The City of Lights
They say a Freudian slip is when you say one thing, but you mean your mother.
I have in my life loved and lost many women who in their time were the whole world to me. Have succumbed, no, rushed wildly, recklessly into the hills, valleys, glens and dales of their landscapes, chasing after the nymphs and the woodland fawns of their essences, their gestures, their smells, their nuances, like some intoxicated satyr gone mad. At so many points, when at all conscious of things outside of my own inner worlds, it seems to me now that I must have seen romantic love, along with the other chief hedonistic pleasures that one makes great trades to participate in, like some big all you can eat buffet. As though this mortal coil around us, fleeting as it is, is, like the one price smorgasbord, a smash and grab affair. They are, our pleasures, arrayed before us on long, endlessly long, tables, in all of their sundry hues and colors, all their mounded, juice dripping glories, fattened, gilded prizes already paid for with the one fee, our trip through this carnival called life, a fee paid for not by us, but by those who came before.
It is not we who provide our own entrance into our own worlds. No. No that is provided, is part of the package deal we get when we pass through the soul exchange, are seated, our seat belts checked, our empty bags stowed in the overhead compartments. No, it is those who chose to come together, to blend their seeds, to initiate the sublime, ineffable process of mitosis on our behalf that we have to thank, or to curse, for covering our costs. It is their blood which pounds through our veins, it is their mix of mitochondria that form our own. It is very much that we have, by virtue of our parents act of physically coupling, been provided with a vastly intricate biological machine, hardware, if you will allow the analogy, that does not become our own, does not manifest into "us" until we download enough programming, enough software, to continue the metaphor, to formulate any "us-ness" at all.
Intelligent design? Well, perhaps. In the strict sense of two carbon molecule based, animated beings controlled by "intelligence" who have decided to merge and split and start the process of cell division that is the more or less self replication that forms each of us. Or, in other instances, their isn't any intelligent preplanning involved, maybe, as a friend used to say, the act itself is somewhat closer in actuality to that represented in the line, "I knew you before you were a drink in your mama's hand."
However the process of physical intimacy comes to pass, we soon enough spring into the world, another bit of God, another pattern of energy, of, what, 99+% empty space with enough electromagnetic bonds, enough binary on and off saline, potassium, and glucose produced switches to become imprinted through our environment, and, hopefully, through our primary caregivers, to form a mind of our own inside of the unimaginably complex organ that our brains are, to form some sort of a hologram that convinces us that we are.
Okay, where I'm going, prattling on in my peculiar manner, is that we owe it all, everything, to those whose cells we propagate, our parents. And here, today, I want to spend some time blathering about the exceptional being that is my mother. Father, have no feelings, please, of non-inclusion; I shall focus in a later piece about my awe for you.
Lutecia Maria Gonzalez Quintanilla, as she was named by her parents, is my mother. My two older brothers, Marco Kelly and Leone José, and I, could never have been blessed with more. I can not, nor am I now in any position to speak for anyone but myself, but in my humble opinion, okay, those of you who know me well enough may not agree with the humble part, I feel ultimately blessed by the universe to have been reared by a being of such grace, awareness, and, more than all else, love.
Of Mexican parents, my mom was born in Mexico City in 1940. Her father, Enrique Gonzalez Aparício, was an economist who taught at UNAM, the Univeridad Nacionál Autonomica de Mexico, the large, national university in D.F., the Federal District, meaning Mexico City in the same nomenclature we use to say Washington, D.C. He formed the first worker's bank in Mexico, and was the chief economic advisor to Mexico's only Socialist President, Lázaro Cardenas, in the late 1930s. Cardenas and my abuelo, attempted, unsuccessfully, to nationalize the American oil companies in Mexico during his term in office. He spent some time schooling in Moscow, at, I believe, what was called the Lenin School of Economics. He was a man of the people, a man whose name is that now of of street in D.F., and after whom the Library of Economics at UNAM is named and whose bust sits in the foyer of said building. He passed away under somewhat contested circumstances, some say assassinated, others that he simply died of infection, after going to the hospital for a non life threatening injury. León Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City with an ice pick at roughly the same time. It is from my grandfather that I received my middle name, Enrique, the "e" in my, Peb.
I was unlucky in that I never knew either of my grandfathers. One of the reasons I have always tried to live close to my own father as I have reared my own kids, is so that the same would not be true for them. My mother's mother, Lutecia Quintanilla del Valle, came from a much storied, highly connected, aristocratic family in Mexico City. Her father was the Mexican ambassador to France and she was born about two blocks from the Arc de Triumph on Rue Victor Hugo, on the eve of World War I. The name, Lutecia, is in fact taken from the Roman name for Paris, the City of Lights. Some of her brothers served their country as ambassadors, her brother, Luís, was the Mexican ambassador to the United Nations in New York City, and used to arrive at Vassar College in a limousine, with a driver, to pick my mother up and take her out when my mother attended school there, living on the same floor as American actress, Jane Fonda.
I have been to Mexico City many times, living there with my parents and brothers for a time as an infant. During the visit to commemorate the life of my abuela some twelve or thirteen years ago, one of my family members made two interesting comments to me as we sat, some forty or so of us, at long tables in a fancy restaurant, an establishment that had its own small bull ring built into the center and a balcony high up above the seating area where singers performed during the meal, stopping at one point to give salutations and a statement about my family, about my abuela.
The first comment was for me to look around at my family members and to notice how light skinned we all were, how it remained that way because "we" never chose to mix with the locals, that our blood lined has stayed unblemished since the time we arrived from Spain some hundreds of years before. In fact, he told me, looking me in the eye, the del Valle part of our family line was there because we are all direct descendants of Hernán Cortez, the conqueror of the Aztecs, the takers of the great city of Tenochitlán, the site of modern day Mexico City. That as a reward for his achievements on behalf of King Ferdinand and his Queen, Isabella, Cortez was given as his economienda, his fiefdom, if you will, el Valle de Oaxaca, the Valley of Oaxaca, the valley surrounding the large Mexican City of Oaxaca, some ninety minutes south of D.F. I haven't any solid reason to believe that this is true, that it isn't simply a family's desire to create for itself a mystique of greatness, but then again neither do I have any solid reason to doubt it. Two Mexican presidents have come directly out of my matrilineal family line.
My mother, before becoming a professional, hadn't any so called marketable skills. She was, for most of our growing up years, a single mother working hard to try to make ends meet. We lived on welfare, food stamps, peanut butter in metal cans, powdered eggs, Velveta style cheese. We lived in low income, predominantly black "town houses" and went to schools that were mostly all black as well. My mother's second husband, Garry Fleming, was a large, gentle, funny but stern when he needed to be, American black. We didn't have much, but then as a child you don't really much know what it is that you don't have. Want I know that I did have, my most treasured object, was my mother, and that was always enough. She poured love into us as though, like the geranium plants that she always maintained, all we really needed was that golden elixir of her constant attention, her adulation, and her constant touch.
She practiced transcendental meditation and yoga, Madison being a bastion of liberalism, of anti-Vietnam War protests and the farm workers grape boycott. My mother was a social activist who promoted a belief system in her three sons that matched. I remember being a small, blonde haired, blue eyed boy barely four feet tall, walking a picket line outside of a liquor store in a parking lot and having angry white men drive through our lines and call us "spics." None of it made much sense to me, but I can see now, years later, that it imprinted me significantly. "Viva la lucha," long live the struggle.
My mother introduced me to the one best orientation and understanding of truth that I have ever encountered. She introduced me to Ram Dass. Born Richard Alpert, a northeastern, US Jew, Alpert and Timothy Leary were the two Harvard Professors of psychology that used LSD in experiments with their students to see it the hallucinogen may have been an aid in therapy. They were, after a time of sensationalized tumult, fired from their tenured track positions. Leary to go on to become a cultural icon well associated with the counterculture movement of the sixties; it was Leary who said, "Tune in, turn on, and drop out." Alpert moved to India and spent six years there learning about the yogic practices of the Hindi gurus, expanding, meditating, reading, serving. The self described "neurotic Jew" came back a very changed man. My mother possessed a dozen or two cassette tapes of some of his public lectures and she would, from time to time, encourage us three to listen to them. I still have those tapes. It was from him, for example, that I got my line about humans being "bits of God."
Our step-father was only in the house for about two or three years, but he continued to figure prominently in our formative years, coming around often, moving back in with us a couple or more times, watching us when my mother was out of town, etc. during all of it, during all of my childhood and well past, my mother was always our biggest fan. In many respects my mother was more big sister than mother, allowing my brothers and I at times perhaps too much leniency, but it was always, at least it still seems this way to me, done out of a desire to further us, to give us our space to create our own experiences, our own selves.
My mom became a trial attorney and went on to garner much praise and many forms of official recognition from the federal government for her work, becoming and ending her career as an administrative judge. She retired some ten years past and lives with her husband of thirty plus years, Ernesto Chacon, a good man. They reside in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and have for more than a couple decades now.
This past summer I was going through some boxes of memorabilia in an attempt to downsize, preparing to move abroad, and I ran across a folder of childhood, mainly school related, pictures, drawings, report cards. I had to laugh out loud as I read the comments of my teachers from my elementary school years. There was a quite consistent, repeated remark about how I was sort of in my own world, was nice enough, but that the other kids seemed to think that I wasn't much willing to go along with what they wanted, that I wasn't a great listener, and that I didn't very well stay on task. From about the age of five to eight there are maybe two or three reports from psychologists who my mother took me to see, both in the school system and outside of it. My intelligence scores were high, elevated, in fact, enough for me to go straight into the first grade without ever being in kindergarten. But through all of the paperwork I read there was this theme of a boy who sat apart from others, who was not the participating, so friendly with all he other kids kind of kid that I have always remembered myself to be. This kid, me, who was hard of hearing and had an operation to fix it, whose speech patterns were often something akin to a gibberish, and who intently made his own projects and focused on those in lieu of what he was being asked to do. My mother took me to a doctor at some point late in elementary school to have me tested for what was then called hyperactivity. The doctor asked me to lie still on his examination table for sixty seconds. I did. He concluded that I was hyperactivity free.
Then there are all of the drawings and the poetry. The drawings are mostly either of aliens or monsters of one form or another, or they are sad eyed people, drawings that feature eyes prominently, often with a tear rolling down. One I saw, and can in fact remember, from maybe around the age of eleven or twelve, has a man from the mid torso up, bare chested, firing a blaster rifle that has the markings, if I recall correctly, X-14, on the side, but while he is mainly in profile firing his weapon to the right, off page, his right eye is looking at the observer, a tear coming down. Now I read a lot of sci-fi,a lot of comics, so the themes make sense, but the sadness struck me. The poems too always seemed, in their steady, rhyming manner, to focus on either heroes or sadness, alienation.
My mom used to always pinch our cheeks and grab on us, as though we were her teddy bears or her cuddly pets, loving on us constantly. I remember how she would say to me, smiling her big, toothy smile, "How come you're so weird, Pebs?" She always said it in a really warm, connective way that would make me want to melt into her, smile shyly, a son only a mother could love, right? At the age of thirteen or so my mother decided that she should take me to see a hypnotherapist in Garden City, Kansas, whom some friend or other of hers had told her did past life regressions. My mom believed in past lives, and in the abilities of a sort of transference to occur wherein issues from one life that may not have been resolved may spill over into the next ones..
When I was perhaps nineteen, going to undergraduate in New Orleans, my mom married a Chicano gentleman named Ernesto Chacon, an activist in the struggle for civil rights for Latinos in the US. A quiet and strong man, Chacon, as he is usually referred to, is above all a good man, a strong and peaceful man. The years have toppled by like dominoes and his presence in the lives of my brothers and our mothers have been slowly, quietly strengthened and settled through his contributions. My mother, I feel, is fortunate to have him as her partner. He is a solid, steady, calm being, centered, the kind of person you want around you when the shit hits the fan. The anchor in a storm.
So she and my best friend, Jimmy DeLao, also about fourteen, and I drove her old Country Squire station wagon from Madison, Wisconsin, to Garden City, Kansas. Jimmy and I did some of the driving until we picked up this funny hitch hiker whose name I remember as Mike, of course I also remember myself as a vey friendly, eager to please, stay on task elementary school student too. I vividly remember Mike driving and at one point saying to Jimmy and I, "did you see that white flash run across the road?" We both said, "no." He then asked us if we knew what it was. Again we said, "no." To which he replied, "I already told you. It was a white flash!" We thought him terribly funny and really cool. The way that memory works is funny. And as I think over the discrepancies between what I recall and what apparently was, I can not but help to think of the words of the American author Sherman Alexie's words, "We are all the worst narrators of our own lives." I mean, I think that's what he said....
In Garden City we met with the doctor. Before he worked with me he showed us a video of his regression of a young man who was speaking crazy talk that the doctor told us was some alien tongue and that the young man also spoke in one or two other languages fluently while regressed that he could not speak a word of in his waking life. Then he had me lay down and stare at a record player turned on its side, a red and white spiral swirling out from the spindle spun round and round. This was to put me in a pre-hypnotic state. His regression of me ended up pulling up a memory of how I was somewhat traumatized one Christmas when my step-father, Garry, would not let me play with a new toy, a purple truck or tractor I want to say, for a spell, maybe for a day, because I had done something I was not supposed to! like tear open the present before it was time. Anyhow, even then it seemed to me that there was no great lancing of any event or uncovering of any earlier life as a young US GI killed in the Nam or an Aztec warrior killed by he conquistadors or any such crystallized point of conflict in me that was in any way exorcised, that in any way set me free. No, I think that those around me, probably to this day, would say that, no, I have remained that strange boy who focuses not on what I should be focusing on, but rather whatever it is that catches my fancy, still not content or interested in doing things in any way but my own.
Any one of my friends who ever met my mother has always been impressed with her, always remembers her warmly, distinctly, and her physical beauty. She is the kind of woman whose energy, infectious, ebullient, envelops and embraces you, produces a sensation that one does not forget. It has been no mystery to me why my father was attracted to her, why they married. And despite the divorce and the messiness surrounding our early years, the traveling back and forth across a continent twice a year to stay four months with our father and step-mother, I can not, as I can not with my own first marriage which produced my two remarkable sons, second guess the event--for out of both aforementioned unions came beings that would not, could not otherwise have sprung forth, and in no manner can I see either event or any of my brothers or my sons as any form of mistake.
It has been said that it is a common phenomenon for a boy to grow up and to choose women to be with that remind him of his more. In retrospect I would suggest that for myself that statement holds more than a grain of truth. My mothered is beautiful, loud, social, a bit histrionic, dramatic, and somewhat crazy. She is a person who does not go unnoticed when she walks into a room. She is no wallflower, she is more like a giant sunflower or an orchid, emanating color and an aesthetic charge that makes one take notice, makes one remember.
My mother has come upon some difficulties in the last two or three years with regards to her day to day memory system. It is perhaps because of a terrible car accident that she was involved in when I was in high school. The cause, however, is somewhat moot. The result is a slipping of the ability that we all take for granted to keep track of our daily schedule or our knowledge of just what, who, where, and when we are supposed to do or be with or to just be. It causes confusion and it causes disruption and fear. It is hard to go about my day to day life carrying with me the knowledge that she is there in the American Midwest living with a faulty memory system as I am here in this place too far away to give to her the support, the encouragement, the love, that she never failed to give to me. It makes me question my choice to be here, to be anywhere but there.
And it makes me sad. It makes me examine my feelings about my worth as her son. The woman who bought me the LP of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, introduced me to it, who listened to classical music in our house so regularly, the background score to my early years. I bought that music just last week, the Vivaldi concertos, including the Four Seasons, and I put it on most mornings now as I ready for my days of work in the Kingdom. How far in both geographical and temporal space I exist today from those sepia tinted, golden days gone by. I listen to late summer, to fall, her smiling, laughing face hanging superimposed over my mornings, comforting me still. The thrumming, pulsing violins forming the backbone of the long string of memories that only are because she is. Yet always, the angel hovering still over and through me, she stays, golden and radiant in the summer sunlight that is young once only.
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