Our Lady of Kings Court, Kendalia

For Mercedes and her Children

On the feast day of Our Lady of Mercy, I take my non-Catholic, non-Spanish speaking fiancé to the Church of the Little Flower to celebrate Mercedes Don Varona.

My friends José and Maria, children of Mercedes, organized a beautiful service.  It was a mix of Cuba and Miami and Italy and Wilmington.  It was the story of a mother’s journey home.  She had climbed back onto the boat that floated her spirit from Cuba and was traveling to another realm.   Even as we were sitting in the pews of the Church of the Little Flower, we stood at the shores and watched the boats go by—Noah’s arc, the ship to Ithaka, a passing image of the wedding at Cana.  We listened to musicians invoke the spirit of Cuba, a memory of the beautiful and complicated Mercedes.  (“Son, they have no more wine.”)

Mercedes always welcomed me into her home like family.  She kissed and sniffed at my skin when I entered.  She sat me down and her little dog ran circles around me and barked and she would wave that dog away. “She loves Pepe,” she’d say.   She told me stories of  her boy when he was young.  She opened up albums and pointed at photos of family she wanted me to know.  And the house was a gallery of Pepe’s paintings.  Once she ordered food from Carreta.  Pigs feet with garbanzo beans and rice.  I ate it.  I could not disappoint her.  I would not.

Last night, she must have been watching as words from the readings carried her away.  Some readings in Spanish and some in English.  Some readings missing. An oral storytelling from Father Ernesto.  At one point, I looked over to my fiancé, wondering if he could understand anything that was going on. 

“You’re smiling,” I whispered. 

“I’m charmed,” he answered. 

Mercedes must have been delighted. I will miss her and her beautiful ways.  Our lady of mercy, the mother of my friends, the Cuban grandmother I never had. 

She is Over the Moon

for Angel

Angel de la Luna and the5th Glorious Mystery was born of three major hurricanes.  Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.  I was supposed to be writing from my more than 30 hours of interview tapes, documenting the lives of 15 surviving Filipina “Comfort Women” of WWII for my book of essays, LOLAS’ HOUSE: Women Living With War.  I was supposed to be transcribing, translating, and writing down history.  But the hurricanes came one after the other and my 2005 sabbatical spun fast in the debris of all that rain.  I was living at Hecht Residential College on the Coral Gables campus of the University of Miami as a faculty resident master and every week, 900 freshmen, twenty-two residential assistants and two other faculty families and I went into lockdown.  So I wrote this book instead, a book that allowed me to work under hurricane conditions, a book that was probably brewing for years. 

Yesterday I came home late in the evening.  I was exhausted and the only thing on my mind was a quiet bath.  I had taken my kitty to the vet that morning and spent the whole rest of the day in meetings and administrative report writing.  I wanted rest.  I wanted silence.  Just as I pulled into my driveway, I saw a cardboard box sitting on my porch.  I knew what it was.  It was this, the moon rising and the spirit going from dark to light, from exhaustion to elation.  My book is here, everyone.  My book is now.  I am not too cool to say it, “Hip-hip-hooray!”

9/11

For the Boy

That morning, the television was on, as it often was.  My brother was zipping up his son’s jacket, getting him ready for kindergarten.  It’s not that there was a loud boom that drew them to the screen.  It isn’t like someone said, “Look!”  But they did.  They watched the smoke fill the sky.  They saw the plane smashing into the buildings.  The fire lashing out from the windows so many stories above ground. They must have imagined the sound of glass splintering, metal crunching. Voices crying out.  

Weeks later, when I was visiting them I watched the boy running around the basement with his arms stretched wide.  Zoom, zoom, zoom he called out.  Crash!  He hissed.  And then he ran into the wall.

A year goes by and sometime in the summer, we went to the library to check out stories.  The librarian stamped the books and told us when they were due.  And the boy looked up to me, said, “Oh, I know that date.”  What is it, I asked.  And he said, “The saddest day in all the world.”

Five years later and he was writing stories for school.  My novel One Tribe had just come out and he said, “Auntie Evelina, I’m writing my own book and it’s bigger than yours.”  Really, I asked.  How big is it.  He thought about it.  He squinted.  Then he said, “So big it has more pages than people who died on 9/11.”

The image of that morning must have seeped into his skin, crawled right into his memory, become the reference point for all things good and bad.  Just all things.  Never to forget.

  

Canvassing Little Havana, November 3 2012

for the President: 
Felicidades on your birthday 

Here is a piece I wrote last November 3rd.  That day was Chauncey's birthday and what he wanted was for Obama to be reelected.  We went door to door down the streets of Little Havana.  Even if neither of us could speak Miami-Cuban-Spanish (más despacio por favor), we knew the only way to make his birthday wish come true was to engage our community.  So we did.  I re-post that day here.  Happy Birthday, Mr. President.  What do you want for your birthday?


ONE: I met a little vieja with hair dyed jet black. She has a picture of the Obamas in her cabinet along with other family photos (I know because her door was wide open). She was VERY excited to go out and vote. She thanked us for coming by.

TWO: I met a guy named Fidel who tried going to his polling place at the Polish American Club three days in a row and found it closed because no one else told him better -- go to la biblioteca on West Flager -- that's where early voting ends today (Saturday), so he said, OK, I'll go right now.

THREE: A young Christian girl who is voting for the first time and undecided because of the abortion issue -- so I told her -- I'm a Christian too, a Catholic -- and even if I might not have an abortion, I don't think anyone has a right to decide for us. Each woman should decide for herself. She said, that makes so much sense!

FOUR: A 30 something man, ineligible to vote said his dad was too old and frail to stand in line to vote. So I told him he could take his dad to the polls and they would seat his father, if he stood in line for him and he said, I'm glad you told me. We'll go on Tuesday!

FIVE:  La Viuda tried to vote twice that day.  The lines were too long and by the time we got to her door, she had taken off all her make up.  She had put her hair up.  She was calling it a day.  The month before, her husband died.  Leaving the house was not easy  Standing in the heat too much.  She was an opera singer in Cuba.  She was elegant even at the door without her face on.  When we offered to call a car for her, when we offered to have one of our volunteers stand with her at the polls, she closed her eyes.

Mi cara, she said.
Linda, I said. You can put your face on while you wait for the driver, I said.
You're beautiful, Chauncey said.  You don't need make up.

Later at the polls, the sun had gone down and the lines were long.  We marched up and down the line leading chants and we spotted her there with a volunteer at her side.  Her beautiful face completely done and smiling.

With Rainy Season Comes Baha

for survivors of Tropical Storm Ketsana 

September 2009

With the rains come baha. My uncle tells me the stories when Bituan, the house my grandmother lived in, would fill like an indoor pool, water rising and rising and the objects in the house -- the chairs, the side tables, the clocks and vases -- the icebox and toaster, the oven -- would float right out of the kitchen and into all the rooms, like guests at a party. My Lola Clara would sit, he said, on top of the piano in the sala and watch their things circle her. Outside the storm would pound the earth, crashing like a giant tidal wave upon the neighborhood. The roof resisted the rain, felt like it wanted to collapse, but refused.

When I spend my summers in Metro Manila, I watch from my window, the way the streets become rivers. The way the cars roll down the avenues, water splashing everywhere. Everything is dark and wet. I listen to the news as they announce landslides in Antipolo or brownouts in Quezon City.

When she was still living, my bedridden Lola Charing would be carried out the house in Macabebe and placed onto higher ground as the water rose high as a four drawer dresser just underneath the bedroom crucifix. I think about that now, how I'd visit her and see the watermarks on the walls. Baha is part of the rainy season and my Uncle Boy kept a little row boat tied to the front porch and it would rise as the rains fell. That was how he made it around Macabebe then, maneuvering that little boat down canals, through the grasses and to my grandparents' graves. Rainy season.

But this is different. Too many people are dying in this rain.

My nieces write me and say Tropical Storm Ketsana has consumed the first floors of our family homes -- the cars are underwater. They wade waist deep in a storm that has infiltrated all our private spaces. The appliances are floating once more. This time, the family climbs to the second floor and the water follows.  But not everyone is blessed with a second floor. Not everyone has the luxuary of drying their feet.

I saw the streets of Makati, a route I used to take down Ayala on my way to yoga, and the waters have filled all the subway entrances. The people, holding onto heavy ropes are pulling themselves down the street, their children on their backs. On their faces you can see they are resisting the tide. A wrong move and they could drift out into the city never to be found, swallowed by the river that was once Ayala Avenue.

Pray that the rains stop. Pray that the sun comes out. Pray that everything dries and that illness does not breed in that damp nation that is the seven thousand islands now drowning in that sea.

An Offering to the Soul Consoling Tower

for Trayvon Martin

  

The Soul Consoling Tower was built by internees at Manzanar.  It stands tall and white against the desert sky, face to face with the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  Quiet place.  Six internees still buried there while others were taken out of the ground and brought home after the concentration camps of America shut down.  Here, Japanese Americans learned to make the best of a horrific situation.  Here, they built rock gardens and flowerbeds, they harvested vegetables from fields they had sown, they sang to one another, hit home runs on makeshift baseball diamonds, dug swimming holes and loved one another.  Here, babies were born in barracks made of wood and tarpaper.  Here, people ate in mess halls.  Stood in lines that stretched around the block in rain, in dust storm, in hot desert sun.  Bathed in open showers like cattle, relieved themselves in front of family and friends.

Here the unimaginable.  Americans incarcerating Americans for the color of their skin, for their ancestry, for the off chance espionage that only fear can conjure up.  Who would do such a thing?

My sweetheart, a Southern White Man from the mountains of Virginia is a good man who believes in giving everyone the benefit of the doubt.  He stands next to me at the Soul Consoling Tower and he comes undone.  This pilgrimage to Tulelake, then Minidoka, now Manzanar opens his heart wide and he is seeing the unimaginable that is our American history. 

On the tower, people have placed offerings.  Stones from the earth.  Coins from their pockets.  Peace birds fashioned out of paper.  At the pillar, we say our own prayers.  We gaze at graves marked by stones.  I choose a pebble from the ground and place it on the white altar. 

He puts a quarter on the ledge.  Stands there.  And then looking beyond the tower, beyond the barbed-wire-fence he sees the mountain standing blue and hard and tall.  This he knows.  He goes out into the field.  So small against that mountain.  So quiet. 

Later he will tell me about a circle of stones.  A flock of paper birds.  A secret buried beyond the fence. 

Who would do such things?

Jetta the Mountain

for our angels

 The weekend after teaching intense workshops at Voice of Our Nation Arts Foundation, my friend Elmaz treated us to the spa at Calistoga, California. At the end of the treatment, she put her hand on my shoulder and asked me, “How was it?”

"It was like having angels," I told her.

The following day we loaded up the VW Jetta and began our pilgrimage to three of the ten U.S. Internment Camps: Tulelake, Minidoka, and Manzanar. 

On the road to Manzanar, we traveled through the mountains of Nevada.  Were awed by the sight of red rock formations, by the miles of lone passageways, by the skies big and wide as the universe.  At half a tank of gas, he turned to me and said, “Let’s start looking for filling stations.”  We looked as we took pictures of the landscape.  Said things like, “It’s like being on another planet.”  We listened to an inspirational talk on trust.  We sang songs of gratitude for the beautiful, treeless mountains.

The sun began to set.  The sky grew bright with color.  We oohed and ahhed.  We drove by towns where pumps were closed.  We continued oohing and ahhing.  We did not talk about the talk on trust.An antelope leapt into the road all copper and dreamy under the setting sun.  We swerved out of the way.  Freaked that little thing out.  She jumped back fast.

Then the sky went midnight blue.  The stars did not come out.  The rock formations fell asleep around us too.  Their magnificence was lost in all that night.  The needle on the gas tank went down.  Twenty miles, then ten, then five.

When we talked to 911, the lady said, “Sorry but we can’t help you until you’re stopped.” He slowed down to thirty-five miles an hour.  Shifted the car into neutral, coasted.Under my breath, I sang a song to God.  I considered faith and trust.  Made a choice. He went silent, said, “Watch the road markers, Sugar.” The cell coverage went dead.

By the time we were forty miles from Benton, our gas tank had been empty for five miles. We made a choice to go forward any way.  Crawled the hills like snails. Got so high up the ride down shot the Jetta back up the next mountain.  At the crest of one peak he said, “7,125?  That’s 2000 feet higher than Denver.

I whispered, “Thank you, God.”  And then the car flew down the mountain at 85 miles an hour.  He hit the breaks to manage the curves.  We drove 45 miles on that empty gas tank—me singing all the way, he silent and holding my hand.  The Jetta hungry.

At Benton, we rolled into a sleepy town where everyone had gone to bed, save a building next to the gas station.

“The lights are on,” I said.  “Ask them to open up the pumps.”

But he rolled the car next to the newfangled gas pumps.  

“Give me your card,” he said.

We slipped the card into the pump.  We held our breath.  And when the lights went on we filled the tank and danced.  The angels still with us.