Letter to my niece Sofia

Letter to my niece Sofia on the occasion of my latest birthday

Perhaps the best way to start this letter is to say that I’ve always felt old. I’ve come to understand that with age comes a certain degree of detachment, as if I were compelled to evaluate not only the events of my life but also the changes I am undergoing as if from a distance. I think of it at times as a meta-experience, a way of stepping out from reality and from the story that is unfolding as it were to comment on the production, on the action, and on the way we all respond to stories. It is the author who views himself as a character, the playwright who inserts another play in the work in progress, or the character who recognizes the landmarks that liken his or her predicament to a narrative or fictive formula, with thrilling or at times uneasy consequences (with regards to the latter, I have only to bring up the case of Augusto Pérez, the character in Miguel de Unamuno’s famous novel, or nivola, “Niebla”). It is a way of recognizing that we are passing through certain stages, and each experience, each encounter, leaves me with a feeling at times of sadness and regret.

The reason I am writing this to you is that I today was my birthday, and these events aren’t becoming any easier to countenance. We go through these charades with the obligatory enforced hilarity, or at least, that is how I have come to perceive my birthdays, feeling this immense pressure to have it be a sublime apotheosis, for on your birthday popular culture tells us that we are supposed to mark them in some way as special days, in a spectacle I have come to refer to as “competitive indulgence”. Is it your 15^th or 33^rd or 60^th birthday? What did you do to make it different from all the other birthdays?, says a voice inside, the voice of rampant consumerism that reduces everything to a compulsive spectacle of consumption and acquisition. My birthdays are considerably lower-keyed, but I try to go along with it, the jokes about how many more items I have crossed off my “bucket list”, about how I will soon be 50, and have I gotten what I truly wanted? I don’t know what kind of a spoilsport I am, but I have to confess to you that with each year I find these celebrations becoming almost unpleasant duties. I try to put on a good face, but the fact is that the years are passing by much too quickly, and even though I am still in my forties, I already feel weighed down.

Sofia, I see you now, four months old and smiling each time I hold you, and I reflect on the children that I didn’t have. I wonder at times how you are going about piecing the world together, and what a confusing jumble of impressions it must offer to you. It may be that we all carry a primitive memory of our time in the womb, and of floating in a dark, liquid abyss, hearing the pounding of our mother’s heart mixed in with the sensation of mysterious voices coming from afar. After birth, I imagine that the overwhelming sense is that we are shockingly alone, having left the maternal matrix and finding ourselves beset by light, the bitter, pounding sensation that we can’t reconcile with the peace we had before. I wonder how you greeted the light, and what it took to open your eyes and begin to make sense of the world around you.

You are much more aware than you were before, but you are still a creature of appetites and primal urges. You are scared, I understand, and confused, and you wake up at all hours of the night, and never seem to sleep for more than an hour at a time. I have seen the toll this takes on your mom, my baby sister Irma, who wakes up with hanging pouches under her eyes, and who struggles to find the energy she needs to go to work in the morning. But what exhausts her more than anything else is the prospect of not being with you during the day, and I’m sure that you miss your mother’s hugs as well, and her voice, and scent, and the memory of the time you spent when you and she were one.

I see a little of myself in you, even though we are separated by so many years. I’m still bewildered, still searching for solace as the years flash by, and still haunted by a past that, now, I find myself recreating in essays I write, reflections that carry a heavy note of regret. I’m not sure I can remember what I feel you might still remember, the memory of oneness with the being who nurtured you so recently, but I am well able to imagine the anxiety you feel at the prospect of separation. I’ve been so used to being independent all my life, so willing to go off and venture to different places, and I’ve had my own calamitous experiences that I’ve kept to myself. However, I look at you, and see you being held by your grandparents, my parents, who are in their late sixties and early seventies, and may possibly not live to see you as an adult. I hate to use the word “poignancy”, but that is what I see, and I regret that I haven’t been as close to my family as I should have been, and the echo of the loss of my parents, which I hope won’t come for many years yet, makes itself felt.

When we were kids, growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was difficult to be a Mexican-American. We felt like the despised minority in this town, located on the outskirts of Los Angeles, an ethnic group that didn’t merit recognition in our schools or in public culture. I don’t think you will experience that sense of being a barely-tolerated outsider, you won’t experience the frustration so many of us felt but weren’t able to express when we were younger, when we would celebrate the pageant of European immigration to the United States, the myth of Ellis Island and the welcome extended to the “poor and huddled masses”, but found no similar dignity accorded to the pageant of Mexican immigration to the United States, nor any acknowledgment of the contributions of our forefathers. I wonder what you will learn when you are in school, if there will be more balance, now that Mexican-Americans are the majority of the student body in our district, the district where you will surely grow up, in a region (the Southwest) where the Latino population is growing and big states such as California and Texas will soon be majority-Latino states.

We suffered from low self-esteem, and we were our own worst tormentors. We Mexican-American kids were so creative in the insults we could hurl at each other, employing all the pejorative terms that were directed at us, but also employing others that somehow sounded worse because they weren’t used by our Anglo counterparts, but had been created by us, by our community, to belittle ourselves. It was one thing to be called a “wetback” by our Anglo peers, but there is no way, I suppose, to communicate the ferocity of a term such as “chúntaro” that we used to hurl at each other, with the suggestion of animal-like simplicity, unless you could see the sneering expression of those who used it. We used it with each other, Mexican-American kids buying into the message of racial and cultural inferiority, and holding no other dreams than to one day escape our working-class surroundings and, I am embarrassed to say it, transcend our ethnic origin. That was my experience.

By and large, we did make progress. One of your aunts and me, your oldest uncle, became college graduates, and by now, a few of your cousins are well on their way. I know that when I return to college this fall, teaching my three classes, I will probably see my students in a new light, hoping to see in them a forecast for your own future. I have always been able to connect in this way with my students, and I see them recapitulating so many of the mistakes I made, but also, hopefully, making their own discoveries and deriving joy from their experiences.

Your mom didn’t go to college, and I always thought she would be the next to do so. It disappointed me bitterly when she chose to find a job after graduating from high school, especially given her achievements, she having been a particularly thoughtful and mature student. She was the outstanding 3^rd grade student of the year, as commemorated in a statue she received in the 90s, an early achievement that filled us with so much pride. I couldn’t help comparing it with my own relative anonymity during my years of public school attendance, and the way I used to hang back, furtively reading books on Greek mythology or Charlie Brown anthologies while the fourth and fifth grade kids kicked me as I sat at my desk, or chanted vicious ditties at recess. I think your mom had a much more positive experience in grade school, and she certainly seemed to show signs of well-adjusted and confident. I hate to think that the spectacle of an older brother who was still pursuing graduate degrees in his thirties, and who hadn’t settled down by then, might have discouraged her, and I hope it doesn’t discourage you, Sofia.

I don’t know what the world will hold for you in the future. I am reminded of a line from one of William Butler Yeats’ poems, about his visiting schoolchildren, he being the venerable old Irish poet of his age, and remarks that in a humorous way that he felt he was being considered as little other than an “old scarecrow” by the young students who knew nothing of fame of a poet, at least nothing that could compare with the image factory of heroes and (idle) idols that was being mass-produced in Hollywood.

                   And I though never of Ledaean kind
                   Had pretty plumage once — enough of that,
                   Better to smile on all that smile, and show
                   There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

                   (Among School Children)

I’m not an old scarecrow, and to paraphrase another verse from another poet of the English language (Alfred Lord Tennyson), the verses that proceed as follows:

                                Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
                                Death closes all: but something ere the end,
                                Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
                                Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

                                (Ulysses)

Where the last verse would hardly seem to apply to me, the son of farmworkers, but that I chose to appropriate because I can’t help but think that there was dignity in the spectacle of people such as my grandfather and father, and migrants of all epochs, who venture out in search of a quest, one that makes them akin to the heroes of the classical age, the Odysseus who traverses the metaphorical wine-red seas of the Agean, or in this case, the endless expanses of the Sonoran desert. I don’t feel old yet, I’m still in my forties, and I feel as I write this that I am perhaps I am being imprudent by quoting great poems, but I try to tell myself that as I grow older I have come to understand the sentiment expressed in these verses at a deeper level, in a way that is much more profound than that which characterized my first reading of these verses, back when I was a teenager at Corona High School, looking forward desperately to the day I could take flight. What I hope to communicate to you, Sofia, is a sense of hope, and an appreciation for art, and an attitude, remembering as I do the things that gave me solace back then, as a young Mexican-American who couldn’t even use the term “Chicano” to identify himself, but who still felt hope in the prospect of making a difference.

From the looks of it, though, it would certainly seem as if we have mucked it up, though, with the world stumbling from crisis to crisis, with the Middle East in flames (with revolts and rebellions in Egypt and Syria), and a class divide that is growing ever wider in the United States, a dysfunctional political culture in Washington and with the prospect of an environmental catastrophe in the near future. Would that we could all scramble back into our mother’s wombs, I say to myself from time to time, which is as you will come to know, is just a figure of speech, for literalism is not given to people who are reflective.

But if we did, we would miss out on so much. I hope I have communicated to you the hope I feel that our society is changing, and that we will have the tools to be able to forge the identity we want to assume, for yes, identity is not a given, it is something that we have to claim for ourselves, and mold, until it expresses the scope of our dreams. And we would miss out on the beauty of every day, on the mundane events that we so often overlook, on the sight of your grandfather singing to you songs of the Mexican radio pioneer Cri-Cri that he heard in Mexico when he was growing up, as he holds you in his arms, and of cousins who are two and four years old, rambunctious little boys who eat macaroni and chicken nuggets and drink punch and pester me to inflate water balloons, but who also reach out and caress your cheek when they see you.

Did I tell you that a week ago, after hearing the constant coverage on the news about the annual Perseid Meteor showers that take place during the middle of August, that I spent half an hour for several days sitting outside after midnight, craning my neck up at the stars hoping to catch a glimpse of one? We may be located an hour’s drive away from Los Angeles, but alas we suffer from too much light pollution, and this makes any such enterprise a chancy affair. I saw the few stars whose light was more pronounced either because they were closest to us or because their intrinsic brightest was able to actually break through this haze, and I couldn’t help but reflect on the light from each having crossed vast distances that I can’t begin to imagine to reach me. We are mortal creatures, perhaps something like moths, with little deep-felt understanding of the immensity of the world, and of the beauty we behold, but attracted nonetheless to the light.

I didn’t see a meteor, try as I might, but the same impulse came to me on the night of my birthday, when a feeling inside told me that I should walk outside and give it another go, even though the meteor shower was no longer projected to be at its peak. I was born shortly after midnight, and when I stepped out, the first thing I saw was what looked like a flaming fireball streak across the sky. It took only a few seconds before it was gone, but I can’t tell you how encouraged it made me feel, and how thankful, for it was as if I my existence had been acknowledged and somehow dignified by the spectacle.

That is how I feel when I see you also, Sofia. You are still very young, and you have many experiences that await you. I can’t promise that they will all be pleasant, for you will certainly suffer in ways that are both similar as well as different from the ways we have suffered. But I hope to be with you when you become an adult, and hope that you will carry with you as well the memory of fragile pleasures, those moments like the passage of a meteor overhead when you feel connected, not only with your mom and your family, but feel yourself a part of this wonderful and poetic universe.

You see, we never did leave the womb after all!

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013