Encouraging kids to read, encouraging kids to excel in school

This past week has been a momentous one for our family: our fourteen-year-old son has received letters of acceptance from the best public and private high schools in New York City. This has not happened because we are lucky or because we have a lot of money. Our son’s hard work and focus, as well our creating an environment at home for learning beyond school, have been keys to his success. I contrast my son’s school application experience with my own. I went to a poor high school on the Mexican-American border in which a majority of the students probably did not attend college, yet I was successful in El Paso and later at Harvard and Yale because of similar practices at home. How can we encourage our kids to excel in school? This is what I have learned from my parents, and as a parent.

Read to your children early, and regularly, when your kids can’t even walk across the living room floor. Reading to very young children establishes an emotional bond with reading, and with you, a bond they want to recreate as they get older. Laura and I read to both of our sons every night, for about half an hour each, for years. Not surprisingly, both our sons are voracious readers, reading about two or three books a week. We read, they watch us read, we’ve read with them, we buy books and regularly visit libraries, and we limit TV time. All these things create an environment of reading for recreation, to explore ideas, to revel in the magic of storytelling.

Give your children the space and attention to follow their intellectual interests. I loved creating gadgets and traps as a kid in Ysleta, all manner of Rube Goldberg machines. My father allowed me to use his tool shed, to experiment with his construction materials, to bring back ‘junk’ from the dump, which for me was treasure. He taught me how to use his tools; he taught me how to use a LeRoy for drafting when I expressed an interest in his work. Similarly my younger son loves to build, and we often cart old computers, monitors, and fax machines we find on the street for my son to create something new with them. It is about paying attention to what your child is interested in, and giving him or her the space and opportunity to follow that interest.

Teach your child the value of hard work and limits. This was what I told my kids. ‘As long as you do well in school, you have your freedom, your TV time, your time on the computer. But if you are not finishing your homework on time, and finishing it well, then I will be on you like a rash.’ Now I rarely have to tell them anything, because we made it a practice for them to finish their homework first, right after school, before they turn on the TV, have a playdate, or just relax. It was a work habit that became their habit over time. I do not expect them to be perfect; I just want them to live up to their potential. It is gratifying to see the results, and how they have internalized doing well in school for their benefit, and not for mine.

Love your kids, and listen to them carefully. Remember, it is about time with them, and guiding them to become the best person they want to be, and not about money or fancy trips or false accolades. Sometimes I have to tease out of my children an issue that is bothering them. At other times I see an issue, overscheduling for example, that they are grappling with, but have not yet identified. You sit down and talk to them, not to tell them what to do, but to brainstorm the problem, to offer possible solutions, to get them to resolve the problem in a way that works for them. Just letting them know that they are not alone and that they can bring problems to you to discuss is already a victory in your relationship with your child. It is hard work and time-consuming, and I have been humbled repeatedly by the process. But I adapt and learn, and I always keep trying to be a better father.

Marie Ponsot

I returned from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Annual Conference in Chicago this weekend inspired by the most unlikeliest of writers: Marie Ponsot, a poet. I do not write poetry, but I do care about the role of the writer in the world and the craft of writing. I worry that my sense of how and why I write is antiquated, to help others into explorations of ideas often unmarketable and unusual. As a contrarian, a loner, and an Aristotlean, is there still a place for me?

In the panel, “The Duty of a Writer,” Marie Ponsot said simply, “The duty of a poet is to write poetry.” The work of writing defines a poet, she said. The struggle to write a poem. The action of writing a poem. Not the thought, nor the hope of writing poetry. “The mastery of skill is the mastery of oneself.” This mastery is internal; it is inexpensive; it is ongoing. Above all, this is a practical mastery. To listen is one of the most important skills a writer must cultivate; to listen in a world full of noises and phenomena is difficult. The act of work sharpens and deepens the writer’s listening skills. I am paraphrasing Ponsot’s words, leaving out so much, and perhaps distorting her at once complicated and simple message.

To improve as a writer, I have tried to slow down my thoughts, and my fingers, to ponder words and sentences before they become entities on the page. Every writer, I believe, must work against his or her weaknesses. Mine are that I write too fast and too colloquially. I can create a story (plot plot plot!), yet I often find the care missing from my words. I do often ‘see’ beyond what others see: I read as much philosophy as literature and I do not care for the crowd. But often that ‘sight’ is not translated into the words that reveal a new world on the page. I am trying to improve.

In a recent essay, “Trapped,” I wrote about how my body and its “loin energy” at once give me an advantage and a disadvantage. I love to work; the more I work, the more I can work. Yet this nervousness, or incessant thinking and doing and wanting to do, hampers my listening. To write better, I need to quiet myself. Reading poetry and studying the mechanics of poetry and listening to poets have helped me to counter my weaknesses as a prose writer.

I returned from Chicago, and discovered that I already knew Marie Ponsot’s work. Scott Hightower, another poet-teacher, had long ago recommended Beat Not the Poor Desk, by Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Deen. This is the best book on teaching writing I have ever read, and I had forgotten the authors but remembered the impact this book had on my work years ago. Without friends like Scott and teachers like Marie Ponsot, where would I be? These good writers are good people who care to teach.

Incidentally, I attended another panel, “Big House/Small House,” with LeAnne Howe, Rilla Askew, Tracy Daugherty, Molly Giles, and Allen Wier. This was also, in my opinion, another excellent panel at the AWP. In particular, Tracy Daugherty’s thoughtful reflections on the right expectations of literary writers for their careers, their relationship with an editor, and ‘what should be enough for the good writer’ brought me back again to how and why good words on the page matter most of all. I will be in Denver next year, again to listen and improve.

Michael Phelps and the Violence in Mexico: Connect the Dots

Recently my parents in El Paso, Texas called me and recounted another series of decapitations in Juárez, Mexico, their hometown, a place that has become a no-man's land of murder and mayhem. Drug cartels battle the Mexican government mano-a-mano, with thousands dead. Meanwhile, Michael Phelps is pictured inhaling from a bong in South Carolina, Whoopi Goldberg proudly admits, to audience cheers, that she has smoked weed and demands that we leave Phelps alone, and the Daily Show's Jon Stewart jokes repeatedly about bongs and marijuana, making it oh-so-cool to light up. I wonder if anyone will ever connect the dots.

The United States has one of the highest percentages of pot smokers in the world, and our popular culture winks at drug use and even glorifies it. Meanwhile, marijuana is the most important cash crop for Mexican drug cartels, and Mexicans die because of our voracious appetite for drugs. I am waiting for Lou Dobbs to do one hundred shows on America's responsibility for the murderous disaster in Mexico; I am waiting for Campbell Brown to do a series on how our red, white, and blue practices, like our drug use, cripple Third World countries. Wealthy America has a bong party, but the poor outside our borders pay for it, in blood. On our direct responsibility for the violence in Mexico, the United States is all bias, all bull.

I have no love for the often corrupt Mexican government. I have no love for a society that seems permanently stratified to engorge the richest of the rich while the best hope for the poor is often to cross to el otro lado. Indeed, my parents' founding myth, why they left Juárez in the 1950's to become American citizens, is about the lack of economic opportunities in Mexico, the need to pay bosses to get and keep a job, and my mother's still fervent American idealism.

We just finished getting rid of an American president who seemed to lack any instinct for self-reflection and adaptation to the circumstances, but did this malady infect much of the country as well? We are culpable for the violence in Mexico. True, we are not decapitating police officers and kidnapping citizens to intimidate the Mexican government. But America's drug use is why this is happening south of our border. We are the prize. Our money is the prize. We want those drugs, and whoever gets to sell us those drugs wins billions of dollars. What strange mass psychosis allows many in the United States to be shocked shocked about the grisly details in Mexico, while millions of our children inhale?

Recently, the El Paso City Council took up the issue of whether to encourage a national debate to legalize drug use. Just to debate the issue, not to favor legalization. It was a desperation move, in part because those in Washington, D. C. and New York City do not see, across a flimsy border fence, the war zone that has become Juárez. Of course, that stalwart of self-reflection, Lou Dobbs, attacked the city council for encouraging drug use. But that knee-jerk response is symptomatic of our delusion: we rarely have meaningful debates that lead to honest self-reflection about the consequences of what we do when it comes to Mexico.

I do not favor legalizing drugs. I do not favor another war on drugs. I do favor being responsible for what I do. I favor fighting to be critically self-reflective, even when my psyche's instinct is to defend and promote itself at all costs. We as a country have probably the most important invisible hand in the violence in Mexico. Yet we don't readily and repeatedly admit it. As long as we don't, we will never come close to any solution. True, we will have great political theater, and we will lead comfortable, self-satisfied lives about how cool we can be, while reveling in schadenfreude on Mexico. But the United States will have lost many opportunities to avert a future disaster that will assuredly come across our borders to haunt us.

A Cool February Night

Tonight inspires me. It is the first Monday in February, and the weather has turned suddenly mild. Winter, for a brief day, seems all so suddenly in the past in Manhattan, and spring whispers from this cool breeze off the Hudson River. I have been sheltered against the bitter cold for too long; I have drunk, like a magic elixir, this comely breeze on the sidewalk at night. I love the night. I love a night like tonight. I wish the world were made of only nights like these.

I was wondering how living in crazy, expensive Manhattan has affected me as a writer, as an investor, as a father, as a husband. I was wondering about John Updike, and how he really didn’t like New York City that much, even as he wrote hundreds of stories and essays and reviews for the New Yorker. Updike preferred rural Massachusetts, and I can understand why. It is difficult to keep the City at bay, to gather that peace, simply to stop all the business of the city, its pressures, and its people from dominating your psyche. A night like tonight, however, reminds you that it is possible to find that special time to work even in this City.

I remember when I lived in Ysleta, less than a mile from the Mexican-American border, that I would sneak out of the bed, as a child, to roam at night. I mean at night night, when it’s three in the morning, and not a car is on the street, not a whisper can be heard behind closed doors, not a single dog is awake to bark at the moon. Just like tonight, I would listen. I didn’t expect ghosts. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t jump at odd sounds. I just listened, and my mind would feel a presence (this mirror of the self?), and I was enthralled.

The nature in front of me, known and not quite known in the dark, elicited my attention, invoked its mystery, and called me to it. In the harshness of the day, the rooms in Ysleta, just like in Manhattan, seemed all so boring. But at night, suddenly, the chairs, a river’s glimmer through a window, the sky darkly gray, with stars, all of it had life. What do we lose when everything is all too clear in our heads, all too understood? Where is imagination when we are seduced to think that all there is is only what can we can see?

I love the night, because it brings me back to my self. I love this Manhattan night, because it allows me to soar, and to work, and to try something I could never do during the day, something I might keep to myself as that which is unknown, yet still alluring. This night is full of wonder.

I almost feel as if I’m in another favorite place, the middle of the forest of the Litchfield hills. In another night night, amid hundreds of miles of maples and oaks and mountain laurel, with these breezes that slice like razors at your skin. We go there, too, to amble along country roads, but not nearly enough as I want, and perhaps Updike was right about living away from what is all-too-obvious, all-too-loud.

The night night brings me back to a recurrent dream, a dream I have not had for years, but which would rarely leave me in Ysleta. I am sitting on a beam, something that perhaps feels like a beam, yet I cannot see it. Clouds surround me. Clouds or a mist. And I am falling. First one way. Then the other. It is the falling, that thrills me. I am falling into the night, and I am there to feel the darkness as it touches my skin.

Rewriting

I am in the process of rewriting a new novel. I do not like to talk about my work before I feel it is finished, and I won’t talk about the substance of this novel here either. But I do want to explore this process of rewriting, which I have found over the years to be the most difficult as a writer. I rarely lack ideas. I am always writing something, even it is only in my head. I tend to think long and hard before I put pencil to paper, or as I do now, before my fingertips dance over the delicate keys of my black MacBook.

So ideas come easily. Writing a draft of a story or a scene comes easily, for once I start writing I have a good sense of where I am going. Often I surprise myself, or the characters and their situations surprise me, and I am taken somewhere else. But again, that’s fine, and I try to be open to that possibility.

With my first novel, I was not completely satisfied with the result. Some of this was my fault, and some of it wasn’t. I have always loved the headlong, aggressive discussion of philosophical ideas, in philosophical seminars, and at the time of my first novel I was still enraptured by that style of no-holds-barred thinking. Ideas, and the truth-seeking of philosophical thinking, were preeminent in my mind over character and story. What I wrote was a philosophical novel with a mystery at its center, and in retrospect character and story were sometimes sacrificed for the exploration of ideas. The editor (contracted by the publisher) also wanted to change the novel to become primarily a mystery, and only secondarily a philosophical novel. I chafed at his suggestions, yet I read what he said I should change. In a hasty month, which is all the time I had from my publisher, I ‘rewrote’ the novel, half-listening to what had been suggested, angry at being misunderstood, thrilled to have my first novel under contract, ignorant of what it was to rewrite a literary work.

I am still not sure I know what it is to rewrite a novel, but I took it upon myself to try to learn after that unsatisfying process with my first novel. I asked fellow writers about their process of rewriting; I read many books on rewriting, and perhaps the best was The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell; most importantly, as I wrote new work I tried different ways to give myself a new, different perspective on what I was writing. Here are some of the lessons I learned.

First, I learned never to rush the work to publication, even if the publisher is clamoring for it. Take the time to leave the work alone, to do something else, and to come back to it with perhaps a more critical eye. Second, change the physicality of your writing process to gain a new perspective on your work. Write in pencil. Then write on the computer. See how that forces you to consider everything from your sentence structure to the flow of your story. Also, once you have a draft on your computer, print it, and re-enter it again as a new computer file, to force yourself to consider whether each word, each paragraph should be in your story.

Third, read poetry, and study the mechanics of poetry. There is nothing better for hearing the sounds and rhythms of your work, for appreciating a precise metaphor, and for choosing just the right word or phrase, than understanding a bit of poetry. Fourth, give your draft to friendly, willing strangers who love to read. Ask them not to pat you on the back, and make sure you tell them you mean it. Have a variety of people read and comment on your work. And listen, and digest the comments, and listen again to what your first readers have said. Whatever stays in your mind --whatever is a criticism you perhaps already possessed in your subconscious, yet now that comment exists in black and white from your reader-- that is what you should begin to fix.

Fifth, and finally, open yourself up, and don’t be so authoritarian, even if you have singular ideas. Master the art of rewriting, and you will be thrilled with what you can achieve. The work, the story, not you, nor your ego, is what should always matter.

The Latino Dream With Obama

Tomorrow seems a new beginning with Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, and I am thrilled to be a witness and supporter to this change for our country. We are still in the dark days of our financial disaster and the unnecessary military quagmire of Iraq. Another unforeseen terrorist attack could worsen the defensiveness and cultural xenophobia too easily exploited by politicians. We have taken political steps to be more inclusive, to answer our problems differently, with a focus on those at the bottom and middle rungs of society, and to value competence over cronyism. I am hopeful we will succeed, yet I know we do not control our fate entirely: terrorists could still attack us, and immediately change the political debates in this country; foreign creditors own hundreds of billions of dollars of American debt, and their willingness to do so may waver in the future, with catastrophic consequences for the dollar, inflation, and interest rates.

Despite this guarded hope for the Obama presidency, I have also gotten the sense, by watching the news today and reading the newspapers, that Latinos are at the periphery of this change, bit players aboard the narrative train about what an Obama presidency means for the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream. Much of this is understandable: Obama is a self-identified African-American, even though his mother was white and his father was black; the majority of the American electorate voted for Obama as the better candidate who also happened to be black; the civil rights struggle embodied by MLK was primarily to redress the modern consequences of American slavery, including racism, segregation, and the political and economic disenfranchisement of blacks. Cesar Chávez marched and fought for the farmworkers along with Robert Kennedy, yet this Chicano and Mexicano narrative is often given short shrift in official accounts of the civil rights era. Were Latinos bit players to begin with? Perhaps in the 1960’s. But the world has changed, for better and for worse for Latinos.

We have become the largest minority in this country, with the highest growth rate of any ethnic group. Yet Latinos are Cubanos, Mexicanos, Dominicanos, Puertorriqueños, Centroamericanos, not a homogeneous voting bloc, not a race, but a hodgepodge group united by an ancestral Spanish from Latin America. We are closer to our homelands than, say, the English or Irish or Italian immigrants who came before us. Yet this proximity opens up the possibility of living in a nether world, between Spanish and English, between going back ‘home’ and making the United States your home, between identifying with the new Latino immigrant and thinking this immigrant is an alien. Is this nether world better than having a clean break in the New World with your ancestral past? That is an open question not easily answered by anyone.

The biggest change for Latinos today is that they, or at least Latino undocumented workers, became the political pariahs in the hate-filled rhetoric after 9/11. The drug violence and political instability in Mexico and America’s voracious drug habit will only mean the potential for more immigrants from the South, legal and illegal, will remain high for years to come. The hope with Obama is that he will give us a more complex, and more humane, understanding of the undocumented worker. The hope is that he will not scapegoat the weak, even during an economic depression or even after a terrorist attack. The hope is that he will include those who are outsiders, and attempt to help them become part of the American Dream, to help them integrate successfully into our culture, and to welcome the positive changes these newcomers bring to America today. For Latinos, we need to work to help ourselves, too.

Barack Obama is indeed not the grandson nor the great-grandson of slaves: he is the son of an immigrant. That perhaps is not part of the narrative train that has been fueled by the media or even by those who support him. But my suspicion, after I heard Obama’s comments on the immigration debate a few months ago, is that he understands what it is to be an outsider, a person who needs to define himself differently from established traditions, someone in between, a compromise, a bridge to where we want to be.

Killing Latinos in New York

This week The New York Times ran a front page story on Marcelo Lucero, an Equadorean immigrant who was stabbed to death in November by young thugs who shouted anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic slurs: Latinos Recall Pattern of Attacks Before Killing. The news story was about the long-standing pattern of hate in the Long Island town of Patchogue, a pattern that was news to the police. The mayor of Patchogue said that the immigration debate painted undocumented immigrants as “animals,” as outsiders who are “expendable.” Immigrants who have brought life back to Patchogue’s Main Street are instead blamed for cutbacks in schools, for crime, for bringing an alien culture and language to New York. One of the youths (all have pleaded not guilty) told authorities that he only went out “beaner hopping” once a week.

The mayor’s point belies the protestations of anti-immigrant talking heads and political demagogues, that they are attacking only illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants, that they are attacking “those who break our country’s laws,” not Latinos in particular. When you obsessively focus on every crime by an undocumented worker, invariably from Mexico, when you wave the flag and accuse immigrants of taking jobs from ‘real Americans’ to exploit economic fears, when you characterize someone who is darker than you and speaks another language as sub-human, the thug on the street with a knife in his hand and with hatred in his heart will not ask first to see your Green Card. He will stab you, and he may not even bother to ask questions later. That’s the reality. Our hateful environment encourages hateful, thoughtless acts.

‘It is okay to kill a person who shouldn’t be here. It is okay to kill someone who does not speak English. It is okay to kill the kind of person whom my mother and father hate at the dinner table. It is okay to kill someone who sounds like the person the red-faced Lou Dobbs is vilifying on CNN every night. No one wants that kind of person here in the United States, I am doing the country a favor, and I will be having some fun while I’m at it, by getting rid of this vermin.’ How long will we allow these poisonous thoughts to seep into American minds? Shall we wait for more killings of Latinos before we stand up against this hate?

The American hypocrisy on illegal immigration is stunning on so many levels. We profit from undocumented immigrants every day. With cheaper food at our tables. With apartment buildings and houses built by these workers. With nannies who take care of our children. American companies are richer because of the work of undocumented immigrants: food producers, home builders, construction companies, restaurants, bakeries. Perhaps we want to keep these immigrants in their shadowy, defenseless status. ‘Make money off of them, and kick them in ass, or kick them out when we’ve finished using them,’ that seems to be the cruel new American credo.

This hypocrisy on illegal immigration extends beyond those in ‘white’ America, descendants of English, Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants who made their way to the New World by hook or by crook. This hypocrisy extends to some Latinos who have made it here, and want to close the doors to any more newcomers. It extends to some African-Americans who claim a privileged minority status, and so don’t see why any benefits of the civil rights movement should be given to those who weren’t forced to the New World as slaves.

This has never been, and never will be, a black and white issue. We should ask and argue for a return to working out the complex problem of immigration humanely and rationally. We should decry those who use incendiary rhetoric on immigration to climb atop the backs of the weak, for higher ratings or for more votes. We are better than that. Perhaps it is too much to ask of human beings, to see if they don’t recognize that poor, new outsider as someone they once were, as someone who their grandfather or grandmother might have been in another time. It is too much to ask, but we should nevertheless keep asking for America to have an open mind, if we are to keep the best traditions of the New World alive.

Human Nature and the Failure of Our Institutions

We start the New Year hopeful that it will be better than last year, but here is a suggestion: let’s go beyond ‘hope’ to examine one of the many things that went wrong in 2008, particularly in the financial sector, and how we can begin to fix the problems.

One of the fundamental, recurring problems, as I see it, is the assumption that human beings will act for their benefit and the benefit of others if they are acting out of self-interest. A corollary of this mistaken assumption is that people regulate each other, or that the market disciplines itself, and so the less interference you have in the marketplace, the better for everybody around.

Yet when investment banks were allowed to take on unprecedented debt, in 2004, not only did they do so, but they did it to the detriment of their shareholders. Again, when mortgage brokers were allowed to peddle subprime mortgages to those who did not understand them, or who were themselves riding the real-estate boom, on no or shaky documentation, these brokers did it enthusiastically. When politicians were allowed to accept millions from banks, brokers, and other financiers, to promote the “American Dream” of owning a home, these politicians took the money and ran to their bully pulpits to hawk what became an American Nightmare. When Henry Paulson was given $350 billion, with little strings attached from Congress, guess what Mr. Paulson did? Here a clue: he didn’t do what he said he would do, the banks that received this money kept it, and we are no closer to helping los de abajo, those at the bottom of the heap.

The Securities and Exchange Commission failed us. The Federal Reserve failed us. The United States Congress failed us. The President failed us. Many of our banks failed us. Mutual funds failed us, for charging us too much for mediocre returns. Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s failed us, for not rating risk the way they should have, for accepting money from the very institutions they were rating. Even the media failed us. Today, newspapers and TV shows are doing double time to expose the shenanigans which led to the debacle of 2008, but during the boom most of them were cheerleaders for the financial sector, for promoting mortgages to people who couldn’t pay them, for innocuous, celebrity-obsessed, simplistic reporting that eschews complexity, thoughtfulness, and precise criticism. The media were giving us the lowest common denominator, what produced the most ratings, and so in the end we failed ourselves, for not demanding something better when it mattered most, before 2008.

Human beings will take advantage of a situation, if they can profit from it, and if they don’t see it will affect others terribly and immediately, and if they are allowed to do so. So many large and small actors in our debacle performed in this way: why even think about the long-term, or the big picture, if I can get away with it, and if it brings me benefit, and if it’s strictly legal? Of course, millions of these selfish decisions, and a few of these selfish decisions worth billions of dollars, did corrode our general welfare, did damage our financial sector, and are now giving the world pause about whether they should keep lending us billions to keep us afloat.

The point is not to regulate for the sake of regulation, or to assume government will be immune from its own special brand of corruption. It won’t. But there is a crying need for common sense legislation or regulation that protects us from our own excesses, that forces upon us a sense of the general, long-term financial welfare of our country, that safeguards the consumer from predators, that encourages and funds the vigorous investigation of the powerful and well-connected to keep them honest, even when they claim nothing is wrong. Let’s not hope people do the right thing; let’s make sure of it.

Sanibel Island

I am on vacation on Florida’s Sanibel Island for one week. It is a trip we always take after visiting my family in El Paso, and it is a trip that Laura’s family has been taking for over forty years. With champagne held high in my plastic cup, I have celebrated only eighteen New Years in Sanibel, so I am a relative newcomer to this family tradition. Yet over the years, Sanibel has truly become my family tradition as well. Laura, Aaron, and Isaac could not live without our spending time together on this island, and neither could I.

How do you metamorphose from an outsider, cautious and even suspicious of the family you are adopting by marriage, to an insider, a member of the family, someone who belongs in the most intimate moments an extended family can share? I think one answer to this question is persistence. If you don’t leave, if members of your wife’s family see you act and react in many different situations, and grow to respect how you do things, what you think, how you hold your own in an argument, then perhaps over many years they begin to accept you.

For in Sanibel, I was adopting my wife’s Jewish family. I remember my first year in Sanibel; it was a bit overwhelming. It is basically a hothouse, in which Laura’s parents, sister, brother, aunt, and cousins, and their extended families, are all in adjacent rooms at a small hotel on the beach, many often sitting together at the pool, or barging in and out of your room to make dinner plans. Each night we take turns cooking dinner in our rooms, which are meant for two adults, but into which we drag chairs and extra tables and cram as many as eighteen people for a free-for-all dining experience. Grandparents, babies, children, teenagers, middle-aged adults. In Sanibel you press the flesh to the max, and there is no place to hide.

Over the years, as I grew to know the different personalities in my wife’s family, as some became truly good friends, I became more relaxed about going to Sanibel. Everybody had successes and failures over the years, just as we did. We gossiped about each other, we asked for advice, and we argued politics, sometimes bitterly. Often old family squabbles, which predated my arrival into the Sanibel scene, erupted out of nowhere. Yet every year, almost everybody returned to Sanibel. This year we have a full house.

Is this a family then? When you don’t leave whom you are with, even after the bitterest of fights, or even after your fortunes may have diverged dramatically over the many long roads of the past? You could ask why do we return here, why with these people? No doubt, there are selfish reasons to return to Sanibel: the gorgeous beaches, magnificent shelling, biking to Captiva, the simple pleasure of walking on the white sand at dawn.

But no, those are not the reasons why I come back. I come back to remember who I am; I come back to see who I might be; I come back to be with the people I miss all year. Yes, sometimes a few of them rub me the wrong way, but not always. I myself, as my wife has often reminded me, possess a prickly pear cactus of a personality, and so perhaps I am lucky to have found this family whose appearance may seem forbidding, but whose insides contain the sweetest of rewards.

An Ysleta Christmas

I arrived in El Paso, Texas yesterday, my hometown. For Christmas. To visit with my mother, and to see my brothers and their kids. Laura and my kids have always relished this holiday visit, a trek we have made since we have been married. It releases Laura's inner shopper, and for a week before Christmas she gets to pump prime the economy at El Paso’s bustling malls. Aaron and Isaac love their cousins --they are similar ages-- and they have spent the first two days playing New Yorkers against Texans (their version of Cowboys and Indians) and exploring the irrigation canal behind my parents’ house.

For the past three years, however, this visit has been an awkward one for me. Three Christmases ago, I had a vicious argument with my father, ostensibly over something trivial, but in reality over old, deep resentments and that bitterness that can sometimes build between a prideful and headstrong father and a son with the same blood in his veins. For three years, my father would not speak to me whenever I called from New York. Instead, at the moment he heard my voice, he would pass the phone to my mother. For three years, even after I apologized for my harsh words to him, my father would not forgive me, and he would not say hello or goodbye whenever I saw him at Christmastime.

I thought about so many things during those three years. I thought about the argument, and why it happened, and even wrote an essay about it, which I called, “This Wicked Patch of Dust.” I thought about how I had hated my father’s macho personality as a child, his domineering control over my mother throughout the years, his bad decisions made by fiat. I thought about how I hated my own temper, and why I did not roll my eyes behind my father’s back, as my brothers did, but instead confronted my father, challenging him to a fight. I thought about how my mother agonized over our family's rift, my mother the avid reader, my mother who is relentlessly curious about the world, my mother whom I have always believed deserves to stop sacrificing for others, and do more for herself. I thought about my father’s deteriorating body, how he cannot walk more than six feet at a time and is now totally dependent on my mother, and how he cannot stand to be so weak when throughout his life he was indefatigably strong.

Indeed, my father was a good father. Yes, he was tough and occasionally mean. But he did push us to work hard for our family, for ourselves. In Ysleta, my father was there to help me make posters when I ran for Sophomore Class President in high school, to fashion an intricate puppet theater for a play I wrote for an English class, and to teach me how to handle the stick shift of our Volkswagen Beetle. He had to compromise in his life, primarily by adopting a country in which he could speak the language, but with an accent that still embarrasses him. My father truly loved Mexico, but he knew his family would have a better life in the United States. He gained the possibility of a better future, but he relinquished his voice. He cannot stand how his beloved hometown of Juarez, which he visited with my mother every week for decades, has descended into an orgy of drug violence in 2008. Their loss: they have not crossed the border all year.

So as Laura, Aaron, Isaac, and I arrived in Ysleta yesterday, I expected, again, just to make the best of another awkward Christmas. But my father surprised me. As soon as I stumbled through the door with suitcases in both hands, he reached up from his chair --he can’t easily stand without his walker anymore-- and hugged me. At the kitchen table, we talked for a precious forty-five minutes, exchanging news, before I finished bringing in our luggage. I thought perhaps this was a first-day aberration, a momentarily lapse in his anger at his prodigal son. But today, again, my father and I have talked, and we have even laughed together, and although we have not yet uttered the words to each other, we have finally forgiven each other for being Troncosos.