Silverleaf Linings

Maybe the hardiest living thing in all South Texas —next to cactus (native) or Johnson grass (invasive)—is the common Silverleaf Nightshade. 

Here is the memory right out of my mental moth balls: I’m about seven or eight years old and walking the three blocks to school in the early morning. I am proudly toting across my shoulder my bright plastic and cardboard book satchel full of arithmetic workbooks and books with stories that my teachers call readers. 

Our street is unpaved until the north east corner of the school. I walk along the fence and notice for the hundredth time clumps of low, dusty green plants with small blue pointy flowers, each with a crown of yellow stamens. As usual, I am day dreaming. 

On my seven-year-old mind: If my Mama bought me PF Flyers like they show on TV, could I really run faster? 

My present-day mind: Forget the Saturday morning cartoon tennis shoe advertising, kid. I wish I could run just for a minute with your brand-new lubricated knees!

On my seven-year-old mind: Is my best friend Joyce Brown going to invite me to play at her house after school this week? I hope so! She has a dog!

My present day mind: Forget friends and dogs. Pay extra careful attention today to the arithmetic lesson. You are about to overlook a sequence in solving long division problems that will haunt you worse than a ghost.

The years wore PF Flyers and over all the decades the Silverleaf Nightshade followed me into all my yards and gardens. 

They are reminders of both my once much-lubricated knees, and also of the abundant and volunteer beauty that nature always provides. 

Earlier this week, I saw that a patch of Silverleaf Nightshade had overtaken the paths of our vegetable garden. Before I started up my weed eater, I pulled out a large handful of stems loaded with flowers for a vase on our kitchen table. 

Those flowers have brightened breakfast, lunch and dinner all week. Their resilience and persistence are reminders during this pandemic that, as Glennon Doyle writes, “We can do hard things.“

There is comfort is knowing that whether in walking long distances, making and keeping friendships, doing long division, or riding out pandemics or standing up for demonstrations that affirm that Black Lives Matter, always nearby and nearly underfoot stands a little plant with blue and yellow flowers and dusty green leaves. 

Pain and Glory, The Story of Pedro Almodovar

Amy Winehouse may have gone back to black, but Pedro Almodovar chose going back to color. 

During most of the 2019 film, Pain and Glory, Almodovar's choice between black or color is too close to call. On the pain side of the story, there is a lot, and it's physical as much as it is spiritual. On the glory side of the story, there is less than there is pain, but as Almodovar shows us, even in small amounts, glory is catalyzed by healing.  

Salvador Mallo is a thinly-disguised version of the film's director, Pedro Almodovar. Salvador is a film director who has stopped working. His body is racked with pain and mysterious ailments.  His memories of childhood are a counterbalance to the darkness of his present pain-filled life, yet they provide no way forward from his painful present.

 Salvador as a child is portrayed by Asier Flores. As an adult his character is played by Antonio Banderas. 

Pain and Glory is the story of how friends, some long-standing and others long-lost, reflect back to us the self that we cannot see on our own.    

A chance encounter with an old friend who has seen an actor he once worked with starts the film and Salvador's journey.  A screening is planned for the remastered version of the director's break-out 1980's film. This is not a cause for celebration. He has been unwilling to see the film for 30 years. Salvador's break-out film caused him a near breakdown: He had a friendship-ending quarrel with one of the principal actors. His addicted partner of three years left Madrid for Buenos Aires and a new life.  His efforts to be the son his mother always wanted ended with her death in an ICU in a hospital in Madrid instead of within the traditions and customs of her village where he had promised she would be taken to die.  

In one of the movie's luminous flashbacks Salvador as a small child teaches a young, handsome mason from his village how to read and write. After setting in some tiles in Salvador's mother's sunny kitchen, the mason removes his clothes to wash off the mortar.  He asks Salvador to bring him a towel. The boy faints either because he’s been in the sun too long or because he is overcome by the sight of the mason bathing. 

Almodóvar uses color in this film as in his whole work like a painter. Whether you are in a cave, a doctor's office, kitchen or a theater stage, color is as important to the story as the actors. And it is most important in this film, because Salvador, who  lives in the dark literally works his way back into light and color. 

This film is about choosing carefully. Almodóvar clearly made the right choices.

Mothers and Daughters

It was in Mom's nature to both love and to also be critical. Criticism was a way she wished her kids a better future. If you heed me you will do better. But when I heard her criticize her mother, Ventura, Mom seemed to blame the past for what she saw lacking in her mother.  

Mom cared for her mother, for sure.  There were gifts of baby chicks, food, shoes, and frequent visits with a 90-mile one-way trip to the town in Mexico where Nana lived, Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas.

What was going on between this mother and daughter?  All I could figure out as a kid was that they must have gone in different directions. Mom went on into modern times with her family and her life in Arizona and Texas, while Nana stayed in the 19th century when she was born. Her arranged marriage at the age of 13 took her from the tiny town of Parras where she lived with her family to Porcion 23, the ranch owned by her husband Matias and his two brothers, Eduardo and Espiririon Flores.  

I hugged and loved my grandmother, but she was not a warm and fuzzy grandma. Kids have great BS detectors, and I could tell that she was honest, however different she was from what I imagined she should be. A telenovela grandmother. I remember watching telenovelas with my mom back home in Laredo and seeing the old Mexican actress Sara Garcia offering her family wise advice and consolation. Sara Garcia was the grandmother for all of Mexico in film and TV for several decades. Her face was so recognized it was displayed on boxes of chocolates and cookies. The movie grandmother with twinkling eyes and soft, round cheeks.

Ventura Molina Flores, who we called Nana, was nothing like Sara Garcia. Nana’s eyes were dimmed by cataracts from working in the fields planting and tending crops. She tended fires all of her days standing before the hearth cooking for her family and in later years making, cooking and selling tortillas. Sara Garcia's fictional grandmother loved to sit and chat. Nana was not a sitter or chatter. She moved all through the day in a steady manner with short steps and  sturdy posture. You wouldn't want to get in between her and where she was going. When she wasn't selling tortillas from her kitchen window, she chopped wood, washed clothes, tended her garden, and looked after her chicken coop and the pig she raised to sell.

She loved us children but didn't show it by playing with us or interviewing us the way Art Linkletter did those kids who said the darndest things. We children had a place at her table with a plate and food upon it. We knew we had our place in her world because of who our parents were, but there was little curiosity about us after the obligatory hugs when we said hello or goodbye.  The difference between Nana and the fictional grandma's on TV made me wonder if we grandchildren fit into her brain like some new chicks or a piglet to raise. She called me "la niña" instead of by my name.

I found it interesting she didn’t go to church, but her old print of the Virgin of Guadalupe hung on her wall in a hand-carved wooden frame. It now hangs in my home.

As a kid I watched my mother talk about her mother with pity for her hard life. Now I wonder if the differences might have made Mom uncomfortable or even guilty. But Nana's life looked comfortable, secure and sane to me. She wasn't a big worrier. She seemed self-contained, content and never asking for or needing anything.

As I see Nana today, I think of her as deserving more credit than Mom gave her.    She married as a child.  She and her husband had nine children. She lived through the Revolution, the 1930's double-whammy of drought and depression, World War II where her son Adolfo served in the U.S. Army,  the death of her husband and two of her children, the displacement of her town for the construction of the Falcon Dam. She lived too through the steady leaving or dying of each of her children and her husband.

Nana was clean and tidy in her appearance. She always wore black print dresses because she was a widow who continued to feel the loss of her husband.  She wore flannel slip-on loafers with the flesh colored hose. She had long silver hair gathered in a bun. Here is my most clear memory. Nana always smelled of smoke from the fire she worked close beside in the kitchen.

I saw her angry a few times, but she generally had a steady temperament. While she wasn't playful or affectionate, she was kind and approachable. In her last year, she became lost in her world. She was acting strangely her neighbors told us so Mom and my aunt brought her to live in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. At our house she lived in the boy's bedroom while they were in college and the Navy. One night I watched as she stood in her nightgown and urinated on the linoleum floor. I saw she was busy talking to someone in the room with her. Her silver hair loose around her pale shoulders in such a contrast to her saddle leather brown arms and hands. Who is Nana talking with? She is conversing with people only she can see Mom told me. Who are they I asked? Mama said Nana was talking to her Papá and other relatives gone before. Gone to the same place she was now approaching.  We cleaned up the urine and got her changed into fresh clothes. Nana soon gave up on eating and drinking and she died a few weeks later in the Nuevo Laredo hospital. She was buried in Nueva Ciudad Guerrero beside her husband’s bones that Mom and she had moved from Old Guerrero after the town was flooded and the waters had receded.

There were no secrets that my BS meter ever uncovered about Nana. No alcohol, no abuse, no dire circumstances or deceits. But I always wondered about her lack of outward affection, the sense of obligation instead of connection between mother and daughter. Maybe in Nana's world, you don't name your chickens and pigs for the same reason I was always "la niña". Nana's children all left to find their livelihoods far from home. Maybe something in you closes and locks after so many departures.

In my memory, my Nana still stands at the gate to welcome us and send us off again. She is solid and straight backed, seeing the flow of her family arrive and leave with the same calm equanimity. With or without us, she and her strong hands return to chores like chopping wood, feeding animals, watering plants and trees, making tortillas and cooking food on the hearth in the kitchen. In the evening she sits on the porch greeting passersby. A cool shower before bedtime. Next to her bed was a metal trunk that held important papers. A castaña where titles, birth and death certificates, identification papers were kept.  I never looked inside of the castaña to see what Nana might have collected in a lifetime that she held private and contained as her emotions. 

ReplyForward

The Wonders and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) are two Italian films by award -winning Italian director Alice Rohrwacher.

Both films offer a view to an invisible border where one culture ends and another begins, where the old collides with the new.   

In the 2014 film, The Wonders, we are witness to the ripping of the fabric of farming culture by the twin scissor blades of television and consumerism.  A television crew's taping of a reality show pits contestants from the farms to sing from their cultural traditions for audiences across Italy for a cash prize.

Some contestants are happy to trade in their farms for an easier-on-your-back bed- and-breakfast economy. The distrusting father of a family of bee-keepers sees the trade off as a rip-off. Others in the family, however, are eager to leave their seven-days-a-week work lives for the easier life television advertises.

Is the trade-off fair or is it a rip-off? This is the conflict that both films leave for you to judge.  In The Wonders, the Earth provides the bees and the honey that the Gelsomina an adolescent girl and her family collects and sells. Using the family's profits to buy a camel for Gelsomina is a last ditch effort on the part of the father to keep his eldest girl from growing up.

The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro are set in rural Italy. The children's names in The Wonders are old. Gelsomina, Angelica, Luna are names that remind me of my own family‘s names like Concepción, Socorro, Josefa, Angelica and Maria.  Names from the past that have lost out in recent years in favor of newer style names like Yaliza, Yseña and my own name, Linda.

The films show the tug of war of evolution. At one end of the rope, Mother Nature provides: Bees are harvested for their honey with hard labor and a little help from nature. At the other end, civilization encroaches imposing a new order. Besides new hygiene rules for beekeeping, there is the intrusion of nearby hunter's firearms blasts that disturb the bee colonies. The neighboring farmer raises pigs. Weed killer sent by the state to improve his farm further damages the bees.

Dad works while dressed in his jockey shorts among his family of toddlers and nearly adult children reminding me this film reflects a less sexualized era than our's. It's interesting to me that it is less Puritan than our era with its ubiquitous sex-for-sale themes in advertising.

The conflict of old and new is captured under the electronic circus of reality television. Gelsomina, the eldest child of the beekeeping family  is in the spotlight. She happens upon a production team preparing to record a show for a large cash prize. That distressed sound you hear is fabric tearing. She may know all she needs to know about bee-keeping, but that doesn't mean it is the world she wants to live in. Despite her father's wishes, Gelsomina sees her life beyond the farm and the reality show contest is her ticket out of bee-keeping. It is also her ticket out of being the only adult in a family where her parents are either not willing or prepared to face the challenges of modern time bee-keeping or child-rearing.

Both movies' greatest value is that the director, like a forensic scientist, uncovers  glimpses of the natural era that are now nearly ended.  In the first movie, The Wonders, ancient music is sung in harmony by the women in the reality show competition. A boy's whistling of bird songs are another relic brought out for the cameras. In the more recent film, Happy as Lazarro, there is a midnight serenade by male singers at the window of the centuries old stone farm house. The kerosene lamp lit kitchen scene after the serenade shows us singers who have entered to join the family. They pass a cup of wine amongst each other from a nearly empty glass. There is an easy accommodation to scarcity of food, drink or space. Sleeping six to a room or more, the extended family wakes and sleeps to the sun's rising and setting. The planting and harvesting of crops drives the calendar, not the other way around.

Include in the accounting of wonders the bees traversing the skies in their work of pollination also disappearing with insecticides, the ties of people to the seasons for their work and leisure under the rhythms of the sun and the stars.

Both movies trace the nearly lost treasures of communal living a hundred years ago almost everywhere on the planet including the borderlands of Texas and Tamaulipas where my family settled in farms and later in towns.

I grew up listening to my own folks at night on cool front porches talking about their elders hunting deer by kerosene lamp or driving mule packs of bootleg tequila through the desert at night to the US border, their journey guided by the stars. The labores, the fields, tended by many hands of brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents. Families sleeping on pallets of corn husks in a one room jacal with adobe walls of logs and branches, dirt floors and warmth from the hearth where food was cooked. Kerosene lamps provided the light before the era of electricity.

Sounds awfully hard to me, but my mother spoke fondly of her times growing up there despite the family's tight quarters and hard work in the fields.

I am privileged to also study the collision of ancient and modern cultures of the rural the urban, the natural world and the world we’ve been inventing with electricity and it’s many technologies. The world these bright lights eclipsed I only glimpsed through my mother's stories.

The light that Alice Rohrwacher shines on what is nearly lost when one culture dies and another is born helps bring honor and recognition to the ancient songs and ways of living before they are gone for good.

Maybe in the discovering their scarcity we can figure out how to preserve or maybe reinvent the songs and customs within our own time. I have seen it happen before. Witness the preservation of mariachi and conjunto music in South Texas, of Gaelic language and culture in Ireland. We have seen it in the recording of Appalachian songs that were brought from the Old World to the Americas by 1930's song-catchers. We have seen it in the work of Zora Neal Hurston who captured stories and myths in the south during the Depression. We have seen it with Juan Quezada who re-pioneered the thousand-year-old Casa Grandes pottery making tradition in the Chihuahua in desert town of Mata Ortiz. Add Alice Rohrwacher and her films to this incomplete list.

In this time of limited travel because of the pandemic, take a trip back in time to the way most of us lived in rural areas not cities, before the advent of electricity and electronic media, when we lived closer to nature. 

Mashing on Modern Family

Consider the combined writing, comedic and acting talents of the creators and performers of Modern Family over the 11 years of the series. They have given  more chuckles and tears to our household of culturally-distinct, same-gender members of interesting and diverse extended families than I can measure.

Modern Family ended its successful run with a loving post script to its viewers, a documentary about its production over the years. Think "mockumentary about a mockumentary" and wonder what Marshall McLuhan might call it. 

The series has been a virtual family experience uniquely suited for our era. Like many shows before it, the TV series brought laughter to our family. In the 1950's our Spanish-speaking borderlands family laughed at the antics of the viejito Walter Brennan, the grandfather of The Real McCoys, in the 1960's we watched the adventures of the fathers and sons of Bonanza and My Three Sons.  These characters became a species of minor members of my own family as I slowly worked out the differences between fiction and fact with the same awe as Lily, the child actress, did when she entered her role in Modern Family. 

What makes Modern Family a virtual family particularly suited for the 21st century was its mockumentary style of presenting interior monologues. What the character was thinking —the hang-ups, the mechanics of conflict, the asking, solving, failing to solve--much of it messy-- like all things human.

Audiences had a view of how to move forward through life’s passages and trials accompanied as we often are by envy, jealousy, and resentment. We learned how to perfect scruffy tumbles and rolls in order to stand again, dust-ourselves-off, and be our best-possible-at-the-moment-selves. It's all anyone can ask. 

Like the Dunphy Family, we learned how to view shortcomings, our own and those of others, as temporary stumbles on the tricky stairway of life.

Eleven years of laughter and tearful recognition of parts of ourselves are a lot to be grateful for.

Modern Family reflected and bridged important cultural changes in family relationships and careers during its eleven years.  

Most important, the series offered us a welcome, comfy, seat-across-the-couch view of the inner and outer shaping of ideas and concerns, whether judgey and trite or deep and soulful, that accompany us in living alongside and loving those we hold most dear, our family.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here--William Shakespeare

World religions make reference to the way the world will end. Some call it final days, others end times. 

My experience on this chance planet tells me to avoid the useless distractions of despair and fear during these unprecedented times of global pandemic.  End times are upon us, but not in the fatalistic way some people believe. 

There are many parables of what looked like end times but were important new beginnings—think David and Goliath, the crowds feeding on fishes and loaves of bread. In my own million hours spent with media—including werewolves and science fiction, the good guys are challenged to within an inch of the top of their white Stetsons, but they usually win. 

End time values are those that walk with us through every important crossroad. End times are those decisive moments in battles whether patriotic, personal or on the playing field, when the slingshot is swung, and the rock flies forward to a new future.  

Dan Cook, the craggy-faced San Antonio sports writer and TV announcer, originated the modern proverb "It ain’t over until the fat lady sings" to direct our minds to stay open for any outcome. End times are those moments at a championship game when thousands of hours of shooting practice baskets propels a player above an impossible throng of shoulders to send the ball sailing into the hoop before the buzzer sounds and the crowds rush onto the court. 

End times are unpredictable of course.  That’s what Dan Cook meant.  In battles of any kind there are winners and losers.  Dan Cook was saying with poetic playfulness that no one can know the outcome of a contest of any kind.   

Winning for me means more David, less reckless pessimism.  More time throwing baskets in my writing practice,  and in my daily interactions, whether digital or in the few face-to-face ones that I have at safe distances. Use up the stored courage and courtesy, no time to hoard helping hands, hellos or happiness.

Trying really matters. Fear, worry and pessimism may always be present on the battlefield or the playing field. Ask David the soldier or David, the Admiral of San Antonio. I, too, have fear in these end times, but any wisdom I have won tells me that fear only serves me as a signal. Butterflies in my tummy, shaky knees? Time to gird my core. Time to remember the thousands of times I have hit the target.  Leap above the massive shoulders with my best aim. 

End times are when decisions are made, tables are turned, when we humans reach deep to jump high and toss forward into destiny our human race’s next ambition.  

Drill down to what enters into decision points during end times. Our battle against the Goliath pandemic reminds me that now is when to use the force of my faith, to put into practice what I’ve perfected in my life of drills. That doing not doubting determines what I alone control, that I play with all I've got.  

We have to dare to be ourselves however frightening or strange that self may prove to be--May Sarton

This pandemic, however it plays out, has its purposes. For one, it is a perfect PAUSE button. 

The rhythms of my day-to-day are different now and allow for more introspection and wonder. I’m grateful to be here, even in this temporarily off-its-kilter time for our planet. 

I took a dive into a closet full of old photo albums yesterday looking for images of me as a journalist in the 1970's and 80's. That was an era in communication when a bulletin board and a typewriter were what passed for the internet. 

I sped through maybe a thousand photos of me in my teens, college years and early career. When I returned the albums to the closet I felt like an astronaut getting used to walking on land again. I had been further than to the moon and back in my time travel. 

I remembered the tender blooming of my life and the many loves and adventures. I also remembered the painful awkwardness I needlessly carried like an Egyptian mummy grafted on my shoulder.

Seeing all those photos of me shook me to the core because they reminded me of how hard I used to be on me. I spent a large portion of my life being de pelea con el mundo --always in a boxing ring, at odds with everyone and myself.  

I didn't fit in being who I was, how I looked, who I loved, where I came from, and the fact that I have a non-standard issue last name. Of course, I wasn't in this battle alone. The less-diverse white/hetero mainstream media played an uninvited speaking role inside my head. 

I certainly will not multiply the meanness by being mad at myself in the present for being mean to myself in the past.  I know that is not a good course to follow. So, I have learned a few things! 

I was in fact kind of cute! Intense and bubbling over with anxiety and angst of all varieties, but cute nonetheless. 

More importantly, I see with the compassion acquired with age that I was doing the best that I could, given what I knew and the tools that I had at the time. 

I’m proud to say I pushed through most fears and moved forward. Like everyone I made some mistakes and moved backwards at times, but overall I feel it’s been a great ride and I hope I can still keep writing, growing, creating, sharing for many years to come. 

Seeing all those pictures I think of all the cups of coffee, glasses of iced tea, and margaritas I’ve shared and all the lives that I crossed paths with on the dance floor, on the therapy couch, in the hallways at the college. I’m thankful for it all. 

I pray, for all the positives I'm capable of pulling from this pinche pandemic, that it peters out pronto. I want to hit the PLAY button again, and have our lives return back to school, work, worship the way we lived before, taking all the lessons and wisdom from these off-kilter times with us.