One to Ten, How Much Does It Hurt?

 Pain Happens
Michael Sedano

July 2014, a week after the Fourth, I lie feverish, in pain, not acceding to Barbara’s demands she drive me to the emergency room. I am enjoying jubilant sounds out there, kids romping in our swimming pool. Pain comes and goes from bad to extreme. One to ten what number? Eleven. That kind of pain. I’m not convinced I’m dying until a physician, who’d been watching the kids, pushes on my abdomen and I grimace and groan. New pain atop pain i'd been holding back, convinces me.

I wake with a few punctures in my belly and waist—robo surgery, I’m told—and a plastic bag attached to my left side. A young man carbuncular, the surgeon, swaggers into the recovery room informing me he’s cured my diverticulitis. He pauses then delivers his punchline, the surgeon brags he's removed two feet of intestine. ba da boom.

I didn’t know I had diverticulitis until he tells me I don’t have it now. Peritonitis made the surgery a challenge he continues, he couldn't see too well through all the muck. Quite a challenge as it develops. 

Three days later, I turn grey and get a code blue ride to the surgical suite. Doctor comedian nicked the spleen and it is consuming itself. I’m bleeding to death. Now the surgeon slices me from sternum to abdomen to fix his fix. Who would have known the young man to have had so much blood in him?

I died during that surgery, splenectomy, but I get sent back from the other side by the ancestors telling me to get out of line. I wrote about it when the Dilaudid had worn off, in this La Bloga-Tuesday column (link).

July 2014 was as consequential a month as I’ve lived (other than August, when I was born, and married, and returned from overseas). I’d died and come back in July 2014. 

Science calls it an NDE, near death experience, but science doesn’t respect cucui, the spirits, and thinks brain chemistry, DMT, cooks up those visions and messages, “delusional ideation,” researchers call what happened to me.

Twenty-one days in the hospital teaches me to understand physical pain. I while away the hours locating the source of pain deep inside. This allows me to brace for the next wave of explosive pain so it won’t kill me again. Waves of pain blind me and I writhe into deeper agony, groaning into the empty hospital room with the world happening beyond the curtain.

This week marks my twelfth year back on this side of the curtain. I was ready to remain over there with the welcoming spirits who’d assembled. I know now why the ancestors sent me back: Barbara needed me.

Physical pain from one to ten has no counterpart for existential pain—in 2018 Barbara’s dementia of the Alzheimer’s type diagnosis delivers me into a new career as a caregiver. The disease arrives hard and quickly accelerates how she changes. What the books foretold happened one after another with relentless inevitability.

Alzheimer’s produces unrelenting all-enveloping pain in my heart and thoughts. I turn off emotion. This is now my life and I live it every moment of every day. COVID drives us to shelter in place for the rest of our lives. Barbara transitions in February 2023.

Living with Alzheimer's dementia changes both people. Only now do I possess the wholeness to write Barbara’s and my story of living with Alzheimer’s, and my new story, after Alzheimer’s.

We had only time.

Alzheimer’s happened to Barbara. She experiences it alone, by herself, I cannot share that, nor bear it in her place. Behaviors so essential to her personhood change. How painful when I recognize the absence of something as fundamental as a smile. When did I see her final smile? Why didn’t I notice? The pain of regret doesn’t diminish, only memory puts regrets in their place, deep inside where pain comes from.

In 2014 I cross to the Other Side and return. In 2018 Barbara and I begin living with Alzheimer’s dementia. I get sent back because Barbara would need me. When we’d wed on my birthday in 1968, we vowed to one another, “all the days of our lives.” 

There is no pain in joyful memories.

On Turning 80, and Being in Love

 On Turning 80, and Being in Love

by Thelma T. Reyna

 

 

We carry what we can, water carriers that we are, and leverage our octogenarian body, heart, and mind to be as impactful as we can be, to be relevant in this world…and yes, even to fall in love.

 

Only three percent of the world’s population (four percent in the U.S.) attains this milestone. On average, in a random roomful of 25 people, one is age 80. So we are rare birds. Most other mortals have departed that room, one by one, year by year, leaving us to wonder at times why we’ve been allowed to live this long.

 

I am the second eldest of nine siblings: seven brothers, one sister. Only the two youngest brothers, suffering chronic illness, still tread this earth with me. Their steps are numbered, as all our steps have always been, making each footfall even dearer now. For many years, I’ve lived in California 1,700 miles away, seeing my seminal Texas family once a year, defying distance to keep love and memories alive.

 

Eight decades of living gather the dust and glitter of memories simultaneously. My dust is the stage, curtain, and backdrop of Kingsville, my small, tumbledown hometown where few homes had green lawns but where  children could climb giant cottonwoods and oaks, play championship jacks and marbles in smooth dirt, run flag football at the elementary school down the street, and huddle at the brand-new Pizza Hut on 14^th Street till midnight. King High School, the lone granter of diplomas, gathered to its bosom the town’s entirety of adolescent Sturm und Drang; and-- through stellar, dedicated teachers—elevated us to better versions of ourselves. They were the glitter who helped us shine.

 

In 80 years I’ve had my fill of schools and books, first at a kindergarten desk where I learned English with the teacher’s ruler punishing mistakes. My home with nine children had no books, but schools and rules and library stacks whetted my appetite to know. My life has centered on the written word: as an English teacher, author, editor, publisher, poet. Thousands of fellow travelers have walked these paths with me, students and colleagues, filling my life with their precious light. Enlightenment brightened with joy and love.

 

After 80 years, there is ample emptiness, spaces once filled with brothers, sister, mother, father, elders, other flesh and blood. These absences of loved ones sit clearest in ruminations, for losses hurt the hardest when the love’s been deep and strong. But so are my memories of them, of all the people whose humanity and kindness made even the angels sing. They reside eternally in my spirit’s core.

 

And now: about falling in love.

Two deeply wounded souls were adrift in grief, a widow and a widower who had each celebrated over 50 years of marriage shortly before losing their spouses.  As friends, they turned to one another for consolation and support. Three years later, these 80-year-olds are learning about loving again in the twilight years of their lives, about nurturing the bonds that mutual grief birthed, about how rediscovering romantic love late in life is one of the world's greatest gifts.

Who knew?

 

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Tallac Knoll And Pa'lla

Walkabout: L.A. County Arboretum 
Michael Sedano

I began walking regularly for health benefits in 2010 after gut surgery and, not long after, diabetes. I healed, lost weight, controlled that A1C. Walking in gardens, defining my world as what I see in the camera viewfinder, provided respite hours during the years from 2018 to 2023 I lived with Alzheimer’s dementia as my wife’s caregiver. 

I walk with my camera, choosing lenses for the walkabout’s objective. If I seek butterflies and insects I bring the 100mm macro lens. When I seek hummingbirds and other souls with wings in the air, I mount the 300mm lens, with and without an extender. Walking makes people healthy, it’s the “exercise” part of “diet and exercise”. Nature makes people happy, seeing with one's own eyes, and sharing fotos of wonder.

My parents would bring me to the Arcadia Arboretum (link), we called it, with some regularity. The Los Angeles County Arboretum, and the California Botanic Garden in Claremont (when it was named the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden - link), offered a road trip on Route 66; Redlands to Berdoo, Berdoo along the 66 past sleep in a wigwam motel not too distant from Mt. Vernon Street where Rte 66 begins, upwind of Kaiser Steel where I'd one day work, cruise through the muscatel vineyards of Cucamonga where Mom had picked uva as a girl, through the orange grove-lined stretches of Montclair and Upland whose reputation as racist hotbeds kept my head below the windows, first a Plymouth, then a Ford.

For a kid who grew up around orange and apricot groves, Arcadia comes as a new world, the gift of a couple hours exploring and studying trees and plants, reading and making mental notes, enjoying the specificity of taxonomic names to separate the trees from the forest, sabes? Then, as now, the Arboretum lacks fences and stringent borders, allowing gente free roaming through the grounds. 

Several water features make an Arboretum visit a mix of plants, birds, fish, terrapins, crustaceans, insects, and tourists. Excited groups walk speaking Spanish and Mandarin (I suppose). Any visit adds polyglot aural enjoyment. I enjoy good conversations with raza gardeners and, in English, various volunteers. Metiche me, I tell passers-by about that heron pa'lla, check it out and have a great day.

It should be common sense not to harvest fruit nor steal easily-separated cuttings. No fruit hangs within reach at the Calamondin orange trees bordering the main road to the knoll. The avocado grove hangs lots of young fruit. Torongas overipe litter the ground. The Caper bushes are budding. Today, Lake Baldwin's green algae surface prompts signs in Spanish and English, but not Mandarin, reading "do not walk on the lake".

After our Arboretum hours, Mom had to visit south Lake Street in Pasadena where Bullock's department store displayed treasures and luxuries my family owned only with our eyes in those passing minutes on the showroom floor. 

Nowadays, my walking companion, Thelma Reyna, and I make regular walkabout journeys from our homes in Pasadena to Arcadia and the Arboretum. We alternate between here, San Marino's The Huntington (link opens new window). and La Cañada Flintridge for Descanso Gardens (link).

We walked the Huntington yesterday and today we trek to Arcadia intent on climbing to Tallac Knoll, at 583 feet, the highest place in this part of the San Gabriel Valley. I've brought the 300mm lens hoping for water birds and brilliant colors in hummingbird gorgets. 

We've arrived with good energy and make the steep uphill walk with poco stress. Our regular distance takes us a mile and a half and today's route will account for two plus miles with a lengthy uphill trek followed by a steep set of downhill steps to flatland before a culminating incline across deep lawn to the exit. We are good and tired by that last leg of the walkabout.

The prize of the day is a Queen butterfly. A first for my eyes and Thelma's. Our most arresting views are two encounters with a Blue Heron that, on first sight, flies away to lowland waters. We don't see it at the hoped-for pond and move along. Seeing the heron fly overhead toward where we'd been disappointed, we execute an about face to return for some arresting close-ups of the cooperative photogenic creature and the satisfaction of having gone there, and back again.

Through A Lens, Brightly

Canon EOS 6D Mark II. ISO4000. 1/4000s, various apertures. Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM with EF12 extension tube.

Goldfinch wing with Goldfinch.

The goldfinch perches momentarily. I point the 300mm lens. The goldfinch comets away testing my reaction time. I desperately push the button. Just in time.

Bird. Movement (or none). Eye. Brain. Finger. Camera. Lens.  

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4 

Spathodea Campanulata and Colibrí Allen’s. 

A spectacular flaming-orange flower whose gold-trimmed petals open in bountiful clusters draws undoubtedly happy hummingbirds to  nectar in unthreatened leisure high in the canopy of the Arboretum’s African Tulip tree forest atop the Arboretum’s Tallac Knoll.

The tree has bad press as a weed because its delicate seeds float on winds to germinate across nearby untreed tierra. I’ve managed to gather seed but never had one germinate in a greenhouse.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/8 

Blue Heron’s Yellow Eye

Tallac Knoll includes a water garden to walk around on the winding path down to the waterfall. Thelma and I sit on the bench to watch a hummingbird nectaring at Russelia flowers. I stand to peer over the thicket of red flowers and I come eye to eye with a wondrous being—Blue Heron.

The small pond makes for close quarters and wonderfully detailed fotos. This is uncropped at 300mm and five feet distance. The bird moves confidently with water between me and it.

I watch it lift and fly directly away, my reaction time good enough to frame the bird but the autofocus can’t find the bird on the wing. 

The Blue glides out of sight through the tree canopy vectoring toward one of two water features below Tallac Knoll, Baldwin Lake or the Turtle Ponds. I plan on seeing it there, I hope serendipity will be on my side.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/7

Queen Butterfly

Here is a lifer for me.

I’ve read about the Queen Butterfly. I’ve seen fotos of Queen Butterflies. Until today’s stroll into the Herb Garden where the Duranta Tree lures colibríes and mariposas galore, I’d not seen one on the wing.

Floating in from the Desert Willow tree and red Salvia thicket comes a bright orange soul. Not a Monarca though the black and orange colors call that name. But my eye notes something’s different about this monarch—not stained glass leading but dots. Spots. My heart leaps, my reward for remembering a picture. 

Now I’ve seen you.

Órale.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4.5

Anise Swallowtail and Duranta Flowers.

It’s 1124. Sun casts unfiltered light onto Duranta’s profusion of blue flowers and through the mariposa’s beautifully colored translucent wings. 

For its part, the mariposa flies with proboscis at the ready. It aims with unerring accuracy at the blossom’s yellow target to sip Duranta’s flowery nectar, undeterred by the happy photographer looking up from only eight feet.

This is its world, flight and sip, invisible zephyrs carry the butterfly aloft until a wing twist gives it purposive direction. 

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/4.5

Blue Heron Met Again.

Thelma and I make our way down from Tallac Knoll to the herb garden then to the Arboretum’s Turtle Pond. This is a permanent water feature where finding an Egret or Heron happens often enough that I always approach it with warm expectation. Today, I’m encouraged when we see a magnificent sight, the blue heron appears from the rushes concealing Baldwin Lake. It’s flying toward the Turtle Pond. Thelma and I, already challenged by our walk, turn around and go find a cooperative bird, confident as always that four feet of water between it and that guy means he’s a minor distraction. Is that food?

This is not the reflecting pool at the national mall in D.C. The yellow splots come of reflected light off muddy water, not blue paint and algae.

iso4000, 1/4000s, f/7

Technical Note: Most of these fotos are possible with a smart phone. In all instances, the subjects are only a few feet from the lens. Digital photography with quality equipment--I buy only used equipment-- produces a large file that can be enlarged to enormous proportion to sell or hang on a wall.

Memories, Moths, Enamoradas Pasadas

Nightime Walkabout: Visit With A Swarm of Unknown Moths

Michael Sedano

The night isn’t particularly dark on the concrete driveway entering the brightly lit mall parking lot. I’m walking, so I keep to the edge where a bed of dwarf lantana grow. Something, maybe a gum wrapper, maybe a critter, darts across the flowers into shadow.

I bend to gaze intently scanning the spot where movement has arrested my attention. I search around several plants, eyes primed to see a piece of paper that doesn’t exist. I straighten up surveying the bed at my feet where some natural magic shares this climactic moment of metamorphosis with me when these moths rise from the earth like silent chicharras, seeking nourishment from abundant lantana flowers.

I have no idea what moth this can be. When the moths stop to sip, their wings flutter in nonstop delight fully comprehending this nectar. Getting close and getting an iphone foto takes dozens of exposures, but at such wing velocities the iphone cannot catch a wing in space even with flash. By their wings will you know them, moths, I have no identification for these small souls.

I get to my car and a moth has posed itself on the windshield. Mira nomás.

Fast As You Can Wink An Eye

Michael Sedano  

 

She ripped my heart

Into tiny quivering pieces

scattered everywhere. 

A bloody mess.

The janitor complained

It’s not my job, man.

I gathered the shards

Myself

Thinking to put it back

The way it was, later.

 

Carolina haunted him with profound regret, and unrequited passion. Walking away straight-shouldered, she turns to smile over her bare freckled shoulder, hair wafting into a golden blur. The glint from her eye promises him everything he would ever want. But she is paper and gelatin and silver halides and a fifty-years old memory. He’d held the camera to his cheek watching her turn away. She had walked into the crowd and he’d never laid eyes upon Carolina again.

 

Until now. The novelty of being in Edison NJ wears off quickly. Yesterday, to conclude the day’s business routine, his local hosts insist on taking Mr. De las Costillas sightseeing. The blimp. Edison’s labs. The Raritan Canal. White Castle burgers stuns him as the epitome of everything evil about fast food, but Miguel keeps that to himself. The locals are delighted to introduce the big shot from the coast to sliders.

 

It is the final night of the annual three-week swing and Costillas finally gets to be on his own. Relieved at the absence of ritualized company dinners, Miguel walks in a bouncy quick time, excited at the prospect of dinner in a diner. A shiny aluminum railcar diner, just like in old movies or corny teevee situation comedies. Even better, it’s called Carolina’s Place. 

 

De las Costillas mentally leaps in the air to click his heels to read “Blue Plate Special” on the chalkboard. The menu goes on for pages. Burgers, knishes, pirogi, cabbage soup, borscht, steak, fish, spaghetti. Miguel orders the blue plate special, meat loaf and all the trimmings. When he tops off the meal with a slice of custard pie, he tells Mary how delicious this custard pie tastes, like home.

 

Mary laughs and tells Miguel frankly she can’t stomach that slimy shit in her mouth, pardon my french. But the owner insists they keep custard pie on the menu. It doesn’t sell. Mary tells him I gotta tell boss lady about this. And with that Mary wheels around and pushes her way into the back.

 

The piecrust has a hard shell of granulated sugar along the rim. The side of Miguel’s fork cracks into the crispiness and glides through dense orange pudding. Perfumes of cardamom, nutmeg, and canela tantalize his nostrils and quivering tastebuds. Miguel’s fork trembles remembering another custard pie.

 

His mouth fills with flavor when he crushes the morsel with his tongue. The custard has baked just to the point of perfection; light, solid, creamy smoothness. He thinks of the smile over Carolina’s shoulder, the fine hairs of her cheek fuzz glowing in the afternoon light, her eyes at once distant and urgent. Miguel draws a long slow breath through parted lips across the flan still resting in his mouth. He closes his eyes to concentrate on sensing this aroma filling his sinus as he exhales. He remembers the moment he’d called, “Carolina, soma pa’ca! look over here!”

 

When Miguel de las Costillas opens his eyes he is looking into a woman’s eyes. He knows her and he slowly angles his head to look at her from a different perspective. She looks at him intently, then suspiciously. “How’d you find me?” Her voice still carries that sweet timbre that had rested unheard in his memory for fifty years. Fifty years of cigarettes—she reeks of tobacco—ravaged it, but the woman speaks with Carolina’s voice.

 

“Hi, Carolina” is all he says. Then he adds, “Happy birthday, 50 times over.” It has been that long. Carolina sits.

 

Miguel takes another bite of custard pie, savors it, and takes another bite. He remembers watching a 16-year old Carolina bustling in her mother’s kitchen, whipping up a custard pie. That girl had spirit. He played “Billy Boy” on the piano and made up a lyric about custard pie. She had laughed and danced and sang along, and baked a custard pie fast as young Miguel could blink an eye.

 

Carolina’s biography serves up a litany of woes and five husbands. Hard luck turns into elation. But that doesn’t work out, and more hard luck. Only three kids, thankfully, who have troubles of their own. Lou, the last husband before she gave up men, had beaten the shit out of her but when he died he left her this diner and the parking lot. She is not eking by, doing all right, getting there. 

 

Does he want to, you know? Miguel holds her eyes with regret and she begins to sing “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” 

 

It was their song. He played the sheet music, she sang. Singing had been her tease. She would lean over him to read the words, squeezing him with both arms. Or she snuggled against him on the piano bench, an arm around his waist, leaning into him to turn the page with her right hand, occasionally sliding her nose into his neck. She drove him wild, a long, long time ago.

 

Costillas wishes he could photograph the empty darkened diner, shades half drawn, their corner booth in a pool of light. Two figures sit across from each other, their faces moving into and out of the overhead bulb like nighthawks turning in the gyre. The muted green walls scream out to be photographed. 

 

She sings the entire song and by the final measure she has reached her hands across to him. He takes both hands and caresses them. She begins to lose the melody and energy, her voice fades until she whispers haltingly “… long, long, time.”

My Own Puño de Tierra. Galarza Documentaries.

Red Is the Color Dreams Are Made On

Michael Sedano

I have lived in many places that I called home because those were places where, when I went there, they had to take me in, and because I had no other place to go, and because my heart was there. Home.

My hometown of Redlands, California, holds a special niche in my personal definition of “home.” My heart is there, the house in the orange groves, the hillside house through junior high, a teenage boy in puppy love with a girl, a student making good marks and winning speech contests, a chameleon’s existence moving back and forth between raza  cultura and anglo society. Redlands.

Anglo Redlands was a complex place whose astonishing experiences with racism betrayed the character of the town’s everyday gente, like that song, “dear hearts and gentle people.” 

My Dad, with Mom's help, built our first house on a dirt street one street over from where he grew up. The street dead-ended next door, and the groves started growing all the way to the wash. The sign at the city limits claimed Redlands had 20,000 people and was the navel orange growing capital of the world. Harry S. Truman was president.

From 5th to 9th grade, my folks had a house on the other side of town, with a view because Dad always wanted a view of those groves where he’d worked many hours, before Civil Service. 

Jobs at Norton AFB allowed Mom and Dad to build their dream home on a spectacular view lot at the city limits. I was in High School. Home sat on hard, rich, red tierra, solid like the ties that bound us to the land.

When I sold the house, I walked the lot one last time where I’d labored with my Dad to lay cement slabs and dig hillside trails, move rocks, turn the home’s fallow earth, leveled planting beds to cultivate its richness. 

I walked over to where Dad built an horno. He dug up some dirt, made mud bricks, fashioned the horno, plastered and smoothed the outside with more mud. The horno was the center of family celebrations, after banqueting on barbacoa, lounge in the warmth from the open oven and laugh and sing.

That’s where I found my clod of home, where Dad built the horno. My puño de tierra is that red dirt giving Redlands its name and is the stuff dreams are made on.

El día que yo me muera, no voy a llevarme nada

Hay darle gusto al gusto, la vida pronto se acaba

Lo que pasó en este mundo, nomás el recuerdo queda

Ya muerto voy a llevarme, nomás un puño de tierra

Un Puño de Tierra, Ramón Ayala

Early In Our History, Ernesto Galarza

Audiences at Occidental College will have opportunity to view a film composite of all five episodes produced by Jesus Treviño on March 24 in Choi Auditorium at 6 p.m. Two of the episodes are yours for a click or two at Latinopia.com. 

Galarza blazed many trails for Chicanos in high places doing good work back in the days when so few of us held pivotal social roles, Galarza had to be activist, diplomat, labor organizer, author and educator. 

Thanks to Latinopia.com's generosity making these, and an extensive library of film and essay covering arts, literature, history, music, activism, regional views, el movimiento, notables. The site is updated every Sunday with back issues easily obtained.

Putting A Piano In Its Place

Ashes to...Keyboards and Skins

Michael Sedano

I lost the piano I’ve had since 1950, a year ago in the Eaton Fire. Ever since, I’ve been able to play Thelma Reyna’s piano, so my fingers haven’t entirely forgotten how to find the right notes. Playing is not practicing so I’m a year out of practice. I’ve felt the absence of a piano in the house, and, peor, I haven’t had a permanent residence until only recently.

Three homes in Redlands, then Temple City, back to Redlands, rejoin us in Eagle Rock, Pasadena, Altadena. All those places and times, my piano keeps me satisfied and tormented at the same time. Practice tends to soften frustration and when it works and all the fingers come together, it’s a taste of the sublime.

I mourn the absence of that possibility, that momentary discovery of perfection, a line of notes becoming music.

Losing my piano in the fire creates a wound that can never heal. The piano and the sheet music that burned are unrecoverable things rich with memories. While all the things I lost and suddenly remember are emotional papercuts, losing that piano cuts deeper. Not that a new piano won’t assuage the loss. A ver.

Today, I have a piano. Mejor, the piano is a Kimball, same as my lifelong instrument, the one with all those memories. Time for new memories. Adelante, don't look back for too long.

Brandon, with Altadena Musicians, put me in contact with Steve from Santa Monica who had a piano he was donating to survivors of the Eaton Fire. Altadena Musicians understands what losing a precious instrument does to a person’s soul, and to professionals, livelihood. Brandon’s organization coordinates donors to gente like me who were burned out.

“What did you lose?” Brandon asks when I first contact him about a free piano. My inventory includes conga drums--a beautiful set Barbara gave me for Christmas one year--and my piano.

People are generous, wonderful, and truly good, sabes?

Brandon and the Altadena Musicians are not looking for credit, nothing formal-- like I don’t know Brandon’s last name. Nor Steve’s. In fact, these good people extended incredible generosity. When I texted Steve how I could not accept the piano owing to a costly professional mover’s quote, I thought that was that.

In response, Steve tells me all is not lost. And Brandon suggests the foundation can pay the movers. I am moved and grateful at the offer. On his own initiative, Steve connects with A. Garcia Piano Movers, a 30 years in business firm with no website, who move pianos for the Santa Monica music conservatory at discounts and at times pro bono. Steve makes all the arrangements for delivery. I cut short an Arboretum walkabout and get home in time to move furniture out of the path of the three vatos lifting my new piano into my new home. Órale.

I began today miserable, having abandoned hope of owning a piano again. In a rapid fire series of text and voice messaging I learn the piano will come to me within a few hours. At the same time, thanks again to Brandon and Altadena Musicians, another generous soul has placed conga drums in their unlocked patio for me to pick up sometime today. Ajúa.

And so it went, February 2, 2026.

2026

 Meditation for a New Year • January 1, 2026.

Michael Sedano

The sun this grey January day rises only to be shrouded by grey overcast making January First twenty-twenty six one of those cheerless winter days, wet, chilly, just the day for a fire, for remembering, for locating space to hold the fulness of memories.

This day, this year, is time for taking perspective. Now that so much has changed, there are ideas to pursue, experiences to relish, to find a place for some memories to rest.

2026. Another first day of the year. 80 of them in a lifetime, 57 of them since getting married and starting our tradition of eggs benedict on New Year morning. Three years since Barbara died. Today, I appreciate our tradition in a solitary meal, sorting out what was joyful and important.

Our first New Year, 1969, arrives clouded by dread it would be our only and last. I have 18 days remaining until reporting to the Draft. July of ’69 I’m immersed in high adventure, stationed atop the world’s highest missile site near the Korean DMZ.

I take R&R in Tokyo for Xmas and New Year 1970. (Link) Barbara flies to join me. We spend our second new year day in Tokyo, knowing we have only a few hours until my leave expires and her flight to LAX. We have a deluxe Japanese breakfast served in the Shibuya-ku Ryokan Barbara reserved for our reunion week. She wears the silk kimono jacket we bought on our first walkabout and shopping foray and smiles at my camera.

Tokyo is everything Korea isn’t. Abundance versus rationing.  I have not eaten fresh fruit since July. Army mess halls don’t serve fruit of any kind. Stores in Tokyo look like Grand Central Market in DTLA. I buy ten tangerines every day to devour sitting on the tatami, laughing with Barbara counting down our measured days together. 

We remembered that week for the rest of our lives.

I thickened the hollandaise in the microwave this year, and while it was delicious and mostly silky, it wasn’t quite right. Today’s breakfast is a good NewYear memory, packed into yet another January First. 

I sipped Korbel Brut and cleaned up the kitchen. Then, because I can, I finished the champagne reliving cherished memories of days before everything changed, relishing thoughts of the coming year. I always do that.

Stuff of Memories; Con Garro y Sin Paz

 La Bloga-Tuesday welcomes Guest Reviewer Rey Rodriguez and a book adding insight to a story of a neglected daughter-famous father, in this case Mexican Nobelist Octavio Paz’ daughter. Today’s lead article celebrates things found in the ruins of the Eaton fire.

 

 

Stuff Not Lost In the Fire: Treasures of Memory

Michael Sedano

 

Stuff that goes through fire and dug from the ashes come back like a scarred phenix, changed in its passage through the crucible into renewed versions of their essential selves, the memories they hold impervious to the firestorm.

 

My father’s strong box held his WWII memorabilia along with Dad’s high school graduation watch, treasures from his courtship of my mother, precious times of his days on this earth. The warped lid rests uncomfortably on the contorted blistered box. 

 

Barbara’s heart collection featured a colorful ceramic corazón that was born in fire and emerges from fire in two pieces, its bright contours coated with an orange oxidation sweated out of the glaze the clay’s second firing. I hesitate to wash away the sweat.

 

A Review: Con Garro y Sin Paz, presented by Todos Santos Writers Workshop at Beyond Baroque.

 

Rey Rodriguez

 

Iván Salinas continues to curate important events that transcend borders and draw on our Latino past to inform the present.

 

On December 5, 2025, I attended his latest entitled, Con Garro y Sin Paz, presented by Todos Santos Writers Workshop and held at Beyond Baroque (https://www.beyondbaroque.org/). This event was a reading, conversation, and book signing of Marcela Magdalena Deschamps’ latest book, Con Garro y Sin Paz. It is an extraordinary story inspired by the life of Helena Paz Garro, the daughter of the famous Mexican literary couple of Octavio Paz and Elena Garro. 

 

Helena Paz Garro often talked about the distance that she felt from her father following the events of 1968 in Tlatelolco, where soldiers shot down hundreds of students, when she and her mother were accused of orchestrating the student movement. Ultimately, though, Paz Garro forgave him despite his abandonment of her. Elena Garro was considered one of Mexico’s finest writers, but because she was a woman, she did not receive the acclaim she deserved. Paz and Elena Garro were married in 1937. They had one daughter, Helena, and divorced in 1959.

 

It is with this backdrop that Professor Marcela Becerra García, California State University Channel Islands, interviewed Deschamps to discuss her fascinating book, which tells the tale of a forgotten house in Cuernava where Paz Garro lives the last days of her life among feral cats and ghosts of the past. Paz Garro is a complicated character who could not have children because she was raped at the age of three and contracted syphilis. The disease and its treatment ensured that she would never bear children. The rape likely led to a life of deep mental illness, which was largely left untreated. 

 

Nevertheless, Paz Garro was surrounded by books and literature and was extremely well educated in European boarding schools. As a result, her great legacy is her poetry, which Deschamps keeps alive in her novel by including unedited versions of some of her most lyrical verses. 

 

It is important to note that Octavio Paz often did not even mention his daughter’s existence. This absence is notable and makes Deschamps' work even more important than ever to ensure that both Elena Garro and Helena Paz Garro are studied and remembered. Any discussion of Mexican literature and Paz’s legacy is incomplete without a discussion of these two important female writers. Deschamps revives their memory and honors them by writing this extraordinary book that becomes a must-read if we are to truly understand Mexican literature and the unsung role that women played in it.

About Rey Rodriguez: 

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.

Home At Last, Floricanto and rrsalinas on Film

 Michael Sedano

Last January the fires of hell, aka Eaton Canyon, leveled miles of homes in Pasadena and nearly wiped Altadena off the map. My daughter's urban farm--where I'd taken residence following my wife's death with Alzheimer's Dementia--disappeared in the conflagration (link). 

We became nomads, finding shelter where we could. My granddaughter moved away to college leaving only my daughter and me in a painfully expensive, and profoundly unsatisfactory, rental house. I moved eight times since January 7, from motel to motel, city to city, rental to rental. 

From where I sit today, I can see forever. My daughter bought a beautiful home for me and my eighth move is the last one.

I'm home. I have a home. I have a place to call my own. There is life after Alzheimer's, here is some evidence.

After three days moving in and getting stuff fixed up, it was celebration time. My gente all showed up, and one, Margaret Garcia, presented me with her portrait of me, painted when I was only a few days out from losing my last known residence. Here's La Bloga-Tuesday's report  (link) on sitting for that portrait, which now will grace my walls in my new home. My art collection, reduced to ashes and memories, has begun again.

Guest Columnist Rey Rodriguez

Review: Un Trip: raúlrsalinas & the poetry of liberation, a film by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, documentary screening, Q&A, Flor y Canto at Beyond Baroque.

By Rey Rodriguez

On October 4, 2025, I attended at Beyond Baroque (https://www.beyondbaroque.org/), a celebration of raúl “Roy” “Tapón” salinas, an extraordinary Chicano poet who has since passed away but who left a powerful legacy of revolutionary poetry. 

Curated by Iván Salinas, the event included the screening of Un Trip: raúlsalinas & the poetry of liberation, a film by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, and a stellar lineup of poets.

The film credits La Bloga’s Michael Sedano for his photography. At the event, Mr. Sedano described how he located lost footage of raúl salinas as salinas reads his poetry at El Festival de Flor y Canto, the movimiento’s first large-scale literary festival, at USC in 1973. I highly recommend that the reader view rrsalinas’ reading at this link: https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF113JNMZ?&WS=SearchResults&Flat=FP . 

That first floricanto would have been lost to the passage of time, but for the efforts of Mr. Sedano to seek it out and ensure that videos of all the spotlighted artists are now available for viewing by a whole new generation of students, teachers, researchers, professors, gente en general.

Parts of the 1973 reading are included in Un Trip, a short documentary, which is still seeking distribution, despite winning an audience award in Texas. After watching the documentary, it is a film that definitely deserves to be distributed widely for its historical and educational significance in Chicano history and for filling in the gaps of rrsalinas’ contributions to poetry in general.

The event also included emotional and beautiful readings from: Abel Salas, founding editor of Brooklyn and Boyle, who was personally associated with raúl r salinas; Ben V. Olguín,

Professor, Robert and Lisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English, Director of The Global Latinidades Center at UCSB, who read of his experience with the poet; Luis J. Rodríguez, author of many books, essays, poems, and founder of Tía Chuchas Cultural Center along with his activist wife Trini Rodríguez, spoke movingly of his personal connection with this master poet and the power of poetry to transform lives that may have been lost to poverty, violence and drugs; Josiah Luis Alderete, San Francisco’s Poet Laureate and co-owner of Medicine For Nightmares bookshop, who performed a poem to tlaxcalli; Iris de Anda, who read her emotional poetry; and Soledad Con Carne, a self described casually Queer, intergalactic Oakland/Ohlone-based chicanx punk poet, who acknowledges that although they had never met Mr. Salinas, their poetry was in conversation with his.

It is this conversation that intrigued me, so when the evening was over, I was fortunate enough to meet Con Carne and ask them to sign their recently published chapbook, SFV or Die, Foo, published by Lilac Press (https://www.instagram.com/lilacpressdiy/?hl=en – requires Instagram registration). 

I went home and could not put the book down. Con Carne’s voice resonates so strongly throughout their writings with poems entitled, “Carne Poetics,” “Another Memorial for a Brown Man by Smiley’s Market,” and “everything I learned at CSUN.” 

Con Carne stands with the marginalized of the San Fernando Valley and proudly expresses their divinity in their work. They remind us through their work of all that is lost if their vital voices are not heard and honored. 

Con Carne carries on the work of Mr. Salinas, and I hope you will all support their work by buying this chapbook. It is deeply profound poetry that stands on the shoulders of so many others who understand that it is the system that is corrupt and needs to be rebuilt around our mutual humanity. 

Those living in poverty or on the margins do not need fixing. They need to be expressed and heard, and they are, through the work of Soledad Con Carne and all of those who participated in the evening to celebrate raúl r salinas. 

About the writer:

Rey Rodriguez and Laura Varela

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.

Fotos, Ése: Floricanto at Beyond Baroque 

foto: Rey Rodriguez

soledad con carne

Iris de Anda

Josiah Luis Alderete

Luis J. Rodriguez

Abel Salas

Ben V. Olguin

Michael Sedano

I was pleased to be a Special Guest at the film showing and floricanto. When I walked into Beyond Baroque's Wanda Coleman Auditorium, the video of rrsalinas' reading at the 1973 Festival de Flor y Canto played. As the evening's guest, I related briefly the surprise I experienced in 2009 as I was leaving the world of work: a video I thought did not exist!

That video of Oscar Zeta Acosta set me on a detective search for all the other poets and readers videotaped at the movimiento's historic first Festival de Flor y Canto. I found them at UC Riverside where Juan Felipe Herrera helped me secure use of a rare U-Matic Cassette player. The ¾" format, long since abandoned by broadcasters and universities, required access to the sole surviving player in the Inland Empire. Thanks to Herrera and the UCR Tomás Rivera Library, I returned the floricanto to USC, whose institutional memory had completely erased the floricanto from local history!

My goal in digitizing the U-Matics is to make an important historical resource widely available so poets, students, teachers, familias, can see and hear some of la raza's foundational writers in their youth. Here's La Bloga-Tuesday's column on the digitizing process (link).

Coinciding with my 2010 presentation to USC of the digitized videos, I organized a reunion floricanto, Festival de Flor y Canto: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. I invited veteranas and veteranos from that 1973 festival for the "yesterday" element, and artists with publication history for the "today" element, and emerging voices just launcing their careers for the "tomorrow" element. USC's Digital Library also shares videos of that 2010 reunion, documented by Jesus Treviño's Barrio Dog Productions. Latinopia.com includes numerous videos from that 2010 reunion floricanto (link).

Here's the link to USC's digital collection that includes my photographs of the 1973 artists and the full performance videos from 1973 and 2010. You can request photographs via the library, and download the videos for non-commercial, fair use:

https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF15MA253?Flat=y&WS=SearchResults

Here's a compact index to the videos:

https://calisphere.org/collections/27333/

Late-Breaking News: From the Producer of Un Trip

You and a guest are invited to the special LA Screenings of the moving documentary - AMERICAN SONS  produced by Laura Varela, directed and produced by Andrew James Gonzales,  with producers Elizabeth Avellan, Fernando Cano, and Ray Telles.  AMERICAN SONS is a profoundly intimate documentary that traces the enduring scars of war through the story of Cpl. JV Villarreal, a Mexican American Marine from Texas, who was killed in action in Afghanistan. Told through raw, never-before-seen combat footage and the decade-long emotional journey of his Marine brothers and family, the film is both a tribute and a courageous exploration of grief, resilience, and love. 

Location: VIDIOTS (4884 Eagle Rock Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041)
Date and Time: Monday, October 6 - Doors/Drinks reception 7:00 PM | Film 7:30 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 

Moderated by Claire Aguilar

Drinks reception to follow

Location: BOB HOPE PATRIOTIC HALL (1816 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015)
Date and Time: Wednesday, October 8 - Doors 5:00 PM | Film 5:30 PM
 
Location: PBS SoCal (3080 Bristol Street #100 Costa Mesa, CA 92626)
Date and Time: Thursday, October 9 - Doors 6:30 PM | Film 7:00 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 

Location: Film Independent (5670 Wilshire Blvd 9th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90036)
Date and Time: Friday, October 10 - Doors 6:30 PM | Film 7:00 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 
Moderated by Matt Carey
Reception to follow

RSVP at AMERICANSONS@DMAGPR.COM. Please advise which screening you'd like to attend and if you are bringing a guest.