My brother in Afghanistan

Last Friday I went to Zabar’s to select boxes of assorted nuts and dried fruits for my brother who is in Afghanistan with the Navy.  As the Christmas and Hanukah holidays are approaching, one family member will be missing from these festivities.  I think it was important to get this package in the mail, and not to forget those who are serving our country overseas and in harm’s way.

Until last May, Oscar was the principal at Anthony High School, just outside of El Paso, Texas.  He has been an educator for decades, but he has also been in the Navy Reserve for 22 years.  In other ways, Oscar also breaks the stereotype many of us might have of our military servicemen and women: he is in his 40’s, has a Master’s degree, and was working on his Doctorate.  Before he left for Afghanistan, Oscar was promoted to the rank of Chief Petty Officer in the Navy.  Administrators, teachers, and students from Anthony High School also recently sent him a care package.

It is strange to have a brother in places you read about in the newspaper’s front pages, where sectarian violence, for example, recently killed dozens of Afghanis and Improvised Explosive Devices still kill American soldiers in Humvees.  It is strange because on the one hand I know my brother well, but on the other hand he is in as remote and as foreign a place as I could imagine.

I worry about my brother, and I hope with a little luck and skill that he will return to El Paso safely.  My mother couldn’t stop crying for days after Oscar told her the news of his deployment.  Now she keeps a candle lit to the Virgen de Guadalupe in our living room, to ask Her to guide him home.  It is what we don’t know about his deployment, what our minds imagine, and what we see as ‘news’ about Afghanistan that is this cauldron of anxiety, fear, and hope.  Our family is proud of Oscar, because we know he is doing his duty for his country.

I believe many if not most Americans are smart enough to support our military, to remember and honor their sacrifices, but to judge the politicians in Washington by a different metric.  These politicians create American foreign policy, while the military is one of those instruments of that policy.  For example, I don’t believe we should have attacked Iraq to rid it of Saddam Hussein or the weapons of mass destruction that were never found.  That war was George W. Bush’s and Condoleezza Rice’s mistake, which of course they will never admit, because they are politicians.  They manipulated the fear after 9/11 to start a war that should never have happened.  From the start, we should have focused on Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda operated.

But not for one moment would I ever disparage soldiers, sailors or airmen for their service in Iraq.  On the contrary, I would thank them for doing their duty.  Once they are back home, I would do what I can to help them.  I also believe how that war was started is one thing, but how it was carried out and how it evolved are different matters.  You may start a war for the wrong reasons, but what happens during the long course of any war may have benefits.  So even saying ‘Iraq was a mistake’ is too simplistic.  We may not know for years what true effect we had in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Give Obama credit for winding down the Iraq war, and for beginning the process in Afghanistan.  I believe the majority of Americans support this policy, in part because we see our economic problems at home as paramount, but also because the marginal benefits of what we can do in Iraq and Afghanistan decrease each year.  Obama has cleaned up a lot of messes he inherited, and he has also fallen short as a leader at times, yet I give credit where credit is due.

You know, I am not a jingoistic patriot.  But I am a patriot.  It plays better for simplistic hurrahs, and in our TV culture with three-second attention spans, to wave the flag and spout unqualified red-white-and-blue accolades to motherhood, apple pie, and the United States of America.  But I do not always agree with my mother, although I still love her.  I prefer apple crisp to apple pie, and buñuelos with honey to both.  I support our military and my brother in the military.  But I will never stop thinking until I am dead, and that I am able to write what I think, even if it is critical of the United States, is one of the reasons why I know I am lucky to live in this country.

Before the holidays are over, and even after they are done and gone, connect with a military family, and invite them over for dinner or simply for a cup of coffee.  Send a member of our armed forces a care package this week.  Write him or her a letter.  When we go beyond our selves, when we do something good that is not necessary or even asked for, we are all ennobled.

The Last Day of School

Tomorrow is the last day of school for my sons, Aaron and Isaac. For Aaron, it will be his last day at the Bank Street School for Children as a student: he graduates from the 8th grade and begins attending high school next year. Eons ago I also attended a K-8 school, South Loop in Ysleta. Recently, on a radio show from El Paso, I even sang the South Loop Eagles fight song. I remembered every word.

Why do K-8 schools hold this special place in our hearts? For one thing, you are old enough, when you graduate, to remember many details of your childhood school experience. I remember vaguely what happened in 4th and 5th grades, but I remember almost everything about 7th and 8th grades.

Interestingly enough, I don’t remember a single day of freshman year at Ysleta High. I think I was in shock. I was suddenly surrounded by older, more sophisticated high school kids. The girls were sexy, but I was intimidated. The boys were bigger and tougher than me. I just didn’t want to make a fool of myself. I looked like a Mexican Donny Osmond. Remember, it was 1979.

But at South Loop the previous year, I had been an eighth grader, at the top of the heap. I knew what was what. I also did not face the social pressures I would later face at Ysleta High. I think this is one great advantage of K-8 schools. The kids, especially in the latter grades, are protected for two extra years from pernicious high school influences.

At Bank Street, I believe, Aaron has had that extra time to develop his own sense of self. He will be ready when he is tested in high school, and I don’t just mean by his more difficult academic workload. In high school, if you know who you are, if you have a sense of what you want and what you don’t want, you will be more likely to have and keep the right priorities.

My walk to South Loop was two blocks, over a canal, and briefly into the neighborhood Calavera before entering the school’s gates. Aaron takes the uptown No. 1 subway in front of our building on Broadway, three stops, before he walks into Bank Street. He has faced more immediate dangers than I ever did, from taxis which zip across the intersection heedless of the red light to incoherent, disheveled men screaming at phantoms only they can see.

Aaron is a responsible young man, and he has managed New York City well. His high school is but eight blocks from our house, so his commute will be a breeze next fall. He will encounter a strange new world. But I know we have given him the skills and encouraged him to be independent so that he will be able to solve his own problems. Whatever he cannot figure out, we will solve together as a family.

My younger son Isaac began to come home from Bank Street by himself this year. Minutes after 3:00 p.m. every day, I look at my cell phone and wait for my boys to call me, to tell me they are on their way home. I anxiously await the buzz of our doorbell for their arrival. The sound for me means another safe journey through the streets successfully completed. Perhaps another good practical lesson learned for the future. Another day of skill enhanced by good luck.

Even after their school days are only distant memories, I will never stop worrying about my boys in the world.

Bertha E. Troncoso

I should have written this on Mother’s Day, but I was traveling. I did phone my mother, Bertha E. Troncoso, the E for Estela, on the day, and my wife Laura and I did send her flowers. My kids, Aaron and Isaac, created cards for Laura, our tradition of preferring handmade drawings to anything store-bought, and our family had a delicious brunch at G.W. Tavern in Washington Depot, Connecticut, the GW for George Washington. My mother has been my family heroine for a long time. Here are snippets of her story.

She was born in a rancho near Chihuahua City, and anytime I whined in El Paso about throwing out the trash or hosing down the trash bins she would remind me of not having shoes until she was ten-years-old. She had a beloved dog named Sultán, and a mother, my abuelita, who was tough and sometimes cruel. Doña Lola was a single mother before she married the genial man I would know as my grandfather. She survived the Mexican Revolution, machos in el rancho, and grinding poverty, so maybe my abuelita had reasons to be la generala.

My mother’s family moved to Juárez when she was a teenager, and Bertha Estela was so beautiful that she began to model clothes for local department stores. I have seen pictures of my mother in her wedding dress, particularly a close up my father has enshrined in our living room in Ysleta. My mother looks like a Mexican Jane Russell.

As my mother recalls, she met my father at a plaza in Juárez, and when they married she had saved more money than him. My father Rodolfo was a poor student studying agronomy, and my mother had a steady job as a saleswoman. When my father is feeling nostalgic, he retrieves old newspaper clippings of my mother modeling the latest post-war fashions.

I remember my mother being the strictest mom on San Lorenzo Avenue. Doña Bertha, as the neighbors called her, definitely inherited the steel from her mother. Mamá would never allow us to play at neighbors’ houses; our friends had to play at our house, under her watchful eye. And on weekends and after school, boy, did we work! Polishing furniture. Cleaning up after our dogs. Painting the house. Pulling weeds from outside our fence next to the canal. I was head of Sanitation. Our neighborhood, a colonia next to the Mexican-American border, had gangs, Barraca contra Calavera, and drugs, so in retrospect perhaps my mother had a point. As my friends in New York have said, I grew up in an “at-risk neighborhood,” and how you gain the drive and discipline to succeed with that beginning is to have parents who are tougher than the dirt at their feet.

As I grew older, I began to notice how intelligent my mother was, yet how she confined herself to the role of dutiful wife. Mamá still has dozens upon dozens of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory. Once, before I left for Harvard, I tried an experiment with her. I said a friend’s name, and she would give me their phone number. We got up to 36 before we stopped. She made thousands of dollars as a manic Avon lady in Ysleta, enough to buy a sleek Buick station wagon with a tinted moon roof, which I used on hot dates. My mother was and still is a voracious reader of everything from Selecciones to the Bible. I buy her a yearly subscription to The El Paso Times, which she reads from front to back.

Yet she was happy to first take care of my abuelitos when they became infirm and had to live with my parents. My mother fed and bathed them until they died in an apartment my father built in our backyard. Now that my father can shuffle but a few feet without his walker, my mother is taking care of him. They are the same age, but my father is weak and insular while my mother is indefatigable, funny, and quick to ask when my next book will be published.

I don’t know how she does it. Bertha Estela could have done anything she wanted, but she chose to take care of her family; she chose love and sacrifice over personal accolades and accomplishments. Now you know why she is my heroine. I hope I will always follow in her footsteps.