Viejitos

I have really excellent parents.  The only problem is that they drive a new Toyota Camry, and I’m worried it will be a death trap for them.  Of course, I had them take it to the dealer, and the dealer in El Paso said their car wasn’t part of the recall.  But do I trust the dealer or Toyota?  Didn’t I just see a report of a runaway Toyota (which had been given a clean bill of health by a dealer) that had to be stopped with the help of a California highway patrolman?  The driver was so shaken up by the near catastrophe that he needed an ambulance.  I can only imagine what would happen to my elderly parents in that situation.

As our parents grow older, we worry more about them.  My father and mother are both 75-years-old.  My father Rodolfo, who has diabetes, can’t walk more than ten feet without needing to sit down or to lean on his wheeled walker.  He is still ‘there’ mentally, but his body is betraying him.  My mother Bertha has become the boss of the family, and has always possessed an incredible memory.  She is the one who drives, buys the groceries, and keeps my father’s doctor appointments, with him in tow.  Without her, I don’t know what we would do.

Luckily, my brothers live in El Paso, and so they help my parents whenever there is a true emergency.  But in reality, my parents love to be self-sufficient, are beyond intrepid, and will only ask for help as a last resort.  Having unlimited long distance on my home phone helps me keep in touch with my parents.  I am the one who alerted them to the Toyota recall during its initial weeks, who told them to get their H1N1 shots, and who helped them with their taxes.  I also invest their savings (extremely conservatively, given my parents’ preferences).

It is possible I am just bothering them, when I call them once a week.  Perhaps they would have gotten their flu shots anyway.  But I do have lengthy conversations with them about all sorts of topics, which I think sometimes changes their outlook, decisions, or practices.  It is not out of guilt that I call them, and it is not because I believe my way on such-and-such a topic is the only way.  I have a brother who generally listens to me financially, and another one who does not.  (I won’t mention who’s who.)

But this ‘family exchange of information,’ I believe, is the root of good neighborhoods and the root of strengthening communities to do better for themselves.  I think we, particularly Latinos, should do more of it.  I hear on the Upper Westside, mothers and fathers having conversations about which schools are better and why, what scholarships are available, what’s a good summer camp for kids and why, what’s a reliable money market fund, what’s the best kind of mortgage and with which bank,  and so on.

There is probably always a tendency to go it alone, to stay within yourself, to provide for your family, and not to waste time giving advice to others who might not do the same for you.  It’s true: I don’t have all the time in the world, and I’m often in a hurry with six tasks on my to-do-list for the morning.  But if I can help, if someone asks me, and if that day I can offer a practical suggestion, I’ll do it.  I’m certainly more likely to help a friend than a stranger.  And I’m certainly more likely to help someone who I think is a good character, rather than someone who seems to smile at me only when he or she wants something.

So from faraway I try to be a good son.  I simply want my parents to be safe and happy.  Today this is what my excellent parents did for me.  My publisher sent hundreds of flyers to my house, for a reading I’ll be doing in El Paso on Friday.  I won’t be arriving until late Thursday night, so my father and mother volunteered to take the package of flyers to downtown El Paso, to the El Paso Public Library, where they will be distributed by those running the Juntos Art and Literature Festival.

Of course, my parents drove to the other side of town in their Toyota Camry.  Of course, my mother found parking (miracles of miracles!) in the heavily congested area around the library.  Of course, I worried every single minute.  Until she called me on the phone (as they dodged traffic on I-10 on the way back to Ysleta!) and said the lady who picked up the flyers was very nice to them.  I need to tell them about the El Paso City Council's new ban on using cell phones while driving.

Harold Hernesh

I am late sending out my holiday cards again, but I did remember to slip one under Harold Hernesh’s door.  Harold lives in our building on the Upper Westside, and our family, including my children Aaron and Isaac, befriended Harold when we rented a one-bedroom across the hall from him.  The following year we bought a co-op in the same building, but on another floor; Isaac was a mere three-weeks-old.  We have lived thirteen years in this building-qua-miniature-city of 350 apartments.

Harold, who is eighty-seven-years-old, always reminded me of my grandmother, Doña Dolores Rivero, a survivor of the Mexican Revolution.  Both were unbelievably tough, gruff and perpetually half-frowning.  Yet if you stopped to talk to them, and got to know them beyond their flinty exterior and garbled retorts, beyond their complaints about dogs or inept store clerks or greedy banks, these viejitos revealed a fearful vulnerability of what they had seen and what they had barely escaped.  Harold was eighteen when he was imprisoned at Dachau by the Nazis in 1941, for being a Jew.

I have given Harold copies of my books.  He doesn’t know it, but I made a version of Harold a hero in my story of violence and redemption, “Remembering Possibilities.”

Yesterday Harold stopped me in the lobby and handed me three lollipops, one for me and each of my children.  He always carries candy in his pockets, and hands it out to children, or their parents, every day.  I have a jar of Harold’s candies in the kitchen.  For years, Harold sat with his sister in the lobby of our building, chatting and introducing her to his friends.  But Harold’s sister died recently.  Harold is now, I think, alone.

So when he uncharacteristically asked me to follow him to his apartment, I said yes.  I had been to his place before, to fix his cable because he had forgotten he needed to have both the cable box on and the TV on channel 3 for the system to work.  Honestly, how do oldsters survive in this complex, idiosyncratic world?  I don’t know.  I battle with these things myself, and I can only imagine what shape I’ll be in when I’m eighty-seven.  Will I be able to manage an apartment by myself at that age?  Laura and I can barely do this now.

“The Lithuanians!  They were worst than the Nazis!” Harold blurted out, as he handed me a book to read, a story of another Holocaust survivor.  When Harold says words like ‘Lithuanians’ it sounds like ‘Lith-punians,’ and he half-spits every other word he says.  It’s possible Harold had a stroke a long time ago, but I’ve never asked him.  His blue-gray eyes wandered into the distance, and he recounted a story I had never heard before.  As he said, “The luk-thpiest daay of mai lifept.”  The luckiest day of his life.

A Nazi soldier and his Lithuanian collaborators had taken him to a field of mass graves, and ordered him to dig.  He would be digging not only his own grave, but the graves of other prisoners who would be shot that day.  His spade hit the ground, but it was frozen solid.  They beat him, and yelled at him to dig.  He smashed the shovel into the ground, but still the ground would not give.  They snatched the shovel away from him, and tried to dig themselves, to no avail.  “The luk-thpiest daay of mai lifept,” Harold repeated.  Bitterly cold and windy days like today, he said, have never bothered him on Broadway.

I don’t talk to Harold, nor did I ever bike fifteen miles as a kid to visit my abuelita on Saturdays, because I feel sorry for old people.  I listened to them, because I loved their stories.  I relished the bittersweet humor that came from hardscrabble or harrowing experiences.  They took me ‘there,’ wherever ‘there’ was, and I was captivated by and transported to another world.  For me, it was their gift.