Paying Love with Love

Paying Love with Love

Thelma T. Reyna

I have previously written in La Bloga about the selflessness and profound  kindness of my maternal Grandma Guerra, one of my greatest, earliest role models and mentors. To this day, the memory of her inspires me to try to rise to a higher level of humanity.  As a young girl, I was keenly aware of how her daily cooking, cleaning, and nurturing in helping my divorced mother care for all of us nine children helped our family to survive.

Repaying Grandma for her immense love was important to me; but, as a young girl without money and material resources, what gifts could I give her? Fortunately, one day she allowed me to do a favor that became a cherished ritual. 

For most of her last decades of life, Grandma wore a short, curly hairstyle fittingly called “the poodle.” It was cut and layered above the collar, then permed with two dozen skinny plastic curlers all over her head. I’d been to the hair salon with her a few times and had watched the process. So one day, when Grandma needed a haircut again, I offered to do the “poodle” myself.

At the local drugstore, she paid two dollars for a do-it-yourself perm kit called Toni, and another dollar or so for a plastic bag of curlers. At her home, I placed an old towel around her narrow shoulders, took a deep breath, and snipped away. We both endured the strong chemical smell of the perm as it wafted through her small house. In a couple of hours, we were done. I shampooed Grandma’s hair in her tiny sink, sat her down in a kitchen chair, and styled her new ‘do. 

I’ll never forget the smile on her face when she looked in her mirror. She gazed proudly at her reflection, turning this way and that, and immediately reached for her powder compact and patted her nose and face to complete the look of a woman about to go out on the town. In the comfort of her own home, Grandma had gotten her “poodle.”  She saved quite a bit of money and was grateful. So was I.

Until I married and moved to California from our native Texas, cutting and perming my Grandma’s hair was a yearly ritual for us. And always, her joy in the completed job was as unadulterated and convincing as the first time. In this ritual, we chatted about family, about her childhood, about friends and neighbors, about my college dreams, about life and everything. I learned much about Maria Treviño Guerra, this woman who grew up in a poor dusty ranch and never attended a school, who helped raise me, who sewed clothing for me, who cared for my firstborn child while I attended graduate school, who cooked countless meals for us, and who tended to my illnesses. 

When I grew up, I bought gifts for her and gave her money from my college jobs. But I knew that spending time with her and personally doing things for her counted more. So I went with her to doctors’ appointments, took her grocery shopping, and wrote letters to far-flung family members in her behalf. 

        But without fail— gently cutting, perming, and styling her hair, listening attentively to her reminiscences, and pampering her as she was treated to “a day at the salon” gently convinced her of my dedication to her. I paid back her love and kindness in my own small way, and this meant more to her than any fancy gift could ever relay.

Wondering What My Mother Would Be Like at Age 76

 

Earlier this month. I attended Gunpowder Press’s release of their new anthology: Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond. Since 2025 commemorates the 175^th anniversary of California’s statehood, the anthology features 175 California writers. My mother, Blanca Estela Palacio, would have been the same age as many of the women represented in the collection. December 5, she would be 76. For the world, she is forever immortalized at age 44. I am older than she was the last time I saw her alive, but not old enough to contribute to this anthology. The collection gives me an insight into what her life concerns would be as an aging Baby Boomer. Many favorite people and poets are included in this impressive poetry collection, a few micro essays are also tucked in.

As a child, I remember thinking that my mom was an exceptional women who had grown up with the best music. I was the oddball teenager who preferred her parents’ music and dances to her own generation’s. My mother was proud of the fact that she was a Baby Boomer, the generation of children born to parents who lived through World War Two, who protested the Vietnam War, who marched for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and affirmative action.

Blanca Estela and Melinda Palacio

While my mother was born in Texas, she is very much a California girl. California is where she grew up, became a teacher, an activist, and a single mother who also took care of her parents and siblings during her short life. Because I keep aging and my mother does not, I often wonder what her life would be like now. I become wistful around women who have the opportunity for mother-daughter dates. There’s so much about my life in Santa Barbara that I wish I could have shared with my mother. We often took summer road trips from Los Angeles to San Francisco and on several occasions visited my uncle who was stationed at Vandenberg Airforce Base in Lompoc, but we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I don’t think my mom knew the town existed. Solvang was our usual stopping point. To this day, I have no explanation as to why we never stopped in Santa Barbara. I know she would have loved Santa Barbara, given that she enjoyed Solvang’s small town charm.

Ten years after my mother passed, I met a mother traveling with her adult daughter. I was so happy for the two of them. I told them how lucky they were. Mother and daughter Lucy agreed. They had the same round face and blue eyes. It still puts a smile on my face to think of the two women sharing an aisle on the airplane with twenty-year old younger me. While I can no longer travel with my mother, we sure shared some fun travels together to Hawaii, Mexico, and Europe. In reading Women In a Golden State, I see my mother in so many of the poems. Sharon Langley’s poem, I Saw My Mom Today, reminds me that I only need to look in the mirror see my mother: “Purse. Pucker, now pose./That’s her smile for sure./I saw my mom today.”

Thanks to Gunpowder Press editors Diana Raab and Chryss Yost, there’s a collection of 175 poems that share the concerns of Women in a Golden State and the anthology my mother would be included in if she were a living poet. 

 

 

 

*This article also appears in the Santa Barbara Independent

 

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me I Have to Wait

Review: Tim Z. Hernandez. They Call You Back. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2024

Michael Sedano

I happily began reading They Call You Back by Tim Z. Hernandez. I don’t remember how many days into reading that I looked at the cover and noticed the publisher's bug next to the title. “Advance Reading Copy” it reads. The back cover says publication date of They Call You Back will be September 17, 2024. 

I'm not jumping the gun with this brief review. The book demands attention. Gente, waiting it out is all you can do. When the book hits the market, They Call You Back will be a literary sensation, for its stories, for the writing, for the book's necessity. 

 

They Call You Back is a necessary book at a necessary time. As the nation descends into divisive chaos, only unity can bring it back from the brink.  Tim Z Hernandez has a mission, it's been at the forefront of his work: make visible the invisible. Specifically, bring back from contemptuous disregard the Mexicanos and one Mexicana who were buried known only as "deportee".

 

Hernandez won the 2011 Premio Aztlán for the novel Breathing, In Dust. His 2013 novel is the first "discovery" book: Mañana Means Heaven, earns accolades for the Chicano writer’s uncovering the Mexican woman fictionalized in the beatnik classic, On The Road. Next, this author causes a sensation with publication of his 2018 investigative report All They Will Call You, that “finds” families of braceros killed in the worst airplane crash in history.

 

They Call You Back recounts the birth and growth of the author's mission--perhaps despite himself--to find missing souls. It's not just the deportees, nor Kerouac's lover. Hernandez reveals generational searches for lost graves and lost, missing, or disappeared, relatives. 

 

Asked by historians about his "method," Hernandez can point to dogged legwork but mostly to the lost themselves. A person doesn't need to be spiritual to be influenced by spirits, and that's Hernandez. The author discloses a yearning to be free of his quest, but when he's ready to leave behind the old work, a new story finds him when a relative contacts him. "I think I'm related to..." Skeptical of any claim, the author resists, but they--the spirits--call him back into the search.

 

Writers will devour They Call You Back as an avatar of good memoir writing. Every now and then, Hernandez pulls back the biography curtain to disclose a personal fact--a divorce, alcohol dependence--but his quests always compel the storyteller to get back to the next fact, the next connection between disparate events that, with hindsight, are prophetic. This is the difference between "memoir" and "autobiography," the author's dedication to writing about writing his stuff. The book's the thing whereby the author catches the conscience of a readership.

The author's use of time and location-based incidents will captivate readers and writers alike.  

There's a fly, and a butterfly, that attend a family crisis. The reader notes it, and the writer moves along. Some years afterward, another crisis looms and the author sees another fly, perceives the influence of another butterfly rebounding through family history. Readers recognize matters are not coincidental, but the author remains unable to pin down a concrete connection. In fact, he avers a feeling of being prisoner of demanding spirits that need to be written about.

 

With one glaring exception, the spirits and families seek identification with consequent closure. Because I have an uncorrected proof, there's a possibility editors will eliminate the one chapter filled with black boxes emending the name of one of the deportees. A family, after engaging Hernandez' efforts to find the story of a dead relative, demurs. They pull back permission to name the relative and the author is left helplessly sharing words and grammar--product of years of work-- that build to a name, and instead the name is covered with a black box. It's disconcerting to readers, given the ethos Hernandez builds as a sincere discoverer and sharer of light, to see the story marked up like a mural tagged and ruined beyond recognition by marker-wielding vandals. In this case, the vandal is the author himself.

 

For the author, as for readers, the search for the missing lives comes with powerful emotions. One of the most emotional moments for readers, as for the writer and his children, comes when the California State Assembly fetes the author and book, All They Will Call You. 

 

There's a powerful backstage moment when Joan Baez sings Woody Guthrie's "Deportee" song to Hernandez and three families of the discovered. It's the only time Baez or anyone, has sung the words for members of the families of the Los Gatos plane crash.

 

More powerful, when the State Senator begins to call the names of the dead, Hernandez' son takes up the ritual when raza roll call the absent: "Presente!" the boy mumbles at first to himself. Then, as the roll grows, the boy's voice grows in power and others join him. It's a magnificent piece of writing here. As California government calls out names, the boy's voice draws the elected members of government to their feet. As each name is pronounced--all they will call you is 'deportee'-- the government finally acknowledges its shamefulness; the power of cultura brings back those lives once and for all.

 

Presente!

Link to UofA Press: https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/they-call-you-back

 

 

SOME SEEMINGLY RANDOM EVENTS

By guest essayist Jennifer Silva Redmond

My mom was born in 1940, to a Mexican mother and an Anglo father, in that far-flung part of Mexico now known as East LA. Her parents divorced when she was young, and my mom split from my own Anglo dad in 1968, when I was seven. We all spent a few years in the hippie beach town of Venice, which I still consider my hometown, then Mom took us kids traveling around Europe, since my dad worked for Pan Am. That sojourn was followed by two years in Northern California and Oregon. We moved to San Diego when I was eleven and soon settled in the barrio of East San Diego.

I got into reading and writing very early, which lead me to reading scripts and doing theater as a preteen. At 14, I did the first of two plays at the Old Globe Theater, then went to a local performing arts college on scholarship, after testing out of high school at 16. I enjoyed studying acting, especially the summer school quarter at a campus just outside of London, but was sick of school by then, so I moved back to LA at 19 and started auditioning. I lived in Venice, waited tables in Santa Monica, and got (very) small parts in Hollywood.

My dream was to be a Broadway actress so I accepted a nanny job that took me to New York City. Once there, I became a “Californian,” which of course I’d never thought of myself as before. Once they heard where I was from, people would ask, “Then why are you here?” I could see their point—the extreme hot/cold that is NY’s weather, the indifferent concrete jungle of Manhattan, the cold, crowded beaches and lakes of the rest of the state. I got cast in an eight-month touring show in Florida, which felt more like home, with its acres of orange orchards and long white-sand beaches.

By 1989, I was a 28-year-old aspiring actress, back waiting tables and doing way-off Broadway shows. On a short trip home to San Diego for the holidays I met my old boyfriend Russel Redmond. The timing was right and he proposed and, even more important to me, he followed me to NYC with his grandmother’s ring. But one snowy day in March, we came up with the idea of kicking off our marriage with a three-month honeymoon sailing to and around Baja California’s Sea of Cortez. We got married in San Diego and soon set sail on his 26-foot sailboat across the ocean border, bound for Cabo.

My experience in Baja to that point was limited to day trips to Tijuana and weekends in Ensenada. Sailing was a new world, too; I had spent only a few weeks on the boat in a marina when we set off on that first 1000 mile journey south. The life-changing voyage was full of firsts, like my first time on solo watch enroute to the Islas San Benito during which my mindset went from wary paranoia to a kind of cosmic acceptance in four hours; my inner and outer awareness grew with every nautical mile.

We stopped in Cabo, beat our way up to La Paz, then continued north into the Sea of Cortez. I traded auditions and lunch shifts for wandering empty beaches, exploring cactus-covered canyons, and snorkeling with curious dolphins and colorful reef fish. After three months, we had not begun to see all Baja had to offer, so we cinched our belts, ate lots of rice and beans and fresh-caught seafood, and spent nine more months sailing turquoise waters and making friends in the plazas, markets, marinas and fish camps of that desert peninsula.

I quickly fell in love with Baja and its people, in small towns and fish camps, and in the capital city of La Paz. Along the way, I discovered, or rediscovered, my own Mexican-ness. My Spanish improved in the supermercados of Loreto and La Paz, at stops at the tiny tiendas of scattered fish camps, and the frequent trips to immigration offices. My daily journal writing evolved into stories, poems, and essays. To my amazement, I found that doing theater was not the only way for me to be creative and share my emotional inner life with the world. By the end of 1990, I’d chosen a pen name that included my grandmother’s maiden name, Silva, and started to become the Latina writer I am now.

I began editing for other writers in 1996, and in 2000, started working for Sunbelt Publications, a San Diego publisher that specializes in Baja and Mexico. In 2011, knowing editing was my calling, I gave up my days in an office cubicle writing budgets and grant proposals, and went back to working directly with authors. Me going freelance also allowed us—since Russel was teaching at San Diego City College by then—to continue exploring the West Coast on our sailboat during summers. By 2017, we both were working 100% online. I’m still Sunbelt’s Editor at Large, so I have the best of both worlds.

Over the years, I sold some short nonfiction pieces to magazines like Science of Mind, Sail, and Cruising World, plus anthologies that included A Year in Ink, and Dime Stories, which kept me believing that I had a future as a writer. I was especially thrilled to place a piece of short fiction in the anthology Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature. There I met Daniel Olivas and Melinda Palacio, who both wrote for La Bloga. My husband and I wrote three screenplays together, set in Arizona, Mexico, and California, which kept us traveling to locations to get the feeling of the places just right. We rewrote one of them, El Camino Real, as a short film which got made and even played at a couple of film festivals.

These seemingly random events all led me to start rewriting many of the pieces that began as journal entries so long ago. Soon, I had a rough draft of a memoir of my first year at sea. Being an editor, I kept revising and rearranging the manuscript as we sailed north to San Francisco in 2020, and on to Washington’s Puget Sound in 2022. Luckily, I found the perfect publisher who found me the perfect editor; eventually they said it was time to stop rewriting and publish the book. That memoir, Honeymoon at Sea: How I Found Myself Living on a Small Boat, is published by Re:books of Toronto, Canada. I couldn’t be happier that circumstance made me an “international author,” since I have led such an international life.

If you want to follow us on our ongoing sailing adventures—yes, the honeymoon continues!—here is the link to my Substack, Honeymoon at Sea. To buy/pick up my book at an indie bookstore, or order online and support an indie bookstore, click the link on bookshop.org. You can also order the book at Sunbelt, and see their other cool books and maps and everything else under the sun, at Sunbelt Publications which is a great way to support a small publisher and a regional book distributor.

*         *         *

Jennifer Silva Redmond is a writer and freelance editor from California, whose memoir Honeymoon at Sea is coming out from re:books of Toronto. Her essays, articles, and fiction have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, and on sites such as Brevity. She is on the staff of the Southern California Writers Conference and San Diego Writers, Ink, was prose editor for A Year in Ink volume 3, and co-founder of the critically acclaimed Sea of Cortez Review. Formerly editor-in-chief of Sunbelt Publications, Jennifer is now its editor-at-large. She lives with her husband Russel, an artist and teacher, aboard their sailboat Watchfire, somewhere on the West Coast of North America.

Para Las Mujeres: El Menopause

Melinda Palacio

Women’s History month is in full swing and I am shining a spotlight on menopause, that tricky life change that happens to women of a certain age. As I reach that age, that is middle age or half of life under the belt, I am in the middle of a new era for me, menopause. 

As if adolescence wasn't enough what with pimples and menstrual pains, menopause also brings pimples and body aches as hormones go awry and attack the host body, me. Mood swings, weight gain, hot flashes, joint aches, anxiety, trouble sleeping, hair loss or gain are just a few symptoms. 

I used to chalk up symptoms of depression and weight gain to the pandemic and lock down and having to watch people die of the plague. The whole world experienced Covid, changing how we interact with each other. A new normal of social distance and life on zoom ensued. All because some of us refused to wear some kind of face covering. The news and politics during the first two years of the pandemic didn’t help either.

However, much more was going on within my aging body. Not having access to my doctor, who didn't want to see patients unless it was absolutely necessary, didn’t help either. I figured I would take a page from Sedano's book, time to aguantarme, bear it and move on. 

Reaching a certain age meant finally being comfortable in my own body, until my body started to betray me with night sweats and anxiety, making it impossible to get a good night sleep. There's nothing like waking up in a coffin of your own sweat, thank you memory foam mattress. 

I used to sleep soundly the minute my head or arm found a pillow. Now, I count backwards, tell myself to concentrate on tensing and then loosening a body part until I've gone through each limb and toe. 

Then there's the daytime sweats. Those come on with a vengeance. Having ice water at restaurants helps. You can dab an ice cube on your forehead. It's a new kind of discomfort to meet a friend for coffee and then feel as if you have to disrobe or fan yourself; better hope no one sees you sweat. The term for the sudden change in temperature is a hot flash and it is no picnic. I always ran cold, was the girl that carried a little sweater in my purse or car because I knew I would get cold, especially at restaurants.

 Now, I'm the woman that needs a personal fan, resorts to fanning herself with a coaster. A bandana or handkerchief helps with the sudden breakout of sweat, a tip I learned from my friends in New Orleans. Men and women in the South carry a handkerchief to help with the summertime heat. 

I will be returning to this neglected topic. I am not a doctor. I leave medicine to my sister. I'm a poet, a writer, whose had menopause pause on my well-being, and writing. I've added vitamins, more greens to my diet, and anti-inflammatory foods. I'm started to feel better, as if awakening from a bad dream that has lasted more than a year. My body may be trying to kill me, but I will survive and be much stronger for it. 

Waking Up to Middle Age: Xmas 2021

Melinda Palacio

Melinda and Blanca Palacio

As I emerge from my Covid fog, I'm starting to take note of the new normal and how things, especially the holidays, feel different. They feel different because most of us have spent at least a full year in isolation. What's surprising to me is the huge percentage of the population that has taken zero precautions during a raging pandemic. Doing something I used to take for granted, like having dinner with family or good friends, brought up some feelings I hadn’t felt in a long while.  I was a little sad when I realized I had forgotten how old my mother would be this year. Can I blame this on Covid fog? Let's say yes. 

 

My mother died in 1994 at age 44, which means this year, she would have been 72. These statistics are mind-boggling to me because the last time I saw her, she was younger than I am now. I don't have to imagine too hard what she would have been like as an older adult. She was very youthful and she would tell people that I was her sister. 

 

I have to smile at the creative person that she was and how she would throw herself into the holidays. She was a school teacher at Heliotrope Elementary and loved holidays, especially Halloween and Christmas. Everyone that met her loved being around her. Who wouldn't? She radiated positive energy that was irresistible to everyone.. 

 

Somehow with the world opening up again, I feel more vulnerable about holidays, more down than usual. For anyone else suffering from grief, I’m here to say keep finding that one friend or stranger who will remind you to cherish each moment and memory. Recently, I haven’t shared much of my feelings, but celebrations are sometimes bitter sweet because I can’t share them with my mother who took so much pleasure in all festivities and holidays. 

 

A smile spreads over my face as I remember how fiercely my mother loved me and how proud she was of every one of my accomplishments. The beauty of waking up to middle age is to realize that she’s always there to cheer me on. While the holidays can be difficult, every moment doesn’t have to be a Hallmark Christmas movie, but it is possible to enjoy the season while honoring your grief. For myself, the best way to honor my mother is to be kind to others and to share some of the love that she enveloped me in during the more than two decades we shared.

 

 

 

Dispatch from Plaguelandia

Melinda Palacio

When I started blogging about the pandemic in March, no one could have imagined we would be back in lockdown with no where safe from Covid-19 in December. As it is, we are talking about, at least, two more seasons, maybe three, of the the Corona Virus Song and Dance, relax regulations a little and then shut down an entire city, state for weeks. I am grateful I’ve been able to survive this pandemic both physically and creatively. However, it has been a challenge. Isolation gets to me even though having all this time to write should be a blessing. I admire people who have managed to finish books, publish their work, and create art instead of grumbling about the world ending. 

With so many months to end this roller coaster year, I sometimes feel I should have published two or three books, at least finished the one I’ve been working on forever. The year in lockdown should have served as my own personal writing retreat, but the part of me that enjoys worrying decided to let all the worry and anxiety take over. However, I am ready to move on and embrace the upcoming new year. Next month, the world will be a different place. Given all that I know about quarantine life, I don’t think I would do anything different.

One of the best quarantine decisions I’ve made is adopting a puppy. The days may blur, causing me to surprise myself each time a new week rolls by, but my puppy forces me to keep a schedule. She doesn’t care what day of the week it is, doesn’t let me skip meals or walks. What I didn’t expect was how much joy she brings to strangers. Everyone loves a puppy. Strangers who wouldn’t go out of their way for me, cross the street just to engage with my dog. They sometimes have long conversations with her. They take her approval, licks, and wagging tail as consent for their intrusion. 

On the one hand, my paranoid self shudders at the thought of random people petting my puppy. What if they are infected with Covid-19 and pass the virus to me by touching my dog? I’ll admit, I have asked people to sanitize their hands before petting my puppy. But sometimes people rush her like she’s some famous movie star. I’m often surprised by a stranger’s sheer excitement at touching my dog. I also understand that the quarantine and lockdowns have had a strong effect on people, giving them a hunger for interaction with a friendly being. The dog doesn’t wear a mask or hold out hand sanitizer like a weapon of defense. The puppy accepts all affection with no judgment and wags her propeller tail so feverishly it looks as if she could fly away. 

Without fail, people always want to know the same three questions about my dog: ‘Is she a puppy?, How old?, and What’s her name?’. Pandora, the pandemic puppy, is six months old and while she looks like a mountain lion or small horse, she is definitely a puppy.

My next post falls on Christmas. If we’ve learned anything, let the cancelled pandemic world stay cancelled. Wear your mask, wash your hands, stay healthy and avoid surper-spreading holiday gatherings. Let’s have a merry Christmas by stopping the rising death tolls and curbing Covid. 

If you are looking to participate in a random act of kindness, text FAMILIA to 44321 to Donate to Al Otro Lado and help reunite families. 

Wrapping Up a Pandemic Summer Vacation

Melinda Palacio

Summer Vacation was a long drive east to visit friends and family in New Orleans. Or at least, wave to them from six feet away, instead of two thousand miles away. The plan was a van visit, but things didn’t quite work out. If you tuned in last week, you’ll notice I had to pass on my post. Steve had a tree trimming accident that landed him on the operating table with open heart bypass surgery. Some call it a happy accident that led to the detection of blocked heart arteries. What would have been time for writing and surviving isolation and the pandemic, turned into hospital stays, hospital visits, isolation, and surviving a pandemic. 

If I was a germaphobe before Covid, I’m even more of germ freak now. I walk around with lysol wipes, gloves, extra masks, sanitizing gel and spray and try not to touch any surface with my bare hands. The idea of going into a hospital sounded all my alerts. However, knowing that I had the opportunity to make sure Steve was going to be alright, made me face my germ fears. In some ways, I was lucky. Hospital patients in California aren’t allowed visitors. I was surprised by how casual some of the doctors, nurses and staff were, many of whom ate at their desk and spoke without their mask on. 

I kept my mask on as I sat in the corner and saw a rotating circus of doctors, nurses, technicians and hospital staff enter and exit Steve’s room. What I didn’t realize is how important it is for a patient to have a personal advocate. Someone who can run outside the room and let staff know that at 4pm, lunch was never brought to the patient. I understand why nurses and staff are immune to a patient’s call button buzzing every few minutes. Some patients abuse this power, like the guy next door was throwing a baby tantrum over his lack of jello pudding. However, when I mentioned to friends in the medical field that I had to give Steve the lunch I had packed for myself, they told me this was unacceptable and that I should complain. My complained garnered apologies and a fruit basket for Steve’s last day in the hospital. 

Discharge day was a whole other level of crazy. It seems as if doctors are bigger procrastinators than writers. Somehow, getting the doctor to sign a final discharge order, complete with prescriptions from the pharmacy, and an order for a wheel chair (hospitals apparently will not let you leave on your own two feet, even if you can walk), took six hours. Meanwhile, I was bothered by a clogged ear and started to pray and hope that I wasn’t getting sick. A week later, I had my ears flushed out by an ENT doctor. 

Th is how our summer vacation turns into a self-imposed medical leave. Not fun, but at least, the surprising blocked arteries were surgically repaired and my hearing and balance are back to normal. 

If you require urgent or emergency or wellness care, do not be afraid to seek medical attention for fear of hospital germs or Covid germs. It’s important to take care of your health and trust that you will receive professional care, even if the hospital’s lunch cart passes you by. Stay safe, healthy, and happy. Wash your hands, wear a mask, keep sanitizer handy, and vote.  

True Blue

truth

/tro͞oTH/

noun:   the quality or state of being true.

"he had to accept the truth of her accusation"

Similar:

veracity
truthfulness
verity
sincerity
candor 
honesty
genuineness 
gospel

gospel truth

that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

noun: the truth

"tell me the truth"

Similar: the fact of the matter
what actually/really happened

As I've gotten older, I realized that the are things I stopped telling people and explaining. I asked some sister writers Elizabeth Marino and Yolanda Nieves to add their two cents. But before you hear from them, here's mine.

After eight years of living at the poverty level, I've finally decided to write about it. Fair warning to readers: if you are looking for poverty porn, move on.  There are enough stories of the desperation, the panic, the self-loathing; as well as the "I found the light inside me after I lost it all." paens.

This won't be about any of that at all. This is about denial and acceptance and what you finally face in yourself.

I am a recovering alcoholic/incest survivor/survivor of domestic violence and death threats. I wrote books, got some of them published, interviewed people like Martin Espada, and read with Juan Felipe Herrera. I went back to school in my late thirties and got a B.A. and an M.F.A. That history, both good and bad, has nothing to do with what I about to say.

I had to face my own powerlessness - over alcohol, over my sexual abuse history, over what I cannot control either within or without me, what casual acquaintances and those I love dearly will do or not no. I have accepted and let go of a million things...

Except for this.

My people are working people, pushing through and working hard always produced some bit of ballast, some piece of rock to stand on, some food on the table.

What I have fought against and am facing is at 63, I might never find another job. Instead of telling myself if I just keep pushing, keep reinventing myself, there will be a place for me right around the corner. I currently have 943 applications on file. I finished a program to be a TEFL instructor, as well as nailing a proofreading certificate. 

And yes, I have applied for jobs ranging from hotel front desk clerk, to Walmart greeter, to executive assistant, to Assistant Professor of English....and nada.

The new normal - I live on my social security, about $1000 a month, and whatever else I can hustle. This where the belief that hard work = improving my life passes away. 

I stopped thinking about next year, or visiting home, or a more comfortable pair of shoes. I stopped planning for the future, watching a shrinking horizon. 

Now l try to eat as well as I can, get enough water, walking and getting some sunshine, and finding one true piece of joy in myself, in my partner, in my day.

At the risk of hyperbole, I fight the wolf, whose teeth are fear, and whose claws can shred your self-respect, if you let down your guard for even a second. 

Gente, I'm tired.

I know there are millions out there like me.

I know there is no social contract to take care of each other, to provide a dignified life and death for anyone in this country. Friends have done so much, giving what they can freely, but that is not the safety net I mean.

What I stopped telling people is I'm sure a break is just around the corner.

Elizabeth Marino

As a self-identified socially engaged poet, one’s personal poverty can be flooded by pity, when you hunger for empathy. A sharp, piercing cry of pain is not the full sound of your humanity, and skimps on what you need to say. The literally starving artist, with unstable housing, lack of access to decent health care, and maybe one hot meal a day is as crushed as anyone missing the essentials for material survival. To choose impoverishment in some wrongheaded attempt to identify with some Other or “lift up the voice of the voiceless” ultimately rings false, and an artist must be free to get to one’s own truth of their own conditions. To be of use in the world demands such truthfulness.

I have survived through connection and solitude.  One cannot take the hand of opportunity when one’s own hand is trembling and faltering.  But one can rest and rise again. Keep holding onto your drive to communicate when much is expressed, as well as to those drafts which help move you along your journey, but do not need to be revealed to others. Delirium might be trippy, but not really nourishing.


One victory for those of us of color is that with the existence of projects like LaBloga, our voices are still here, telling our stories in our own ways. If we truly lack resilience and persistence, why are there volumes of our work, and more in production? If we do not craft our work properly, why are our audiences so moved, and our lines shared among our listeners? Know that there are people who in the name of diversity relish the pornography of our pain more than the tapestry of our living struggle. Keep moving. Keep working.


Yolanda Nieves

I have stopped sharing the story of how I grew up with an alcoholic father and am considered an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACOA). I am a survivor of a father who was a benign alcoholic (he’s dead now) and a mother who wrote herself into government history by applying and receiving welfare.  I was 9 years old when my father decided he didn’t want to live with us. That began the moment of my greatest shame-paying for grocery with food stamps and realizing my mom, infant sister, and I were going to be immigrants in the land called “abandonment.”

It’s terribly exhausting to keep labeling yourself an ACOA when your father’s been dead over a decade, your mother has found peace with all the decisions she made (like staying married to a damaged human being), and you’ve been through several of years of therapy to figure out you have actually been a decent person all of your life and it was “not your fault.”

I want to address what a “benign” alcoholic means to me.  My dad wasn’t interested in anything except drinking.  Liquor was the root chakra force that illuminated his world. The bottle was his wife and mistress at the same time.  My mom, sister, and I were just the afternoon matinee ticket holders who had to watch a bad movie where the hero is on a one-way trip to hell. He spent all his money on booze, forgetting that he had to pay bills and get groceries for us.  Yeah, we were hungry some days.  But he gave us provisional alms once in a while.

I suppose he was one of those periodic alcoholics.  He would stop drinking occasionally long enough to come up for air and say, “I’m sorry.”  My father was not physically or sexually abusive to my mother, me, or my sister.  He was, however, an expert in the area of neglect. He loved dogs and devoted a significant amount of love and time to the dogs we somehow adopted when he wasn’t drunk, which is weird because we were the human beings in need desperate need of his time and attention. (My connection with animals comes from the ying yang love/neglect our dogs suffered.)  

When he wasn’t drinking, my father would drop everything to help his neighbors.  I remember he was attentive to me in this manner: He bought me books. He took me to the zoo, the garden conservatory, amusement parks, and the movies.  When I was 8, he bought me a dictionary as a birthday present and gave me direct instructions. “Read it.”  And like Malcolm X I started with “aardvark” and ended with “zymurgy”.  

So now you understand. It’s complicated, but I have decided to uncomplicate it.  As a witness to my dad’s chronic disease, the memories of his ocean-like drinking episodes are still as awful, dark, and traumatizing as the moments they happened. Yet it is possible that I had an idyllic childhood in comparison to other children whose parent(s) have suffered addiction.  I still am an ACOA, but it’s not worth mentioning anymore.  I had it good.  That’s my story.  I’m sticking to it

Interview with Claudia D. Hernández, winner of the Louise Meriweather First Book Prize

Melinda Palacio 

Claudia D. Hernández 

I am so thrilled for this amazing and lyrical memoir, a life in poems and story by La Bloga friend Claudia D. Hernández, 2018 winner of the Louise Meriweather First Book Prize by Feminist Press. Knitting the Fog is a book you’ll want to read and reread. 

MAP:

There is so much fierce courage in Knitting the Fog from the courage of being sent to the mill to bathing in a river without knowing how to swim and then crossing the Rio Grande and in between all the stubborn acts of childhood courage such as sifting though the dump. Can you talk about the courage required to expose yourself in this book and was it something that was easy or hard to summon?              

                    

                                                 

CDH:

It took both emotional and spiritual courage to write this book. Me desgarré like Tía Soila would say. I had to break family bonds and secrets that not one family member dared to pronounce in decades. To give you one example, I begin my book with a poem titled Facts on How to Be Born: Life.This poem explains how at the age of eighteen I learnedthat my real last name should have been Rossi instead of Hernández. It took me eighteen years to find out about this truth and it took me another ten years to process this information and to write about it. It was painful to accept it, but I understood my mother and her struggles. She was a young mother and a wife fighting for her life, forced to be in a relationship that was based in domestic violence rather than love. I don’t blame her.  

It took me thirteen years to write this memoir because it’s a hybrid with essays and poetry. During the process of writing each essay, or each poem, I felt as if I was in therapy. The problem was when I began to submit to journals and eventually these got published and accepted. Exposing my family and myself was killing me slowly, hypothetically speaking. I was revealing all my dirty little childhood secrets as well as my mother’s and my grandmother’s youth. But these are lessons filled with loveand courage and therefore I believe they should be shared. Someone who reads these stories or poems might relate to my mother’s courage, my grandmother’s struggles. Perhaps they might even find inspiration in some of my writing. I admire my mother’s valor for leaving my abusive father behind. She had to sacrifice her three daughters by leaving us behind, but like Tía Soila says, “Your mother has a backbone like no other woman,” she came back for thethree of us three years later to set off on a journey that would forever change our lives.  

MAP:

Knitting the fog is the title of your memoir and an expression for something that cannot be done. I see this also as knitting the different aspects of you and the languages you grew up with. In beautiful prose and verse you've accomplished the impossible in telling your story in a unique and lyrical way. Can you tell us a little more about why you chose the title for both your title poem and memoir and when did you first hear of the expression?

CDH:

The first time I came up with this expression was when I wrote the poem, Tejiendo la niebla, I was on my way to San Francisco on the 101 freeway and the mountains were foggy. I remember clearly saying out loud: Tejiendo la niebla, knitting the fog both in English and Spanish. I know it sounds absurd, something unrealistic, but at the moment I felt inspired and my Spanish poem was born. I was in the passenger seat, so I wrote the skeleton of the poem. Eventually a poem was born and I began submitting it to different presses months later. This poem was nominated as the Best poem and published on La Bloga in 2012. A yearlater, my partner then translated it into English and decadelater, I decided that Knitting the Fog would became the title of my memoir. 

My memoir has many layers of unanswered questions that perhaps will never be answered. I think I will be okay if that’s the case. It also has other layers of painful memories that will never be resolved and I want to be okay with thatas well. Like for example, my mother truly forgiving my grandmother for abandoning her at the age of six. I’m not sure if my mother will ever let that go and let Mamatoya in her heart again. Or my sister Sindy forgiving my mother for bringing her to the US against her wishes. I want my mother and my grandmother to heal and forgive themselves as mothers and move on. Motherhood is difficult and no one teaches you how to be a mother especially when you’re seventeen years old. This was exactly the case with both my mother and grandma—young mothers at the age of seventeen. This is part of knitting the fog. It’s complicated. 

MAP:

Now that you've lived in South-Central Los Angeles (are you still in Cudahy?) for longer than your birth place, do you feel distanced from the protagonist in your memoir? How does place affect who you are? 

CDH:

I no longer live in Cudahy. I live in South Gate, the city that borders it. This is still South East Los Angeles, though. I lived in Cudahy up until I was eighteen years old. When I turned twenty years old I became a Teacher’s Assistant and I worked in Cudahy, at Park Avenue Elementary School for four years, the same elementary school I attended when I first arrived to the US. Soon after I got my B.A., I began substituting all over South East Los Angeles area. When I became a teacher, I got hired at Jaime Escalante in Cudahy. I was elated to be working back in Cudahy, giving back to my own community. I worked at Escalante for one year and a half as a kindergarten teacher up until I was let go due to low enrollment. So I feel like I have never left Cudahy. It’s always in my heart. Who knows, I might come back one day when I build enough seniority with LAUSD. I’m currently working as a fifth grade teacher at Nueva Vista Magnet Elementary School in Bell, which is also in South East Los Angeles and next to Cudahy. I never want to leave this area. This is where I belong. This is where I grew up and this is where I need to be, where kids see me and can relate to me, look up to me and say: Ms. Hernández is my teacher and she’s an artist, a poet, and a writer. I want to be just like her when I grow up. 

MAP:

What do you when you are not working or writing? Do you have any hobbies, obsessions?

CDH:

When I’m not working or writing I love to sleep and run. It makes no sense, I know. But I love both. Not in that order. I love running long distances with friends and short distances by myself listening to my favorite band/obsession right now: Bomba Stereo. I love music: from trova to British pop, from Violeta Parra to Nico from the Velvet Underground. I also like to hike, paint, and do ceramics, but these come with the seasons. Road trips and bookstores are two more of my hobbies. Also, thirty-mile-bike-rides specifically because that’s all I can handle as of now. I occasionally play Soccer, depending on my mood. I love to dance. Did I mention that I love food? And photography is simply part of me, although I’m on an indefinite hiatus and I still don’t understand why. 

MAP:

Are you happy with the production of your book, the cover art, etc. Did anything surprise you about the process of publishing your memoir?

CDH:

I’m very happy with the production of my book. I love the Feminist Press and what they stand for. I love the fact that they have been around for almost fifty years and it’s a nonprofit organization founded to advance women’s rights. I found the perfect home for my book. What surprised me was when they asked me to submit my Spanish poems to go along with the English poems. I loved how they wanted to publish both side by side. I never imagined that I was going to have the opportunity to have my beautiful Español published in such an important book. Another thing that I liked as well was how none of my Spanish words/phraseswere italicized throughout the book. In regards to the art cover, they decided to choose one of my photographs as the art cover. I was very pleased with that. All the content, including the cover art is all my work, my art. I can’t complain. I love the Feminist Press!

MAP:

Anything else you'd like to tell La Bloga?

CDH:

I want to thank La Bloga for always being such a great supporter and sponsor to 

up-and-coming as well as accomplished artists. ¡Muchasgracias!