My father Diego, 2509 W. Marquette Road, Chicago, Illinois 60629
Pop. Just Pop. That’s what I call my father now. My brother Jerry’s children who are half Irish call him Papa Diego. I still call him Pop because when I was little we only spoke Spanish at home and my parents were mami and papi. When you’re very little, say up to about five or six years old, calling your parents mami and papi is still acceptable. When I started playing at the Davis Square Park, other kids called me baby if they heard me call my parents mami and papi. So, eventually I began calling them Mom and Pop. Definitely more acceptable by my peers of preteens. But I could never write pap because everyone would mispronounce in English. So that’s how he became Pop, just plain Pop.
I remember, once when I was at the park, Bobby–I never did learn his real last name–started a fight with me. I must have been about six at the time. I still had not learned the protocol that if someone hit you, you must hit them right back, or they would forever pick on you. Bobby punched my face and I ran home crying. I got home quickly because we lived right across the street from the park at 4501 S. Hermitage Avenue. Both my mami and papi were home. My father was somewhere in the apartment; how someone could disappear from his family in a four-room apartment is beyond me. Anyway, my mother wanted to know why I was crying. I said, “Bobby hit me!” but in Spanish. “¡Bobby me pegó! My mother thought I had said papi hit me. My mother immediately began scolding my father–who was forced to come out of hiding.
It actually took a couple minutes for me clear up the confusion and prove my father’s innocence to my mother. My father took me to the park to look for Bobby, but he had left. Somebody was probably trying to beat him up for some prior transgression. As I would learn later–mainly because Bobby was always in my life no matter how I tried to avoid him–no one liked Bobby because he was an all-round troublemaker. Once someone tried to shoot him, but they missed him and shot the person sitting next to him on the park bench. Luckily, the bullet went through the fleshy part of his thigh. Everyone was troubled by the fact that such an act of violence had failed to restore peace to our neighborhood by ridding everyone of Bobby for good.
But back to my father. Pop. When I started calling him Pop, no one made fun of me anymore. One unintended side-effect was that my little brothers stopped calling my parents mami and papi. That was rather sad because everyone knows how cute little children are when they call their parents mami and papi.
Dr. D. running for the Beatrice Corporate Marathon Team.
I’ve often heard that “work” is a four-letter word. No wonder I try to avoid it at all costs. But wait, “word” is also a four-letter word! Hm. And so is “four!”
The more I think about work, the less I like it. I’ve worked all my adult life despite never having a job that I really loved, or at least liked even a little bit. I mean, I can work extremely hard as long as what I do isn’t classified as “work.” If I have to do physical or intellectual labor for someone else, and hopefully, for a salary, I’m unhappy and resentful.
I can work out all day just for the fun of it because I’m doing it just for me. Years ago, when I ran marathons, I used to run more than one-hundred-mile weeks just because I loved running marathons and I wanted to run my fastest marathon possible.
One of my pet peeves of having a job is having a boss who bosses me around. But worse than me being ordered about by someone on a power trip who loves to exert his or her authority just to show everyone who’s the boss, is having me in charge and having me order people around.
When I worked at the peanut butter factory, I did repetitive, monotonous manual labor. My first job was stacking sixty cases of peanut butter on wooden pallets. Each case weighed about forty pounds. I learned how to save a step here, an arm movement there. When you work eight hours doing manual labor, every motion adds up. That was the only way to conserve my energy so I wouldn’t wear myself out. Sometimes when the assembly line broke down, I got to rest awhile. Eventually, I brought a paperback with me so I could read during my breaks and whenever the line was down. Well, my bosses couldn’t stand to see me sitting there doing nothing, so they would always find something for me to do like sweep the floor, stack pallets up, etc. Well, no matter how many things I was supposed to do during that downtime, I always figured out a way to do everything more efficiently. No matter. I still always had time to sit and read. My boss finally gave up on finding more tasks for me.
My mother used to get mad at me because I didn’t aspire to get promoted or take better paying positions such as mechanic. My mother coached me as to what to say whenever I was approached to advance on the job. The boss would usually ask if I could do a certain task and I was supposed to answer, “No, but I can learn!” Every time I was asked, I would say, “No, I don’t know how.” “Would you like to learn?” “No.” And that would be the end of my climbing the company ladder.
Somehow, my mother would always find out about my new job offer and yell at me for not accepting the promotion. She would call me lazy and unambitious. Back then I was really into kung fu, so on my days off I would work out all day. I want to build up my endurance and stamina. In fact, at work I could work tirelessly for hours. Then, one day, against my wishes–due to a shortage of manpower–I was promoted to assistant foreman on one of the peanut butter production lines. Suddenly, I found myself having to boss my fellow employees around. And they didn’t like it! They liked me well enough as a coworker but hated me as their boss. One likely reason was because I was younger than them. I was caught in the middle. My boss would give me orders to get certain things done, and I had to make the workers work. Well, absolutely no one obeyed any of my commands. So, silently, I started doing all the work that had to be done. And everyone just watched me. I didn’t complain. I just kept working, minding my own business. I didn’t know what else to do. At least, I wouldn’t get in trouble for not working. Eventually, everyone started working alongside me. I was shocked! When we were done, the foreman showed up and congratulated us on a job well-done. After that, I never bossed anyone around, but everyone did their job before I even had to tell them. Go figure!
I don’t know why, but Mexicans find it difficult to write letters to each other.
When I left Mexico, both times, I said I would write back and send pictures. Well, it took me a while took write back, but I finally wrote back! And guess who wrote back? One cousin to whom I didn’t even write. So, I felt guilty and wrote her a letter.
I wrote to my aunt and then she relayed a message to my cousin who e-mailed me telling me that my aunt said hello. This same aunt still had letters that I had written to her thirty years ago. They were tucked away in her picture box along with my Chicago Marathon medal, which I have no idea how she obtained it. Perhaps, I gave it to my mother before she went on one her trips to Mexico.
Now it’s starting to come back to me. My mother said if I wanted to give something to my aunt, so I gave her my marathon medal. Actually, it was a lot easier than writing a letter. Even with the Internet, we don’t seem to be writing to each other any more frequently. I still have a long list of relatives to whom I will write before my next visit. But even if I don’t, we’ll pick up the conversation right where we left off the last time. My cousin likes to IM me and that’s fine when I have time. It is a lot easier than writing letters.
When I attended Divine Heart Seminary, Latin was no longer the required language for freshmen and sophomores, so I studied Spanish. My sophomore year, I continued to study Spanish, but I also took French as an elective. I was the only sophomore in the class and the rest were juniors and seniors who had abandoned Latin. There was a certain mystique to study French ever since the seminary hired Miss Lundi to teach French, who was partly responsible for me enrolling in her class. Ever since I was little, I had this desire to be fluent in at least ten languages. So, there I was anticipating studying Spanish and French. However, when I returned to the seminary from summer vacation, I heard the rumor that Miss Lundi would not be returning to Divine Heart Seminary. The details of the rumor were sketchy, which made it even more salacious! The previous year, Miss Lundi had found a teacher’s pet who was an all-around varsity jock in his senior year. He was tall and muscular and as hairy as a caveman. Rumor had it that their friendship blossomed into a full-blown romantic tryst. But for the fact that he was already eighteen years old, no crime had been committed. However, Miss Lundi was not asked to return to the seminary.
Well, we were all abuzz wondering who would now teach us French. We also wondered who would be lucky enough to become the French teacher’s pet. We were all full of hope and elevated expectations. On my way to my first day of French class, I could sense that there was a lot of excitement in the hallway. In fact, a couple of upperclassmen rushed past me to get good seats in the classroom. In the process, they bumped into me, and my glasses fell off my face. Another student ran past me and accidentally stepped on my glasses. I picked up the pieces and put them in my pocket since I could no longer wear them. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I would soon learn. Well, when I walked into the classroom, the class was staring at the new French teacher. The whole classroom smelled of expensive French perfume. She was hot! Only I couldn’t really be sure without my glasses. I was judging her based on the reactions of my classmates who were so painfully obvious as to how they felt about her. She had long black hair, blue eyes, a svelte figure, and beautiful legs. Oh, yes, I am a leg man! I may not have learned much French that year, but I did learn that I am a leg man! Much to the dismay of the students in the front row right by the new French teacher, she immediately assigned desks by alphabetical order. As luck would have it, I was stuck all the way in the back row in the corner at a desk with horrible sight lines. She immediately began the class by introducing herself in French and the entire class of adolescent boys just melted, this author included. Actually, “melted” is not the most accurate word to describe our physical reactions as teenage boys with an over-active libido, if you know what I mean.
She sashayed back and forth across the classroom as she spoke. All eyes followed her back and forth as if watching the French Open. Within minutes, she began writing things on the blackboard in French. While her back was turned some of the students silently made irreverent and obscene gestures, but they stopped immediately when she turned to face the class again. She told us to copy what she had written on the board. Without my glasses, I couldn’t read a word. I asked her if she could read the board aloud. She gave me a quizzical look and I explained that my glasses were broken and I couldn’t read the board from the back of the room. She immediately moved me to the desk in the front row directly in front of her desk. The student whom I displaced was relegated to my desk in the back row and hated me for the rest of the academic year. To this day, I’m afraid that I will bump into him in some dark alley for fear of how he might avenge himself on me for the loss of the best desk in French class.
I took my glasses to the optometrist for repairs, but I wouldn’t get them back for two weeks. Two weeks! For two weeks, I sat in the front row of French class, and I still couldn’t read the board. I would copy the questions from the board and ask her if I had copied them correctly. She would stand at my side and bend over to read my notebook. Well, she had spent the previous summer in Paris and done a little shopping at many boutiques, so she had quite a wardrobe of the latest Parisian fashions. She wore low-cut dresses with high hemlines. She said that her dresses were décolleté, which if I remember correctly is French for, “I think I’ll show off my breast today!” So, when she bent over to check my notebook, I was exposed to quite a scenic view. Soon, the rest of the class was asking her to check their work, too. Every boy vied to become the teacher’s pet. But she was too wise for them and soon stopped checking everyone’s work.
When I finally got my glasses back, our assigned desks were ours for the rest of the semester! She never even noticed that I was wearing my glasses now. When I finally got a good look at her with my glasses, I felt as if I had been blind until then. What I had imagined her to look like from a distance without my glasses correcting my nearsightedness paled in comparison with her actual beauty. She truly looked like a runway model who had walked of the pages of a French fashion magazine. Why was she teaching French at a Catholic seminary? Well, rather than question God’s infinite wisdom, I decided to enjoy my newfound vision that felt like the superpower of a comic-book hero. The beauty of the whole situation was that she spent most of the class sitting on her desk directly in front of me. Her dresses were marvels of fashion design. Like a good French composition, they were long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting. When she sat on her desk, her dress reminded me of the tidal movements of the ocean. Just as when the ocean causes a high tide on one shore, the waters will recede on another. So, too, her dress would emulate tidal movements. And I had the best seat in the house! If she wriggled too much while sitting on her desk, her skirt would recede up her thighs. If she pulled her skirt down too far, she would expose too much of her breasts. But the absolute highlight of the class came when she sat on her desk and would forget that she was sitting in front of twenty libidinous adolescent boys. She would actually cross her legs at the knees. As I sat right in front of her, I could see the color of her panties. After class, everyone would surround me and ask me what color they were. I was the pride and envy of French I.
That was the best French class I ever took, but I never did learn to speak French! Other than, “Je ne sais pas.”
Carmen has always caught my interest. As a name because my mother was named Carmen. I have also met two Italian males named Carmen. I have met a couple of girls named Carmen, but I can’t seem to get too involved with a girl with my mother’s name.
In high school, I had to read part of the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet. As I learned later in life, French composers have written some of the best Spanish classical music ever. That’s just one of those mysteries of the universe! I don’t even remember in which class I read Carmen the opera or even why. But I do remember that it was a French opera about a gypsy who lived in Spain. Later, because of my interest in Carmen the opera, I read the book Carmen written by Prosper Mérimée on which Bizet based his opera. Eventually, I saw a video of the opera Carmen and loved it.
I love watching different interpretations of the same work. So I was ecstatic when I saw the movie Carmen by director Carlos Saura. The characters in the movie decide to produce a stage version of the opera Carmen while also referring to the original book by Merimee. The movie is set in Spain, so they will make a flamenco version of Carmen. There is a lot of wonderful flamenco dancing and guitar music in the movie.
The main problem for the director Carlos of the flamenco version is finding the perfect Carmen. Well, as luck would have he finds her: Her name happens to be Carmen and she also happens to be a gypsy. The movie blurs the line between fiction and reality on multiple levels and the viewer must differentiate between the action of the characters of the flamenco version and the actors who portray those characters. Sometimes the actions and emotions of the actors and characters overlap.
I also recently saw–again!–the movie Carmen Jones that stars an all-African-American cast. The movie follows Bizet’s storyline faithfully and uses his music, but the lyrics were changed to suit the updated plot and characters. The story takes place down south near an army base, perhaps some time around WWII. Carmen works in a parachute factory instead of a cigar factory. Instead of a toreador as the rival lover, there’s a boxer. Don Jose is still a soldier, but a U.S. Soldier. The movie is very good and the lyrics that are true to the characters are sung well by Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. Of course, none of this would have been possible without Bizet’s wonderful Spanish music.
I was once at Blockbuster and saw another version of Carmen, a hip hop version. I didn’t have time to watch it, so I didn’t rent it. Now that I have some time, I plan on seeing it. I wonder how faithful the movie is to Bizet and Mérimée. I’ll have to watch it real soon!
Chicago USA 