Rogelia was a pleasingly plump Mexicana who lived next door to us when we lived at 4546 S. Marshfield Avenue. Whenever she saw me, she would call me by name and say hello to me.

I always appreciated her personal attention since I was only ten. She had brown eyes, naturally wavy dark brown hair and olive skin. Judging by her clothing, her favorite color was blue. She was married and had two daughters who were older than me. Her younger daughter Estela looked just like her mother, but she was a little plumper and a little more naturally tanned. Rogelia and my mother were good friends so I saw Rogelia at our house a lot.

In the summer, we all sat on the front stairs and just talked and talked and talked even though every one, except the children, had to get up early in the morning. Neighbors walking by would stop to talk a while, too. Amazingly enough, no one drank beverages of any kind. The rambling conversation was enough to intoxicate everyone.

Whenever Rogelia sat on our stairs, she always asked me to sit next to her. I was like her date. My mother used to get jealous. I loved it! Sometimes Rogelia would run her fingers through my hair to comb it out of my eyes–and my mother would stare daggers at me. She would scold me later and tell me not to let Rogelia touch me. But my mother was never that affectionate with me, so I enjoyed the attention.

Rogelia looked very dainty, but was very physically tough when necessary. Sometimes her husband would home drunk, try to start a fight with anyone sitting on the stairs, and then go home. He would yell for Rogelia to open the door for him, but she wouldn’t. Finally, he’d get tired of yelling, then he’d pull out his keys from his pocket, and open the door himself.

He’d slam the door the door behind him. Most of the time there was yelling and the sound of objects crashing against the wall or floor. Even my mother had to say, “¡Pobrecita Rogelia!” One day, there was more yelling and more crashing noises than usual. Suddenly their apartment door slammed open and her husband, who was drunker than usual when he walked home, came running out with Rogelia chasing him waving her fists at him. He had a black eye and his face was all bloody. Rogelia was furious, but when she saw everyone staring at them, she stopped and told her husband if he ever did it again she would kill him.

We never found out what he did, but there was much speculation for months. Chismes, rumors, spread rapidly and became more elaborate with each retelling. One day, the police came and arrested him. They went to his car and conviscated some rope and a knife from the backseat. Apparently, Rogelia’s husband had raped and killed a woman. He was gone for a few days before he returned. It was a case of mistaken identity and he had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rogelia and her husband never had another argument after that.

As strong as Rogelia was, she would feign to be dainty on occasion. For example, when she returned from grocery shopping with her cart filled over the top with groceries, she would ask me to help her carry in the groceries. I was young enough and naive enough back then to think she really needed my help. When I was done, she would ask me questions about how I was doing in school and if I had a girlfriend. She was genuinely interested in me. Then she would give me fifty cents and I would leave.

Sometimes Rogelia would cook dinner for me. She would stick her head out the door and yell my name. The first time she did, I didn’t know why she called me. I soon enjoyed every time time she called me to her apartment. She liked talking to me while I ate alone. And Rogelia was a much better cook than my mother.

The only thing I regret to this day about the whole situation is how I behaved toward her daughter Estela. All the boys made fun of her because she was overweight. Well, I must confess that I, too, joined in on the ridicule. One day, as Estela was walking home, my friends and I were sitting on our front stairs. Alfonso called her a hippo. Fernando corrected him and said she was an elephant. Of course, me being me, I had to top everyone else. I started making earthquake noises and pretended that the ground was trembling. I pointed to crack on the sidewalk and said that Estela broke the sidewalk by walking on it. She ignored us as she continued walking home. Then my earthquake sounds became louder and my body trembled even more. The “earthquake” was so strong that I fell all the way down the stairs.

Estela started crying! I looked next door and saw Rogelia standing outside her door waiting for her daughter. Rogelia had seen everything. I was caught in the act of making fun of her daughter! I was so embarrassed! I knew that Rogelia would be mad at me forever. She would never cook dinner for me again. I looked at her face to study her reaction. She was actually attempting, unsuccessfully, to repress laughter. She put a consoling arm around her daughter and they quickly went into the house.

Well, I did not fall from Rogelia’s good graces because of my incident with Estela. In fact, later that day, she invited me in to dinner. Her husband found me a babysitting job across the street that paid a dollar a week. And everything was fine between Rogelia and me until we moved to another house in the neighborhood.

I just got home from Looptopia. There so many people downtown and in Grant Park late at night. I really enjoyed roaming around just people watching.A

ctually, the whole trip was rather unexpected. I went out with my Spanish class for a few drinks to celebrate a student’s birthday and some graduations. We were really enjoying drinking and chatting at the bar. Then, someone said we should go to Rush Street and then Looptopia. And we were off.

Every now and then, some of my students insist that we go out together for drinks. I always try to say no, but I always give in after some minor arm twisting. But I had a lot of fun with my students just wandering around Rush Street and the Loop and attracting the attention of everyone.

This is what my friends and I used to do when we were younger. Now, I find myself doing the same thing with my students. My students are a bad influence on me. And I liked it. I liked all the attention. My students kept telling me that they thought I was cool for going out with them. They repeated it so much that after a while I started to believe it myself.

As we wandered around, I met some people whom I knew, and my students were impressed by that. My sons mentioned it to me before. Whenever we go out, I usually greet someone I know. That’s just my world of coincidences. They don’t even phase me anymore. I’ve had so many unusual things happen to me in my lifetime that I just accept them as they come. Of course, if I were writing a book, I wouldn’t be able to include these wild coincidences because no one would believe them.

Mabenka Restaurant, 7844 S. Cicero Avenue, Burbank, Illinois 60459, 708.423.7679, serves Lithuanian and Polish cuisine. The owners named the restaurant using the letters of their children’s names. I’ve been eating there occasionally since it opened. I love their delicious food and the low prices. And the waitresses are always friendly. The only negative thing I can say about Mabenka is that it’s not in Chicago where it really belongs. It’s across the street from Chicago, so that’s close enough in my books to count as a Chicago restaurant.

 I ate supper there tonight because I couldn’t think of a topic for my blog. As I was sitting at my computer, I thought to myself, how can I write when I feel so hungry? So, I went to Mabenka’s for the first time in about a year.

I went by myself, and I must admit that I really enjoyed the company. I ordered the liver and onions with dumplings, sauer kraut, and mushroom soup. I’m not sure why, but I love liver and onions! I think that’s why I’m still single. I haven’t met a girl who loves liver and onions as much as me. I have only known one other person who loved liver and onions as much as me. And that was my mother.

When I was little, she made liver and onions quite frequently. My brothers ate it without complaints until they got older. Then my mother got creative. She made the liver without the onions and told my brothers that we were eating tiburón (shark). So everytime we ate liver sans onions, my mother said we were eating tigre, león, cocodrilo, among other exotic meats.

One day, we were all eating our liver and my brothers were about halfway finished eating it. Then, I accidentally said, “Mom, this is really good liver!” They all said, “I hate liver!” and stopped eating immediately. My mother was really mad at me for that.

So, I ate my liver and onions remembering all those times that I ate it with my mother and brothers. But I couldn’t finish it all tonight because they served me two large pieces. So, I took the leftovers to go. I’ll eat them in a few days and relive all my liver and onions flashbacks all over again while I eat the re-heated leftovers. As I drove home, I wondered what I would write for my blog entry.

Arturo was another one of my Mexican classmates at Holy Cross School. He looked like your typical Mexican. He was short and stocky with black hair and brown eyes. And he spoke English with a Mexican accent.

There was no mistaking him for Lithuanian. He was very charismatic, so he always had many friends and even more girlfriends. More girlfriends by his calculations. Any girl who talked to him was his girlfriend. But a lot of girls did talk to him because they liked the way he talked.

In class, he usually knew the answer, but sometimes he mispronounced words like shoes. He would always “choes.”  He couldn’t make the “sh” sound to pronounce shoes correctly. He would make the “ch” sound instead.

So, words like “church” and “choose” should have been easy for him, but they caused him just as much trouble. I explained to him that all he had to do was reverse the sounds of ch and sh. I helped him practice, but he never got the hang of it. On Sunday, Arturo went to “shursh” because he would “shoose” to go.

I once went with him to buy some shoes and he narrowed his selection to two pairs of shoes. For some strange reason, he thought I had excellent taste in choes, I mean shoes, so he asked me to help him buy some choes.

Anyway, he holds out the two pairs of shoes for me to inspect and says, “Whish choes chould I shoose?” I said, “Choose? Which shoes?” He said, “Yeah, whish choes?” I was getting frustrated by our interchange because I usually had this kind of conversation with my father. Not about choosing shoes, but about how to pronounce words in English. My father had trouble pronouncing the word “world.” To this day, he can’t pronounce “world.”

There were too many sounds in one word for my father. Arturo’s only problem was differentiating between two sounds: sh and ch. Now that I think of it, he couldn’t say chanclas, either. That typical Mexican word for flip-flops became shanclas.

My mother had super powers, but no one ever believed me. They weren’t super powers like comic book heroes have. Rather, they were more practical super powers that made my childhood extremely unbearable. For example, just by looking at a new friend that I brought home after school, my mother could tell if he would be a bad influence on me or not.

She could even predict if he would wind up in jail and in how many years. I never believed her analyses and I was sure she was completely wrong, but I couldn’t defend my new friends either. It was just easier not to bring them home anymore.

Somehow, she knew everything that I did. When I got tired of my paper route, I quit without telling anyone. I rode my bike home about two blocks away in about two minutes. As soon as I went into the house, my mother was standing by the door waiting for me with her arms crossed and she was glaring at me as I stood there silently. Then she asked, “Why did you quit your job?”

I never did find out how she knew I had quit, but somehow she knew! She could sense my every move no matter where I was. When I was little, I was only allowed to ride my bike around the block. By the time I was twelve, I was allowed to ride for about a two-block radius.

One day, as I was about to cross my mother’s imaginary line that I was forbidden to cross, I heard her yelling at me. How could she know where I was? Anyway, she yelled, “¡David! ¿A dónde vas?” I looked behind me so sure that I would see her there, but she wasn’t there! But I had heard her voice loud and clear.

She also had x-ray vision. Whenever someone sent me a card in the mail for my birthday or some other special occasion, not only did she know if there was money in the card, but she also knew exactly how much money was in the card. But the one thing we both knew for sure was that she would talk me out of my money. She would play on my sense of gratitude for her being my mother. She would remind me how she had raised me, provided me with a good education, and had also provided me with loving relatives who cared enough about me to send me money. She knew exactly what to say. I never kept any of my gift money.

My mother also knew that my first girlfriend would make a fine wife. She could tell just by looking at her. I pointed out to her that she was wrong when I got divorced. Of course, she didn’t believe it. Somehow, I was entirely responsible for the divorce and proving my mother wrong.