’s life depends on it. When you adopt a pet, you’re entrusted with their welfare. They look up to you to save them from their own ignorant behavior. The same rule applies to babies.
Twenty five minutes and two and a-half doses later, there’s vomit. Jubilation!
NO RAISINS IN THE MIX!
I can stop feeling guilty now. I kiss the pooch.
After the tears, I make sacred vow that toddler, dog and raisins never, ever, under any circumstance will be alone in the same room. So help me pet god!
Partners in crime and BFF
NOTE: Besides chocolate, grapes and raisins, onions and macadamia nuts can also prove deadly to a dog, according to Snopes.
Hey! That There Book is “THE” Communist Manifesto!
Published December 29, 2009 Cuba , Cuban-American , Human Rights , Personal Essay Leave a CommentTags: Cuba, Cuban-American Relations, The Communist Manifesto
That was my reaction when, as an 18 year-old, I spotted the Little Red Book at my college library. My reaction had everything to do with the indoctrination I had received as a child growing up under communism.
Because I never found a copy of the U.S. Constitution in my Cuban hometown library — or any other “subversive” works, for that matter — I assumed that my adaptive country would behave the same way. No work or information on the opposition.
Imagine my shock when I discovered the there was a Communist Party, active and legal, with it’s own nominee running in the national elections!
That was one of the reasons I fell in love with this country. We’ve never being afraid of different points of view. That’s not entirely true. Republican administration seem to be very sensitive to this. They appear to have a propensity for quelling dissent and ignoring the constitution, but that’s material for another post entirely.
I recently thought of my encounter with the Communist Manifesto all those many years ago because of the Cuban musicians visiting and touring the States.
It occurred to me that anyone of them could sing a communist-inspired song anywhere here and it would not cause one eyebrow to rise. No one would be arrested. No news would be made.
An American musician visiting Cuba would not have the same priviledge or consideration. The weak have trouble accepting criticism.
There are some major differences between the two systems of government. I never forget that.
