Historia de un Adolescente – Love

It’s been a torturous time since last I wrote. The physical pains, in association with the mental anguish, were almost unbearable. That, intertwined with the celebration of a painful day of “Memorial” celebration for those that were present - at some point in the lives of us veterans - and have long since gone didn’t help any. We cannot erase from our memories those that served alongside of us during times of human conflicts and that -because of some caprice of life- tragically perished in the prime of their existence. “War is the lowest degradation of the human mind and it only serves and benefits those that see it as means to profit from it.” Although I’m a veteran and support those that defend our way of life, I cannot help it but feel for our next generation when I see how now a days the Military Industrial Complex is celebrating our “War Machine” under the banner of  “Patriotism “in every conceivable way. “The real soldier “Loves” peace.”

Getting back to the initial thought; In spite of all of the personal controversy, there were many positives. The pain was overcome and the anguish was temporarily excommunicated of the brain. The main reason is what I call “the unselfish and overwhelming desire to place the well-being and happiness of another person above one’s own; L.O.V.E.”

I’m blessed with it. The one that shares my most intimate life, that supports my every desire, that glances the other way in order not to be too obvious of a presence in the presence of all of my faults, gives it to me. Not only in the physical sense but in the spiritual way and in the way  that everything in my surrounding gets done. How could I not overcome the little discomforts of pain and anguish when such behavior surrounds me? I can’t. And at the end of the day, there’s a feeling of achievement which was undeniably motivated by that particular four letter word. L.O.V.E

I’ve known many types of “Love.” As our life progresses it’s almost t inevitable to experience them and to share them. The first one, like most humans, is that inimitable one, the one that epitomizes all of the other varieties. The Love of that one person who brought us through pain and suffering to this world and who sheltered us from the evils of it in our infancy; that of our mothers. It’s universally understood and accepted that there’s no greater mortal love than that one. I’ve already told you a little bit about her. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of her or visualize her face or hear the sweet pitch of her voice. There’s not a morning in which I wake when I don’t feel the reassuring blanket of her presence shield my body.

Then, there’s the love of a father. It’s said that anyone can be a father but you must presently and in attendance be one in order to be one. Mine was present only until my teens, and though I was lucky to share in some of the things that he liked and as a result influence me to like those things as well- the cock fighting, the horse races, the baseball games, the women- my time with him was brief. I’ve no doubt the he love me, though he rarely showed it to me or any of my sibling’s. He had been raised a certain way and in his formative years suffered through persecutions because of sickness by the U.S. Marines during the time of military intervention at the beginning of the twentieth century. Once, while I was spending school recess vacation in Miches, the town in which he was brought up by his aunt, she sadly told me. “Luisito had no child hood, the only love he received came from us… and we did not give him as much as we should have. So he doesn’t know how to give it.” I remember my brother Luis Ernesto confessing to me that at the time of his death, while  looking at him over his coffin he told me that he could not remember the last measure of affection that our father had given him. Yet, when I asked our mother whom she thought was our father’s favorite - thinking that she would reply “you” - she unerringly said “Luis Ernesto, because of his shyness.”  Amazingly enough, I did not feel disappointed for myself, on the contrary, I felt rather good for my brother. There’s the Love of a sibling, a cousin or a relative - today, as it turns out is my sister Rosemary’s birthday, the Doctor in the family- that type is unexplainable. There’s nothing to be gained or lost by it; it’s just the fact that through their veins runs the same blood as yours and that their presence has been a constant. Some you have looked up to their protection with respect, some you have looked down to with advice and with protection. I have eight of them and each one is different in their own ways but the love is the same.

There’s the “puppy love.” The one you felt for a teacher or for a next door neighbor to which you serenated by whistling a song under their window. A lot of people will debate whether that is a form of love or not but to me it was real and I did cry when her mother bathed my serenate with a bucket of soapy water.  Then, there’s that real first love; the one that was consummated and that shared the forbidden and desired carnal knowledge with you; the one that simultaneously gave away our virginity. That first one for me was my father’s gift on my birthday and it became an obsession that almost destroyed me.

There were many “Junior High School” and “High School” kissing sweethearts, and Port affairs while I was a sailor but it wasn’t until my twenty first birthday, when  I saw her descending in swaying rhythm down a winding stairs in the last days of December, that I felt it again. Her big brown eyes hypnotized me and I did not feel a sense of lost at my – until then- bachelor ways. Through all times, of plenty and or lack, she is still with me.

There’s the love of a son or daughter, equally consuming but more protective. It’s the kind of love that will, in the blink of an eye, place your life in front of any danger without any regard for  it and that will make you tremble in mortal fear of anything that might harm them. It can also be the most tender of all love, requiring nothing but their happiness and well-being in return.

Then there’s the love of grandchildren; twice as much because they are the result of your result and the love and the pain, when something occurs to one of them, is doubled; doubled as well because, unlike your children, one is aware that life won’t allow you the full measure to see them reach their peak.

 In most men, myself included, there are other types of love, the purely carnal ones that are there for a hidden benefits and that in turn eventually makes one realize where the true one lays, and those that appear to have been but in reality are not and are just a figment of our imagination or better said our lust.

There’s the love of a friend. Through our life there are many acquaintances, people that we say we know but that in reality are only casual passersby in our lives. I can count in one hand those that are “friends” or unrelated “Blood” that will revel with you in times of youth and merriment and bleed for and with you in times of tragedy.

Last but in reality first, there’s the Love of that Supreme Being. The one that some of us only reach out when the troubles, pressures and ambiguities of mortality overwhelm us. The one that guides us - as a dear friend recently told my unbelieving soul- whether we ask for it or not through Life, Love, Truth and Lies.

Until the next time…Adios!

Historia de Un adolescente – “Life”

Here I am once more. As you can attest, with the help of my oldest son, Joseph Anthony - recent Cum Laude graduate of Colorado Christian University- I have embellished the page. In the profile one you'll see me as I am now with my favorite Panama hat and on the one on top with my beautiful mother, Gloria and my oldest brother Fernando, to her left, and Luis Ernest to her right. The good looking kid sitting next to her is "Yours truly at six years old. 

I was pleasantly surprise that almost a hundred people have read the previous blog. I wonder who you are. Are you a friend or family? Or are you a total stranger in the outskirts of Alaska who found the title intriguing? It would be nice to know but if not… thanks and welcome to my view one and all. Each new post is a challenge. I always scream to myself “I have no idea of how to continue what I began or what exactly I intent to say. And then I start writing and the words seem to flow, and like a leave over a running stream I'll just float along and let myself be taken to where my silent self takes me. Wish I could feed myself with words; hunger would never invade me..

I didn’t realized, until after I e-mailed the link with the first post to all of my relatives, “acquaintances” and friends and until after my head hit my pillow last night, how impactful this might be on some people. Human nature always wants to know how “Noble” we have been in order to justify our own wickedness. “See, I told you!” I can almost hear some of you shout. By putting this down I’m basically admitting some of the things that I’ve kept internally; which will put a face to some of the private secrets that reveal my imperfections. Who knows? Perhaps by me doing so, it will get them to admit their own. “Let him or her that is without sins cast the first stone.” But regardless of it, there’s a liberating feeling about it, one that I’ve already put down on “Historia de Un Adolescente” which is also the motivating factor why I’ve titled the blog Life, Love, Truth and Lies.

Life. “The Gods envy us mortals because their immortality does not allow them the agony and the ecstasy of our earthly existence.” I read that somewhere in a Mythology book and for some reason it always comes back to me whenever I deal with life and subsequently "mortality." We know where we are born and where we’ve been, but never where it’s going to end. We can’t choose whether we come into this realm with a silver spoon in our mouth or with our stomachs deflated and tied to our backs. Nothing we can do but, without yet existing, hope that it will be the first and not the later. I guess I was fortunate. I was born in a hospital instead of country “Bohio” but in retrospect that's meaningless. I’ve known many, whom I admire, that were born amidst extreme poverty and were infinitely better and achieved more precisely because of it. That initial hunger and early stage of lacking makes some people thrive more urgently than those born without it. Yet, we have to assent to wherever “Life” places us. The rest is up to each individual.

My story began precisely, if that’s possible, at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, December 31^st, 1950 at 12:00 PM. I always thought that there was something significant about that but I’ve not found that yet. I was the third of Luis and Gloria. Their destiny had been joined when she escaped the sexual persecution of our then “Jefe,” the Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had a weekly ritual in which a dozen or more gorgeous virgins were offered as pleasure sacrifice to be deflowered by his degenerate penis.Though my mother had been spotted and selected as a candidate by one of his spies in the country hills of Ocoa, where she was raised, at the risk of losing their lives, her parents sent her to the city, where virginity was harder to find that in the hills. There, our father found her in my uncle’s barbershop and by the time the spies located her again she was no longer a virgin and for Trujillo’s “Vampire Penis,” nothing that was previously used was good enough. Not even my mother. That would not be the first time that the dictator would affect our lives, there were two more instances in which he did; one directly with me and his favorite grandchild, Ramfis Rafael, and one with the entire family just because or our last name, Simo.

Life, like a car, has different gears and the higher the gear the faster life speeds by. Most people will agree that our infancy is the slowest. When I was a child a day was a month long, a month was a year and a year took at least a decade to end. The saddest day was the day after “The Three Kings Day” for we all knew that it would take another eternity before the toys that came with it came around again. It’s funny how when you are in the spring of your life you hear your elder say “Youth is wasted on the youth”, “Twenty years is but a blur” and you completely ignore it only to find yourself wondering how life would have been if you had heeded to their advice and your youth had not been what you made it to be. But how could one not waste our youth? How would we have gained the knowledge that we now have if we didn’t do exactly as our youth dictated us to do? I have a feeling that ‘if” we were able to retrace our youth, we would all do exactly as we did. My apologies, my mind sort of wondered away from the stream of thoughts there for a minute.

My first gear was full of controversy between my procreators and I, unlike my full brothers, haven’t a single memory of my parents living or being happy with each other under the same zinc roof. My only recollection of them together was the last night she forcefully threw him out when she found out he had a concubine not more than a mile from where we lived. I’ve always felt that the single fact that my brothers they were able to experience at least a brief period of living with both of our parents had some bearing in how they dealt with life and how it would ultimately shape mine. I know just by watching their example that my two brother’s life benefited from sharing that experience and it helped shaped them to the secured persons they are just because of that brief period of time during those formative years.

When you’ve reached a certain stage, some of us, have a tendency to place the fault on something other than ourselves. It’s an excuse that shelters us from our own deficiency but at the same time is the beginning of our recognizing the truth within ourselves.  “The truth shall set you free.” But that’s another thought.

 I’ve always “blamed” a single arrogance for my lacking their combined tutelage; the one attitude that is still prevailing within our culture, “The Macho” one.  I became aware of it early as I saw the accepted and overwhelming power that the men of our culture with the economic means had over our women. My father was one of them, his money was his magnet to women, and I was an innocent witness of how he used his money against my own mother.

Funny thing is that even though I was a bystander to what it did to my own mother and those of my other half siblings’, I still admired him; revered his stature and the sureness of his steps and most of the things I later did in life were influenced directly or indirectly by my father.

I once heard him tell Ernestina, my sisters mother, after she found out that he had another concubine in his Villa Mella farm. “If you don’t like it, there’s the door. All that is here was here before you came and here it will stay after you are gone.”  Only thing was that Ernestina, wasn’t like my mother who divorced him and left him everything that was coming to her. Ernestina waited until he left for his customary Sunday “ride’ with Matilde at the farm and took everything but the kitchen sink. When he came back and saw his empty house you could literally perceive the fumes coming out of his nostrils. That night, we all had to sleep in the floor and in retrospect we all had a good time that night joking about the old man. She had hit him where it hurt him the most; his pocket. His main focus was always his money, what he had accumulated and until now I did not realize that he did it to ensure that he needed nobody at the end. “I came alone and alone I will go.” He’d say. Ironically, when death came along, it did found him unaccompanied. It wasn’t until eight hours later that my sisters discovered that he was gone. But that was his attitude and without realizing it, it was the same that I would take in my first gear. They were both around but I lived my spring days alone.

When you’re young and you live in an island, each day is an adventure and mine was. To his credit, Trujillo’s City was clean and safe. It was, after all, his city and there was only one thief and murder was only allowed whenever he wished it. But I didn’t know that or the story about my mother until my brother told me about his brutality the day after his assassination. All of us that were born under his regime were brainwashed into thinking that only God was above him and as long as I believed so, he had no quarrels with me. The precaution on how they spoke or behaved towards Trujillo was for the oldest people that had to deal with the geopolitical realities of the island and with his brutal dictatorship. In my youthful ignorance, I walked the cobble stones streets of my barrio, played in the historical ruins of the oldest city of the western hemisphere, swan where the Ozama river and the Caribbean sea mingled with a kiss while playing chicken with the sharks, and played baseball and any other game amongst the children of the barrio without any prejudice until the ‘Viejo” appointed curfew when the red sun, in all his glory, tainted the blue skies and settled down in the horizon line. Do as you want was my way of Life. Until the next time, one and all…Adios.

Historia de Un Adolescente

Polito De La Cruz, Little Paul Of the Cross, suggested it at work. There's something spiritual about him in his simple demeanor and if there is someone who has learned, didactically, about this new way of expression through computers, websites and anything related to this new age of communication  is him. Like my nephew Pavel Ernesto, he dreams about this technology. I was conversing with him about my frustrations regarding my economic inability to publish my book, or I should say, what I've been writing, when he mentioned -and within second found -ways in which I could do it. He also mentioned "Bloggin" as a mean to express myself to the vast universe of humanity that does this sort of thing. "If your message has a point, people will read it and through them you'll find support." I hope it works. It reminded me of the phrase in a movie I'd seen. "If you build it, they will come."

 So, here I am. I just went through the whole exercise of setting the blogg - with Polito's help- and I'm still not sure whether I have created one or not, nor what I really want to say. The idea of writing collectively is not new to me. I often send my "Spanish"poems to those friends that are close to me just to let them read whatever muse came to my mind. One of them told me- matter of fact- that he was collecting them and will, once I'm dead, perhaps publish them. Is he a friend? I'm not truly sure. Once, I though he was. 

Where do I go from here? I don't know. Let me go outside and suck on a stick to give my brains some time to consider. I'll be right back. I'm back and I think I know how to begin. I've name this confession- I can't think of a better word to describe this- 'Life, Love, Truth and Lies" because that's what best describes my life. You know; the one in the book in Spanish that I'm writing, "Historia de un Adolescente" ( An Adolescent Story) which is two chapters away from the end. I've lived, loved, told the truth and told some lies, like most everyone. But I guess the real reason hides behind what in my country, The Dominican Republic, is called "La Curvita de La Paraguay" or the Paraguay Curve, which is simply a way to say that life is going down hill and the spectre that we never though about is showing his face. At his stage everything comes all at once. The pains, the realization that six decades has gone by and that you did not plan for this stage of the ball game. It's ugly. And most of all depressing. For the last decade I've been dealing with it and the simple task of just setting your feet on the ground each day is monumental. The thought of ending it all is only subdue by the thought of those I love and the fear of leaving what I started writing undone. Perhaps just writing about it will alleviate it.

I first clearly captured the environment in which I was born when I was 7 years old. It was like a great, grey cloud was taken from in front of my eyes and suddenly, the Market where my fathers' business was, the people, the prostitutes and the black, white chested swallows playing with the flying feathers from the livery, turned into technicolor. I was not aware that the regime of the island was a brutal dictatorship nor of the bigotry that divided it. I was just seven years old and like magic, I knew who I was. Funny how some things remain so vivid in our minds while some things that perhaps were done a few days ago dissipate. I had only two people that I looked up to in those days. "El viejo", my father and "Curumbel", my nickname for my mother. Two completely diferent people. My Sun and my Moon and till today I don't know which one I loved more. One was brutal when you did not do as he ordered, but always equal in whatever he did for his then six children. I was the six. The other was always full of love and a sweet disposition for her three children. I was her third. When, after previously taking my two brothers with him, on my seventh birthday he finally took me away from her, she told him"If I have to selll my body to take back my children back from you I will" I knew then and there that, even though she didn't do as she said, that that promise would come to reality one day and that when it did, my world would drastically change. Seven years later, it did; A new culture, climate, language and status came as we arrived in America. In the time it took from Hispaniola to New York, we turned from the rich sons of a wealthy business man to the poor sons of a shoe factory worker.  But before it did, I would learn to Live, Love, Tell the Truth and Lie before I was forteen. 

 I'll pick it up again next time.  I have go now, my wife just came in an since this is her computer and her "Real Estate" work is what's been paying the bill, I got to get off. Hope I get some feed back. I need the motivation to continue this. Until the next time. Adios.