Happy Birthday, Dad. Still missing you, man!

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Author’s Note: I published this entry on my father’s birthday for the first time in 2009. I still miss him and not only on his birthday, so I post it again today. This is the one post that gets picked up most by search engines. Other folks who missed their departed dads come here to read about mine. If you’re reading this, I wish that you were as lucky as I was in having known someone like my dad Gilberto. Blessings to yours and mine.

If my Dad was alive, today would have been his 80th birthday.  He died in a car accident in Cuba in 1979. He was 47 years old.  I almost died with him.

On a day like today, I am remembering his courage and his grace.

I would love to tell you a little bit about both.

We were in Cuba visiting the family we had left behind a decade earlier.  We were one of the first groups to travel back to Cuba under the Family Reunification Act.  This was an agreement entered into by both the Cuban and American governments to allow family members living in the US the opportunity to visit relatives on the island.

Like a lot of Cuban families, ours had been split along political lines.  After supporting the Revolution from its infancy, my Dad broke with it in the early Sixties.  He felt the original promises of the Revolution — a return to democracy after Batista, with the Constitution of 1940 as guide — had been betrayed.  He called the Castro gang the real counter-revolutionaries.  After the nationalization of private property — including my Dad’s humble-single pump Sinclair station — and the declaration by Castro that communism, not democracy was the future for Cuba, Dad filed the necessary paperwork to emigrate to this country.  I can only imagine the pain Dad must have felt leaving his family and friends behind and move to a country that spoke a different language and lived a different culture.  He was only allowed to take with him the clothes on his back.

About a quarter of my family did the same thing.  The other three quarters stayed behind with different degrees of involvement in the Castro government.  Some close relatives, believers in and defenders of the Revolution, were high up in governmental circles.  I loved these people as much as I loved the ones that made it across the Florida Straits.  My Dad taught me that.  I never heard him say one negative, unloving thing about any family member that had chosen differently than him.  He had a big, accepting heart.

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A Poem (And A Photograph)

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NICOLAS

My five-year-old brother hands me my mail,
Happy Birthday, he says while smiling
content to be eating pretzels and peanut butter
before dinner. I flip through the stack
of unopened bank statements.
Nicolas has decided that uncooked pasta
is worth trying. He offers me some.
No, thank you. I’m not hungry, I say.
He reaches for the sugar bowl, the teapot,
the clock: they are companions, belong together.

He thinks of home. Mama? Papa? he asks.
I explain they are near, at The Mermaid Inn.
I distract him by changing a light bulb.
We agree the kitchen is too bright.

And, later, when asked by our father
the child says, yes, in fact he would
like to thank god for something:

cupcakes.

—Sherisse Alvarez

Hoodies For Trayvon

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Congregants bow their heads in prayer during a service at Middle Collegiate Church in New York, Sunday, March 25, 2012. Church-goers were invited to wear hoodies to services to show their support for justice in the case of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was wearing a hoodie on the night he was killed by a neighborhood watch captain in Florida. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

 

 

Jesus, Alcoholic. . .

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That’s what I say most Sundays. I say it in a church basement, as my turn comes up to identify myself to the group of alcoholics gathered there to “share our experience, strength and hope” with one another.

It’s an act of trust and of humility. But more than anything, though, is an act of self-acceptance.

When my father died at the age of forty seven in a car accident in 1979, the impact of that tragedy affected me more than I understood, or was able to accept, at the time. It happened while on a return trip to Cuba a decade after we had gone into exile. Suddenly a joyful event turned dark, it’s devastating shadow following me back to the States where I would only deal with it in the only way I found worked: I self-medicated, using drugs and alcohol, for the next few years to ease the pain and also to cope with a life that suddenly had stopped making sense.

There are many men and women that lose a loved one in an equally arbitrary and horrific way. Some in even worse conditions. Most of these folks learn to live with the pain and can carry on with their lives without resorting to the method I used. I reacted that way simply because I am an alcoholic, and as my late sponsor used to say “alcoholics drink.” I had used alcohol before to numb the pain, to celebrate an occasion — sometimes a very trivial one — or to cope with uncomfortable situations. I was mostly unaware that this was going on. But I certainly developed a relationship with booze from an early (and awkward) age that served and protected me. Continue reading →

This Is “Your Brain On Fiction”

A great article on the effects the (fictional) written word has on the area between our ears, by Annie Murphy Paul:

AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

More HERE. . .