Counting blessings

Querida mami, querido papi:

These are days when counting blessings feels really necessary, because if you don’t count them, they get lost. I never expected to live through what feels like a slow apocalypse… every day more deaths; MN now #stayathome until May 18; coronavirus feels both close and far away. We are now at the stage that (some) businesses in town are requiring customers to wear masks. I used to love grocery shopping, but not anymore. And this is the week in which my psoas has decided to flare up in pain, making running impossible, making my mental health that more precarious.

So. What are the blessings? Hi spring, thanks for arriving. Hi too to the sun. Hi podcast with Zach Braff and Donald Faison, recapping Scrubs (Fake Doctors, Real Friends). Hi friends and virtual get togethers. Hi cats, asking to sit outside. Hi neighbors and weekly MPR sing-alongs on Friday evening. Hi Café Shawn pizza. Hi yoga by zoom. Hi broadway streams. Hi Julio Torres’s instagram feed. Hi being able to do teeny bits of writing. Hi occasional moments where I feel competent (I sent in an essay to a journal!). Hi zoom cooking classes with friends. Hi weekly hanging out with my brothers online. Hi dreams of sourdough starter, ice cream making, furniture refinishing, porch building.

Tidbits of joy

Mami – if you were here you’d remind me to look for the joy. You wouldn’t say it that way, of course, but you would push me towards finding bright sides. So what are the bright sides these days:

• walks with N, during which I often learn a lot about his new academic love, linguistics
• Some Good News with John Krasinski
• the new Fiona Apple. My running pandemic playlist. All the cool DJ instagram shows. I haven’t taken a dance class yet from Debbie Allen, but I’m hoping to do that soon
• successful cooking experiments. I’m keeping notes so that I will have, at the end of this all, a Pandemic Vegetarian Cooking book/guide for N
• running and the arb, running in the arb. Running. The arb.
• Silicon Valley watching with N.
• the cats. They’ve become part of the family. They’re ok.

I’ll keep on adding to this list as we go. There are so many ways to detail our experience of this virus. Yes, death and infection numbers; sure, daily habits and their shifts; but also: how do we stay centered, able to corral the anxiety and re-imagine futures?

What week is this?

Mami y Papi – one thing a lot of people are remarking on is that at this point (4, 5, 6 weeks into quarantine depending on who and where you are) time starts to feel onerous. What day is today? Does it matter? Is it any different than yesterday? The only thing I know, for sure, is that any version of tomorrow that brings joy–i.e. any version of tomorrow that brings change, people, life, travel, the normal–is a ways off.

I did a run this morning. A block from home I ran into a neighbor who told me that last night was the first night she’d slept badly, with anxiety about [gesturing around wildly] all of this. First I recommended CBD oil because, wow, have I come to be thankful for that little bottle of CBD oil I found in the house after your death, mami. I mean, I didn’t sleep for 36 hours; I kept on replaying your death in my head; inside I was screaming pretty much non-stop. And then I tried a dose of the oil and, hey, it worked. My brain settled and allowed my body to just breathe and let go of painful images. Same now. Of course, there are other things I try to do to get a decent night’s sleep, like don’t read twitter right before bedtime (oops).

Daily writing on this blog seems to also trigger a bit of anxiety in me. It’s a little hard to make myself sit down and write. You would not believe how every day brings so much new information and so much new emotion and I try to detail it in my head, just to organize the chaos of all of it a bit, but it’s all too much. On Friday there were protests in a number of states (including MN — and OH the day before) demanding “freedom.” “Let us work,” they shouted. And, goddamnit, yeah, we all want to get back to normalcy. But doing so without testing widely available and with hospitals not yet prepared for impact is pure stupidity and selfishness. You would both be furious. And of course he who does not deserve to be named tweeted out stupid, incendiary tweets on top of it all: “Liberate Minnesota!” Mmmhmmm. Liberate us from you, please.

If y’all are in some sort of afterlife, looking over at us all, you’re probably also laughing. Did you see that the states are starting to organize into units, increasing cooperation for bids for PPE equipment? Ohio’s with us, no worries.

I haven’t seen your house in a little over a month. This gets me anxious too. I know–logically–that it’s fine over there. But I had planned to travel back and do the last few things on my “I don’t know how to do this” list: take home the box of papers; pack up stuff for T; bring in a book seller to see if there is anything valuable there. I keep on saying goodbye to you both by saying goodbye to the house… let’s face it, I’m not ready for either.

There’s good stuff happening on these tedious every-day-the-same marathons too. Like on Friday when we ordered pizza from the local pop-up caterer; before I went to pick up the pizzas I joined neighbors (12 feet away from each other! We were a small, very spread-out group!) for an MPR sing-along: “You’ve Got a Friend.” Dad, you’ll be proud to know that I belted it out with all the Carole King love in my heart.

Every day is both full and forgettable. Which means I really should try to write more often because I already forgot Thursday. Yesterday I recorded an episode my The Drip friends and, at the end of the call, I didn’t want to get off. I miss hanging out with my friends so much. Today I did a long run, slowly, made it home and made pannukakku for the first time. Later I’ll talk with T and C. We have weekly calls now; I know that would make both of you happy. You do not have to worry about us. We’re taking care of each other.

A friend sent me a note yesterday and asked, “hey, how are you doing? It hasn’t been that long.” And I marco polo’ed her back (oh hey, yeah, there’s an app called Marco Polo for asynchronous video chat) and started to tell her that all of this [gesticulating around to the fucking pandemic and the state of the world] has meant that my grief over losing them has been pushed to the side and so mostly I feel “ok.” And as I talked about feeling “ok” I realized anew how much I miss you and how terribly, achingly sad I am. It made me recognize that I should be grateful (and let myself open up) in those moments when someone asks and really really wants to know how I am.

Los quiero un montón.

Week 4

Dear Mom and Dad,
Five weeks ago (March 12), I sat in your empty house with words ringing in my ears. The WHO had just declared the coronavirus spread to be a pandemic. On March 12 we were in a little bubble before the president declared a national emergency the every next day.

I lied. Your house wasn’t empty. My brother was there. Your stuff was there. Your stuff is why we were there. We were sorting through the piles of things, some of them meaningful (who knew, mami, that you had kept love letters from Dad?! who knew that Dad had written you love letters!), some of them not (how many cords can one tech geek gather? it seemed like zillions), but all of them a messy, pile of reminders that we had all of this but none of you.

I still can’t believe we’re living through this without you.

So I’m writing this now. A series of letters which is also a diary which is also a bit of history. Living through a pandemic right after losing my parents. Grieving in the time of the corona virus. Doing anything in the time of the corona virus.

Five weeks ago I had plans. After going back to MN to spend a week with my spring-breaking, college-aged son, I would return to your house. I would finish a bunch of business there. I would prepare to wrap up the estate. I would lean on your friends and they would remind me of you, and I would talk to the priest who saw me see you die, and I would make some kinds of peaces out of these pieces.

Instead here we are. My son is here, finishing up his semester online. I’m here, devouring twitter, feeling like I’m in the middle of the pandemic (emotionally) but somehow a part from it too–small town MN doing a decent job at social distancing means that even as I feel unsafe going to the grocery store, I’m probably safe. And I can stay home a lot. But twitter feeds me this:

This morning I went running. Thank heavens I can still run outside. I was in the arb, where generally I don’t see many people. On one path, a woman was walking with two dogs. I moved over, off the edge of the path, so that she could get by me with 6 (or 10! I’m big on distance!) feet between us. Instead, the dogs wanted to say hi. They jumped all over me, and there she was, having to get pretty close to me in order to corral the dogs. She apologized a bunch. And I understood. And I was mad inside, but trying not to show that, because what would that achieve? And also sad. So sad because in another time, I would be laughing, petting those dogs, talking to her. Random social interaction; I miss it so.

I saw a post on someone else’s FB recently which contains this fabulous line: “It’s easier being in each other’s presence, or in each other’s absence, than in the constant presence of each other’s absence.” The constant presence of each other’s absence.

One of the hardest things to deal with is that there’s no certain end date. How long will we all need to circumscribe our lives last? Will this temporary rearrangement shift norms and expectations? Goddamn it, will I ever be able to watch a TV show again without shouting at the screen: “Step back from them! You are all standing WAY TOO CLOSE to each other!”?

Los quiero mucho.

Write your way out

Source: my fabulous Latinx Studies colleague Brian Herrera who is working on a project, the #ImWithUs Dichos. Some of his work is available to purchase.

you want to write a poem
but you don’t want to write a poem
because if you write a poem
then the floodgates open
and the rhythms make all your feelings
spill out.

i spend weeks training my students of poetry
to know that the speaker of the poem
is not the same as the writer of the poem
but you know if you write a poem
then the words will peel from you
and expose your innards.

you should know that some poems
tightly wrap up souls in words that fit together
like puzzle pieces.

you should know that other poems
unravel. That’s what worries you, I know. You might
tug at the ending of a phrase and discover
what you truly love
or what truly scares you.

you should know that writing poems
makes you consider language, hold it
in your palms and move it around your tongue
and push it to the roof of your mouth,
breathing in and out as the words take shape.

and when you breathe these words into being,
they will bear your design; snowflakes you have crystallized,
they will scurry through the cold air. They gather strength
in numbers. You could bury something with these words;
you could overwhelm a person with your beauty.

poetry is dangerous, you’re right.

Risky Business

Querido m’hijo:

You and I, we’re both risk-averse, careful people. I’ve known this was a quality of yours since you were 15 months old. You’d been cruising–walking around holding onto the edges of furniture–for several months. We’d wheedled and encouraged and used cookies as bribes, but you hadn’t dared let go. And then, at 15 months of age, you let go of our hands and walked across the entire driveway. You then plopped down with your hands up as if to say, “Yep! Knew I could!”

This poem is for us.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Risky Business

Risk aversion is the behavior of humans when exposed to uncertainty, which is operative pretty much always, since we can’t yet predict what’s coming or how and even futures that seem assured, like the picture eighteen-year-old me had of my forty-year-old life, can’t be fully insured against failure. Life happens, and all that time you spent practicing how to drive does not mean you’ll never crash. We can make some futures more possible, but there’s always uncertainty, and sometimes we lose control because we cannot control all the variables.

I didn’t learn to run until I was thirty and then I couldn’t stop. What I love about trail running is the way that I am always on the edge of control and the variables are overwhelming. I have twisted my ankles and scarred my knees and banged up my elbows. This is not skydiving or bungee jumping; I churn my legs close to the earth and it refuses my mastery. I get knocked down and I get up again. Getting up again means limping, sometimes, means blood and dirt and feeling humbled. I am only a body. I am a body. I am my body and moving through this world. When I run, before I fall, I am swift and graceful and on joy.

If you avoid all risks you will never run.

Running is a metaphor.

Falling is not a metaphor. You will need to fall hard in life. Fall short. Fall down. Fall in love. I am here to tell you that when you take risks, you can get up again. Break your heart. Fall apart. Move through this world. Take your chances. Speak up. Say what’s in your heart. Stand for what you believe. Invest in the world. Love and guts are renewable resources. You can’t know the future, but you can believe in today, in this today when you are brave and loving and know that you can run.

 

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

Querido m’hijo, mi cielo,

Wow. It has been too long since I sat down here and wrote you a letter. Partly this is so because it’s summer and, with its leisurely pace, we’ve actually managed to sit down and have some good conversations in person. And partly this is so because it’s summer and, with its glorious weather, we’ve been busier and then, when home, more tired.

Today I felt the need to write, though. I was listening to another Beatles song (“All You Need is Love“), trying to get my mind off of the daily news, and then I moved on to one of my favorite Beatles tunes, “Baby You Can Drive My Car,” which of course brought to mind our practice sessions as you learn how to drive stick-shift. Every time we get in the car you plug in your phone and put on instrumentals that I don’t know; more synth than acoustic, the music drones away in the background as you practice getting into first gear, first on level ground, then on an incline.

So you’ve been driving my car, with me always beside you. I know that someday I won’t be there, so I keep on trying to give you “thing big” lessons as you practice. “The most important skill is defensive driving!” “Keep your eyes moving and be aware of other vehicles, and bicyclists, and pedestrians.” “The best drivers are like chess players, they think several moves ahead.” I don’t even know why I said that. I don’t know how to play chess. But I know that you’re an analytical thinker, and it helps you to be able to think through it like a logic puzzle.

It took you a full practice session before you could consistently get into first without stalling. You’d try, fail, then stop and wait. I’d see the wheels turning in your head, and then the questions would come. “How does the clutch work?” “So how long, exactly, should I hold my foot on the clutch?” “Which foot moves first, and how quickly?” There were no precise answers for any of these (well, there is for the first one, but I didn’t know it); you knew and I knew that this drive to analysis was important, but irrelevant. Letting your body feel its way toward the balance of clutch and gas…it was just going to take time and practice.

We’ve since moved onto higher order difficulties: how does one drive a 2500 lb car in this fragile world? How do we take ours and others’ lives into our driving hands? Essentially, you are asking me how you can learn to trust yourself with this incredibly powerful tool.

Adulthood. There are no easy answers I can give you. We wander clumsily into the world with all sorts of powerful tools, from the material ones like cars and money to the abstract ones like love and friendship; you don’t get through life without hurting people around you, whether you want to or not. I surely hope that the pain you leave in your wake is minimal. And it’s important for you to learn all sorts of skills, from driving to communication, to make that more possible. But when you do leave behind something or someone broken, don’t forget or paper over your mistake. Own it. Help pick up the pieces in some way or another.

In the end, m’hijo, know yourself so that you can trust yourself with this incredibly powerful tool. Know what your blind spots are so that you remember how to check them. Know what maneuvers or events you’re most fearful of so that you steel yourself and push through. Know when you get tired or annoyed so that you can choose to get out from behind the wheel and take a nap or choose to turn on music or air that will help you focus. Good drivers are predictable drivers, you know. Practice until you are predictable and until you are ready for others to surprise you. And then practice some more.

Your caution and care as you practice tell me that you will grow to be a good driver. And if you bring this caution  and care to all the other incredibly powerful tools you will wield in your life? Well, you will be a good citizen, neighbor, partner, parent.

M’hijo, you can drive my car…and baby I love you.

What these should not be

M’hijo,

This is the dread meta letter. To be fair, you probably knew it was coming. You know I am a person much driven into meta: not just the what and the how, but the messy whys. Face value is never enough.

For this project, I knew there were routes I wanted to avoid. This set of letters to you is not meant to be prescriptive or didactic. I worried that if I took either of those roads I’d end up boring you to tears or, worse, resistant and pissed off. I also knew that what I wanted to try to do was to leave space for dialogue. I think that’s why I’ve ended up dwelling in some of our past conversations and then building through them. In other words, these are not advice letters. I guess they’re more like “getting to know you” letters.

I don’t know what that will always look like, so I hope you’ll be patient. One thing that you know, too, about me is that I love words. You belong to a family who loves words, and we love them fiercely, watching words shimmer as they cross borders and reappear, meaning similar but not same. A moonstone is also a piedra luna and that means the same thing but feels very different. Moon and luna rhyme, they do, but only when you shear the ‘a’ off luna and make the Spanish ‘u’ match the American ‘oo’. So close. But no cigar.

Your families have long histories of word-loving. Your great grandmother Gela wrote verses that she would recite to all the cousins (your own Abi’s cousins, that is). Her sister, my tía abuela Amalia, wrote short stories and was well-respected in the Jalisciense literary scene. Your great grandmother Peggy studied literature; she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1939 writing a dissertation on J.M. Synge. Then I grew up in houses–many of them; we moved more often than you have–and each of them boasted bookcases crammed with books. I was the kind of kid who always had her nose stuck in a book but, to be fair, so did your Abu and Abi.

Loving words and the journeys they take us on —fuera de sí but also, of course, down into oneself–means that I feel comfortable telling you that I don’t know how these letters will turn out. I don’t have a map. You have to trust words, and listen hard to the stories they tell. Words carry large suitcases of past meanings and uses; we carry around those words and, in turn, have our own private suitcases of meanings, uses, inside jokes. Like maybe I will always call you by your pet name and maybe if I slip and say “buddy” instead, you will always get play mad.

It really does come down to having all sorts of words inside me that I’m burning to share with you. I remember when I first learned the word ojalá –it was the most perfect word I could imagine (I must have been ten, but maybe younger). It meant “I hope,” but with no trace of the subject who was hoping. It meant “if only,” but it had the open vowels of expectation. I didn’t know back then that it came from Arabic, and of course this new-to-me knowledge makes it an even more perfect word, a traveling word that, at least in my Spanish, had lost all of its religion but kept all of its faith. It’s a single word that cows verbs into the subjunctive and, honestly, I think we’re a world so very in need of the subjunctive right now. For a good year, I think I used ojalá for everything. “Ojalá que llueva!” “Ojalá que no haya escuela mañana.” “Ojalá hubiera pensado en eso.”

When I lived in Germany, I latched onto the world genau with a similarly unreasonable grasp. Putting ojalá and genau side by side is jolting: one dreams, the other assents. Genau, the way my 20-year-old self learned it, was a nodding head in response to someone else, a vigorous, “exactly!” (Apparently Germans often use genau as filler, just like we use “like.”) Genau helped me fill spaces in conversations when I didn’t trust my other German words. I was just nodding, but I was doing it with a hard ‘g’ and a lilt.

You belong to a family who loves words. Sometimes we gather them up and polish them so that we can see the bands of color; sometimes we lick them with our tongues to judge how salty they are and where they came from; sometimes we warm them up in our palms and hand them to someone else who will appreciate the heat. You are surrounded by our word collections and we tumble them around you, hoping that you will appreciate how rich we are, how very rich we are, surrounded by so many words from so many worlds that mean so much to us.

 

 

 

 

Sad boy and your words

Explanatory note: I thought this project would be a lot of poems and instead it’s turning into a bunch of maudlin letters. Oh well, I’m just going to lean into it.

Querido m’hijo, you have probably already figured this out, but I just want to make it explicit and direct: I love our conversations. Sometimes we do absurdist bits, all nonsense and bombast with both of us trying to outdo the other; sometimes we’re reviewing the day’s news and exclaiming angrily at the world; occasionally we’re talking about dreams and fears and hearts. And every stage, every year brings a new word or phrase that you share, that I need to learn by echoing you, by using it even when I’m not sure what you mean.

In a funny way, this began when you were a toddler. You wouldn’t just mimic our words with toddler declensions–like when “gol” becomes “dol” or “bravo” becomes “bavo”–no, you would also declare your own language that was mostly impenetrable: “baydo,” “patete,” or, one of my favorites, “no?”–that, when accompanied with a shrug we could figure out stood for “I don’t know.”

School and friends brings a different sort of new language; when you share the words with me, I know you’re sharing these worlds with me, helping me see the contours of your map. One of my recent favorites is “dank meme.” I don’t think I ever really quite understood it the way you did, but I sort of did. Enough, anyway.

Recently you’ve been using the phrase “sad boy.” I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s no “happy boy” that pairs with it. It stands alone. It’s a phrase that comes out when you’re pointing to something hard and sad and emotional. I don’t remember the first time I heard you say it, but I remember the most recent time: when we listened to Dear Evan Hansen together. ^[1] We were listening to Ben Platt (as Evan Hansen) sing “For Forever,” a song that sings a friendship that never existed into being. With his words, Evan is rewriting his own lonely life for Connor’s parents, after Connor’s suicide. It is a song that pretends to remember happiness when it actually dances around all sorts of sadness: of loss, of loneliness, of love never experienced. You turned to me and said, “sad boy.” It was all you could say; we both had tears in our eyes. All I could do was wrap my arms around you and squeak out, “his parents!”

“Sad boy” is such an understatement. It’s not just an understatement; the phrase doesn’t even cover the amount of ground it needed to. Sad boy? Sad boys. Sad boys–becoming-men. Sad parents. Sad moment. Sad families. Devastated. Overwhelmed. Undone. Unraveled. Despondent. Sad boy. But in its imperfections, yours was also such a perfect statement, m’hijo. How in the world can words ever fully recognize and circumscribe such complicated emotions? “Sad boy.”

You are the same age as Evan Hansen is. You are also just a boy, though you are also on your way to becoming a man. Do sad boys get to be sad men? Will you be as kind to yourself as you are to this sad boy we’re listening to?

Me, I couldn’t even name an approximation of my feelings: “His parents!” But when we looked at each other, I knew that there was something about this clumsy communication–the bluntness and inadequacy of “sad boy” and the strangled cry of “his parents!”–because we break down sobbing.

We arrived at no words through clumsy words. And when we were with no words, I felt so very close to you. I could glimpse the sadness you felt through Evan and I knew you could get a sense of the sorrow I felt through Connor’s parents. There, in that moment–and also now, forever, in this letter–I think we trusted each other with this messy sadness: of Dear Evan Hansen, but also of life.

You know, and I know that you know, that I am holding my breath as you prepare to jet away, under your own steam, in a little less than a year. If I breathe too rapidly, too loudly, you will fall away from me much too quickly, and I could not bear that. I know, and you know that I know, that you are eager to fly away and, let’s be honest, you’re ready to leave.

When the time comes, I’ll breath a sigh out and say … well, I’m not sure what words we’ll use then. We’ll need a new language for a new world.

 

Notes

[1] I told you so!

Anybody Have a Map

I’ve been listening to “Anybody Have a Map” on repeat the last few days. Sung by two different mothers in Dear Evan Hansen, they both exclaim in frustration, “I can’t find my way to you…I’m making this up as I go.” And when you and I, m’hijo, watched videos of DEH the morning of your trip, we both sobbed when these mothers and fathers worry about their kids–about their inability to completely, wholly take care of their kids.

A lot of early life felt very mapped: elementary school, high school, college, and then, in my case, grad school. I know that figuring out where you want to go to college is the big unknown right now, but it is an unknown destination (X) within a set of pre-mapped options. That choice is daunting (because choice in general is daunting), but, believe me, it’s manageable. And you will be ok no matter where you go. So it might not be until you finish college that you hit the big moment where you’re having to look beyond the edges of the map that you’ve been given and start figuring out where and how to trace in the roads and sketch out the obstacles. For me, writing the dissertation was when I hit my first big “oh my god you mean I have to decide what this is all means?” moment. But the second, and more long-lasting time, was when I had you. No parenting book, no parenting friend can ever really prepare you for all of the in-the-moment decisions along the way. And those small decisions often feel like they have the potential to have resounding, permanent impact.

I could regale you with stories of how scary and thrilling it is to be a parent, to not know how to do any of this, and still carry on. They’d all be true. Parenting, seen in this lens, is some sort of endurance exercise, a series of acts of faith, taken on because I have to believe that the wrong turns I take mean less than the moments when I get it right. And my instinct to protect you from the world–from its arbitrary and intentional cruelties–is fierce. So I still remember the day that I broke down, sobbing; it’s not important why, what’s important is how I sat out on the back steps to cry, not wanting you to know and not wanting to make you feel responsible for my grief. You were younger than you are today, but not that very young.

You found me anyway, and you wrapped your arms around me and you said, “It’ll be ok.”

M’hijo. For days after that moment, I kicked myself. I felt like I failed as a mother. It shouldn’t be your job to take care of me. Finally a friend took my hands in hers and said, “You’re being a great mother. He’s learning how to be vulnerable and how to take care of people from you. He’s learning it’s ok to cry.” Yes. And you also were learning that we are stronger when we take care of each other.

Day by day you’ll notice that the firmly-drawn lines of the map you have fade; you’ll need to go outside those expectations and take roads you can’t have anticipated. So will I. We’ll both be figuring out what it means to be strong together even as you leave our back steps and jet out into the world.