Latino Days of the Dead Musings
The Day of the Dead, and other days of Death, awakened in me a sense of Death, as a spiritual presence.
Death can be present and color the world. Then, we are in Death’s world for a while.
Death in this way is a godhead, or “of a god,” or part of God, or like a santos (saint). Death as its own day, of course. So it gets special offerings as it manifests in different forms. The forms are, that death stands related to loved ones who have passed. But the dead, and Death, appear on other days.
When Death is present in this way– you do your best to go on. You do what you must. You learn what the word “must” really means. In a way: only in Death’s presence, do you really understand “must,” and family, honor, commitment, love.
This is a very old idea, and sentiment. We should be proud to feel its weight in our lives.
The Greek philosophers thought that to have any of the virtues, you have to have all of them. I say, to have any of them, you have to also have, a sense of Death.
Latino Dichos with Teeth
When I was a kid, I’d get guidance in sayings like, “Respect your elders.” A dicho (literally “a thing said”) get issued in a moment that holds a point you should see, because the point’s staring you in the face. Dichos have practical consequences for latinos, or rather, point out practical consequences of things we should see.
So when Mom in the lazy late 70s in the cool windy Bay Area, back when Dad was working far away in dry hot Davis, planned to go all the way to pinche Richmond to visit wrinkled, gravelly-voiced Aunt Grace. Sure, you’re the only one who can read maps, but Mom knows the way now. It’s not that. Mostly you go because “elders have things to teach us.”
You pay special attention as a Mexican-American to “what’s being lost,” so you don’t lose it. The world turns, as it must. But then our view of the sky changes, and then you might lose sight of important sky things. Our job is to track vanishing sky treasures and keep them in view they sink low in the horizon. The world and its sky lack labels that say, “This is treasure, and that is caca.” So our elders put on the labels. Dichos are labels.
You also “respect your elders” because they’ve earned our attention and our time. Because of “what they’ve been through,” namely, “the shit life dishes out” as Mom would say.
(Mexican moms and aunts and grandmothers and all, are very proper. But they say “shit” from time to time, even though we aren’t supposed to. This doesn’t seem strange to me.)
Richmond: Barrios, Latino and Black
So when Mom asks you, you go to Richmond and don’t even bother to try to get out of it, or you might get a dicho and a bunch of other quotable things, and a look that is not a mal ojo but does give you mild symptoms. Yet I’d resist and dread these inevitable trips before we left, because they were so boring and in bits, very strange.
Past great pink San Quentin Prison, we’d drive. Dad would call it “the Q”. Dad had been a deputy DA long ago and respected such things as prisons. He was, as I say, all week working far away up in Davis at the University, when we’d visit his Aunt Grace. We’d cross the Richmond Bridge in our chartreuse Ford LTD sedan (which I thought of as a very Anglo color because it was, pale, not very saturated, yet somehow fancy). The very deep blue water of the Bay would glimmer below. Later, I learned you call that color Amalfi, after the area where the Mediterranean is that color, so now I know it’s an impressive color to a lot of people, not just kids. Architects call for it on doors and “punch” in fancy houses.
Past the neighborhoods of around downtown Richmond we’d ride, the black barrio which lay nestled among hills like my old barrio. I always wanted to stop and visit it, even though the newspapers always reported “shootings” there. We never seemed to have the time to stop. We would just drive past it to my tia’s latino part of Richmond, to a mid-century subdivision with small houses on a quiet street.
Aunt Grace
Grace was my late grandfather’s sister-in-law, my late grandmother’s sister on my Dad’s side. After my grandfather’s beloved, beautiful wife died young, leaving him with five children, and before he drank himself to death from grief, both he and his kids had become close with her. My long lost-young grandmother looks morena in one picture we have of her, and she’s sunny and happy. Grace was prieta, very dark, by blood very india, which to us, entitled her to extra respect on account of the older things she knew, and the worse shit she’d been through.
She was tiny but sturdy, dense like granite, and grave. Her voice was gravely and deep from years of smoking and suffering, and an accent in English that was very slight but with a strong cadence, a wavy Norteño lilt. She wobbled when walked, but like a weeble, but always righted herself and never fell down.
We’d sit for hours at her formica dining room table, my mom and she and I. She would rub her hands together constantly, from time to time rubbing some ointment on them, complaining of her arthritis.
My tia— as we all called her, though to us she was our great aunt– had a strangely, no, insanely close connection to and communication with her two “tea pot” poodles Bee-bee, and Tyke.
Latino Dogs
Grace bought Bee Bee as a shelter dog, to keep Tyke company. When something startled Bee Bee, and it didn’t take much, she’d shake. At such times, Aunt Grace would tell Tyke to go over and sit by her. He would. Or when asked, Tyke would go find Bee Bee in the house and bring her to us. Tyke would also take Aunt Grace’s directions to stop eating and sit, if he was eating too fast, so he and Bee Bee could finish together. If Tyke misbehaved and Bee Bee was around, Grace would noticeably quiet her voice and take it easy on him, lest Bee Bee begin to cower during a severe remonstrance.
On command, Tyke would bring my aunt her Rolaids, or her arthritis cream from her purse, or scratch her back. (That little spectacle was my favorite– he would rapidly dog paddle while standing on his hind legs in her chair.) If the sought item was not in her purse, he’d go to their drawer and bark at it. Aunt Grace would apologize and waddle over to get the sought item herself.
If Tyke ever started to burp, Aunt Grace knew he’d gotten into the RolAids.
“Tyke! Have you been eating my Rol-aits?”
He’d hang his head low.
“Tyke, you’re a bad do-k.” The short “o” would hang in the air, followed by the hard “k”– a part of the calo.
He’d look up sheepishly.
“You know you’re not supposed to eat my Rol- Aits!”
He’d look side to side, then down, then up as she remonstrated.
It was queer, these conversations– how he’d act like a person, responding with a new facial gesture or movement each time she spoke. But after a while of good talkings-to, my own dog Jay Jay– also a tea-pot poodle– began to do this, too. Or maybe I just began to notice it better.
Aunt Grace explained when I asked, “You get the dogs young from a good home and start talking to them. Let them know you expect them to understand. Be strict with them always, like they’re children not well-raised, and they’ll be fine.” By “fine,” she meant: weirdly human, very sensitive, communicative, and a blast to watch do tricks that you don’t see in a Benji move.
Molcajete Death Day Tales
We’d sit at the formica table for hours, mostly in silence, Tyke at our feet on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Bee Bee would sit nearby, but not under the table, because she didn’t like feet. Daily, Aunt Grace would bring her molcajete to the table and grind a tiny, dried red chili, a piquin or a japones, I’m not sure which, hot ones though, into dust, seeds and all. She’d add vinegar, and make a bright red chili that was impossibly, painfully hot. It drove needles into your tongue. But the flavor!
She’d pair it with a stack of flour tortillas she’d hand make– her tribe was from the North– setting them in a great stack, impossible round, though with scalloped edges. I’d put butter and a little chili on them. The sweetness of the butter, nuttiness of the flour, danced with the endless complex flavors from the chili, and underneath, the sensation of tongue-knives.
From her, and of course my mom, and even my Dad with his green chili, I learned how hard work spent on simple foods gave you the Sublime in all its complexity, and that’s all you need really, and it’s better than “fancy.”
From time to time, Tia told tales of life. Dark stories of children taken to the Indian school from their mother, who died in an insane asylum they’d locked her up, because she’d kept going to Florida to try to break them out and take them back. Aunt Grace told this story in hushed tones after I’d left the kitchen sometimes out of boredom. I’d overhear it and come back to the table and she’d stop telling it. But since she told it over and over, eventually, I heard the whole thing.
Lost Tribe
It would have taken only a moment, and it likely meant nothing to her but words, for me to ask “what Tribe?”
Now, I wish I knew. There are two or three, from the area where her mother grew up. Now, my mom can’t recall. My dad and the others are all dead and gone. My genetic history is vague on this.
Things lost, that slip away as the world turns.
She’d tell her story of the Indian school gravely, then simply go on eating, simply laying it out there. This is life. It has injustice in it.
It also has Death.
Dead Days Creeps out Dogs
Grace’s husband had died in a motorcycle accident. He was killed instantly, out riding alone. On some pretext or other, in the afternoon like some strange clockwork, tia would take me out her detached white clapboard garage to visit the helmet he’d had with him when he died. Tyke and Bee Bee would follow her out as they did everywhere, but Tyke would stop when he saw where she was going– though he otherwise followed her anywhere– and he’d lead Bee Bee back to the porch where they would sit, and wait, and watch.
It was creepy. I’d think, oh great, I’m in some horror movie but I don’t get to take the dog ESP’s advice because I have to “respect my elders.” So I’d accompany her.
Dead Day Garage
The garage was crammed but neatly, to the ceiling. After dispensing with whatever pretext had brought us out there– an old rolling pin for the tortillas, who knows?– Aunt Grace would dig out the helmet and show me where it had cracked nearly split through. She’d tell me how he’d been out riding in the hills, how they weren’t sure if he was wearing in or not, how he’d lost control on a curve and died instantly. Then she’d tell me again the story of how their only son Jimmy, was killed in a plane crash later, riding to Las Vegas with an uncle.
Not all over the garage, but around the helmet– I could sense Death. It was powerful, final and only scary because it was relentless, about its own business without caring for ours. Death, I felt. As real as the cracked helmet, whose crack called to mind in a symbol, a cracked skull.
But at last she’d set it aside, not even sigh– this always struck me– and just go back to the kitchen. “Come on, mijo, we got to make tortillas,” or some such quotidian thing, she would say. I could tell she felt Death maybe even more than me, but oh well, you had to go on, even after your son died, too. That was life.
Now, I could say, I learned that Death was palpable sometimes and “was a part of life, to remember that and keep it close to you, and go on caring and loving and doing what had to be done,” but that’s just words. Instead let me tell you next time, what happened when something bad happened to my Dad. Then what happened, when my friend Kevin X died of AIDS.
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