Family – On Second Thought

Language

The following essay was written for my English 404 Creative Nonfiction class and was inspired by Ocean Vuong’s “Surrendering”

I have told this story it seems a million times. A nun, my teacher in the second grade, told my parents at a parent-teacher conference that they needed to stop speaking Spanish to me or otherwise I wouldn’t be able to progress in school. “This is America, and in America, we speak English,” I remember her telling them. By the eighth grade, I could barely speak a word of Spanish. It was the America of the fifties, and the nun won. I was now an American. Well, not probably in their minds, but I was at least trying to be one of them.

And that’s too bad because then, being American was anyone other than a nice white Anglo-Saxon protestant. Even Catholics were not allowed as long as they stuck to their side of town. And no Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Negroes (term of the time), and we won’t even talk about those Chinese who should have known better, according to red-blooded Americans back then, Hell, they had their own towns.

Those red-blooded Americans thought it was okay that we could live here in the United States of America as long as we spoke English. Funny, they seemed okay with European immigrants speaking Italian, German, and even French (so continental) and Spanish as from Spain (so Castilian). The problem had something to do with those darker people speaking their language. Weird.

So there I was stuck in this twilight world of wanting to be an American and yet unable to speak Spanish, which made it difficult if not impossible to talk to many of my closest relatives, including my grandmothers, who knew next to nothing of English because it was not their native language. And my mother, in her early years, still had struggles with the language, although, with time, she became more fluent. Even with that, I wish I could have asked her and my father questions about their lives in their home countries in the language that I knew they were the most comfortable with so they could tell me stories in that language in all its beauty and specificity that just could not be captured by the English language.

I went on to be an excellent reader and speaker of English, although since I was from the Bronx, some people might debate the excellence of the speaking part. I read books and Boys Life magazine, watched American English television, learned how they spoke, and thought of myself just like them. I never once felt that I was anything but just like them, an English language-speaking American at that young age. And that’s the way it’s been all my life.

Now, I wish in frustration that I had paid more attention in Mrs. Travieso’s Spanish class, “You speak Spanish with an American accent.” I knew she meant to add, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” She didn’t have to say it; I felt it. WTF. I imagine, for a second, that if I had kept my Spanish, and been bilingual, the stories I would have read, the stories I would have heard, the added dimension of life I would have experienced. Damn.

This while thing about to be an American, you must only speak English has messed with my head over the years. Yes, I’ve tried to learn Spanish to explore this other dimension of my life, my family’s life, and their history. When I try to speak the few words that I know, I tighten up, embarrassed with my pronunciation, the accent that Ms. Travieso complained about would make people look at me and say, “¿Que eres un gringo?”

I was so committed to being an English-only speaking American that, in all honesty, there were times in my life I was ashamed when someone would try to speak Spanish to me because somehow they assumed that I spoke the language and I would have different reactions. If they were a native Spanish speaker, I would hesitantly tell them No comprende or No habla Espanol in the worst English accented Spanish that I could muster. You were right, Miss Travieso. If the person was native English speaking and I thought they were trying to make some lousy attempt at shaming me like I wasn’t American enough because they thought I didn’t speak English. I would pause, look them in the eyes and say indignantly; I speak English. I didn’t add, but I desperately wanted to say I probably speak better English than you.

I love listening to people who can seamlessly move between languages. Even better, more than two languages. There’s a skill, a rolling of the lips and tongue, the hand gestures that come with each language. Some stories are best told in their native tongue. The music of that language. The cultural history. The depth of meaning.

Something magical happens when you are awash in the symbolism and specificity of each word and how it’s pronounced. It happens in English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Arabic, hell, any of the thousands of languages that people in America, Americans all of them, speak at home, at school, in stores, on sidewalks, and in the subway. Hell, turn on your radio, television, or podcast. It’s all there, the whole world speaking to us in over seven thousand languages, and some people, okay, a lot of English-speaking Americans, get upset when they hear someone speaking another language. OMG, why is it any of your fuckin’ business?

I secretly dream that I can understand them (I’m a busybody), not so I can share their secrets but because I want to go up to them and ask them about their language, culture, history, and countries of origin. And if they were born in America, I want to know how and why they retained their parent’s native tongue because I would be jealous as hell if they told me, “Well, we just spoke our language because it is beautiful, and it is the way we share our lives.” Yeah, that should be a good enough reason for me and any other American if it was our business.

A Yankee Baseball Game

The following essay was inspired by Constellations by Abby Mims and Jesmyn Ward’s “On Witness and Respair” on assignment for my English 404 class, Creative Nonfiction.

My father never took me to a Yankee baseball game when I was a kid. That was the secret burden of resentment I carried around for a long time. At some point, before he died from Multiple Myeloma in his mid-sixties, I let that silly feeling go. It was still too damn long to carry around such overbearing feelings.

As long as I can remember, my father worked two jobs to support our family that expanded and shrunk with each foster child my mother took on over the years after our brother Peter died. Pop would do his thing as a truck mechanic. If he grew tired of it or complained, I never knew about it. All I know is that he never seemed to stop working. Ever.

I was the oldest in the family, so I was supposed to carry the responsibility accorded to the oldest son, “be the man of the house,” when Pop wasn’t home. I had no idea what that meant at ten or eighteen years old, even as my father and mother occasionally reminded me. Wasn’t that his job? I mean, wasn’t Pop supposed to work his ass off to ensure that we had a roof over our head, clothes on our back, shoes on our feet, and food on the table?

What an asshole I was.

I was a kid in the fifties and early sixties. I was too young to work, and I was too busy with school and playing stickball and johnny on the pony after school to worry about getting my hands dirty, I mean filthy, like my father, who would come home smelling of the very things that would kill him in the end, gasoline, truck oil, and lubricant. On his hands, arms, sometimes his face, all over his work clothes. After eight hours at one job in the south Bronx to another in Brooklyn. That’s not even counting the hours at job number two on Saturdays.

Then, the church usher duties on Sundays at Saint Anselm’s Church. For years he would drive from 140^th Street and Third Avenue to 156^th and Westchester, which was not around the corner. He would fulfill his duties which stretched through Sunday mornings and then turn around to go back home bearing warm Italian bread or Kaiser rolls so he could sit down with the family for lunch, usually over a bowl of Chicken Soup Puerto Rican style. Then, it was off to visit sick relatives, his mother, brother, and sister (sometimes with us in tow).

In the summertime, he would pack the family into the car for an excursion to upstate New York for outings at any number of lakes that seemed like foreign lands to us but provided us with exciting memories and relief from life in the projects of the South Bronx.

You would think I would have been more grateful.

Nope. It was the sixties, and rebellion against authority, whether it was your parents or the President of the United States, was the thing I did. Pop and I settled into a regular stream of arguments about everything from the Civil Rights movement (moving too fast) to American foreign military excursions (What are you, a communist?). I would sit in my room reading books and articles about philosophy, religion, identity, war, and civil rights and think that I was smarter than my parents, and what the hell did my father know anyway? He was just a truck mechanic with barely a high school education. (Until now, that’s all I ever had but do go on).

It wasn’t until my first child was born that I began to get an inkling of what Pop knew about life and responsibility and family and what work was all about. By then, much time, distance, and bitter feelings had passed between us, and we had settled into a peaceful co-existence, and we were okay with it.

But, the damn Yankee baseball games. They still haunted me. Somewhere deep inside of me, like a lingering toothache that wouldn’t be relieved until it was yanked out. Without Novocain.

It wasn’t until he was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma in his mid-sixties that his sacrifices became clearer. By then, I thought it was too late. I was in my early forties, and I realized that all those years of pettiness on my part, all that open rebellion from me, all the disappointment I had showered on my parents over the years (Seminary, drug abuse, failed marriages and relationships) did I realize that I would one day not have the time with my father that I secretly wanted so I could ask him questions about life, his life, his past, his dreams that went beyond throwing himself under a truck so that engine oil could drip onto his hands, into his body, down through his veins and crawl into every cell of his body so it could be cooked into cancer in his retirement years when he should have been relaxing.

I should have been the one to take him to a Yankee baseball game.

In his final days, I was called back to the Bronx from my home in southern California, so I could witness the inevitable, knowing there was nothing I could do. Cancer had run its course, and the options for cures and stays of death had been exhausted. All I could do was help my mother get him dressed one last time for the journey from the hospital to the hospice. I stood next to this man whose strong arms and hands had fascinated me as a kid and were now thin and barely holding on to my shoulder as I held him. The final indignity of his frail naked body was the last thing he wanted his oldest son, the son who had never appreciated him in his life, to witness. All I could say was, I got you, Pop. He turned, looked at me, and didn’t have to say anything. I knew, and he knew.

Texas

Hot. Temperatures over a hundred. For the entire week, I was in Texas. This is what I remember most from my recent week-long visit with my son, Antonio Nelson Ruiz, and his wife, Crystal, and their daughter, my granddaughter, Anabella, in Arlington, Texas. But while the heat was a daily reminder of where I was, there was more to my visit.

This was the longest I’ve ever stayed in the Lone Star state, and I came back home with some stereotypes shattered and others strengthened. Texas is more than the image of my youth, cowboys and injuns (No disrespect meant but I can’t count the number of times I heard this word). It’s the second-largest state, 268,596 square miles. 29.1 million residents. I traveled from Dallas to Arlington, between Fort Worth and Dallas and considered a suburb of both. I visited Fort Worth, traveled two hundred miles to Austin and back, and came home from Dallas Love Field. Easily six hundred miles. This is what I saw.

Highways for miles. The 20, 30, 187, 35, 287. Open spaces that were often interrupted by towns and cities. Truck stops and visitor centers. The southern cooking of The Breakfast Brothers (I loved their Catfish and Grits). Kroger’s. Terry Black’s BBQ in Austin (I did the Dallas one a few months ago). Buc-ee’s, described as a country store and gas station (warehouse-size huge). Austin is a city where it seemed you had to be under forty to live there (It’s a college, music, and tech town). You drive past billboards full of anti-Biden rhetoric and anti-abortion messages. Traffic jams of eighteen-wheelers and cars which, when set free, drive with no care eighty, ninety miles an hour (apparently, the speed limit is a suggestion in Texas). Kolaches in West, Texas. Kolaches are described as “Gooey fruit centers. Doughy, soft rolls.” According to thedaytripper.com, the town of West is the “kolache-kingdom of Texas — and it was officially dubbed Home of the Official Kolache by the Texas Legislature.” Damn, they are good.

$Texas$
Big Tex at the Texas State Fair (Photo by Ralph De La Cruz)
As the self-described “Live Music Capital of the World,” Austin reveres its musical icons and has statues of the late Stevie Ray Vaughan (above) and Willie Nelson (Photo by Ralph De La Cruz)
Hike and Bike trail along Lady Bird Johnson Lake with downtown Austin in the background (Photo by Ralph De La Cruz)
Lake Travis in Central Texas is one of six “Highland Lakes” formed by six dams on the Colorado River (Photo by Ralph De La Cruz)
South Padre Island “Starbase” (Photo by Ralph De La Cruz)
The Dallas-Fort Worth area is home to numerous world-class museums, such as the Nasher Sculpture Center (Photo by Ralph De La Cruz)

But one of the most exciting discoveries was Sascee’s Southern Style Eatery in Waco, Texas. I found it by accident in a neighborhood fully primed for gentrification. Their fried chicken was the bomb. But, their days may be numbered. Go two blocks, and you see the encroachment coming. If you’re in Waco, check them out. They were folk who welcomed you into their restaurant and treated you not as a stranger but as a long-lost friend—rushing to remind you that food is more than food. It is a greeting; a hand extended in friendship—a welcome home hug.

Buc-ee’s is a chain of country stores and gas stations (Photo by Antonio Ruiz)
A man walking his cattle- Fort Worth (Photo by Antonio Ruiz)
Stoking the fires at Terry Black’s Barbecue- Dallas (Photo by Antonio Ruiz)
Terry Black’s Barbecue- Austin (Photo by Antonio Nelson Ruiz

The whole point of my Texas travel was to spend time with my first born, Antonio, and his family, especially that granddaughter, Anabella, who has a very forceful personality for a five-year-old. They live in a middle-class neighborhood near the Arlington-Mansfield line with a wooded area and bike path two blocks away. It was a beautiful walk along the wooded trail in the morning and the evening with their two dogs. You got a sense of serenity with the only sounds that of birds and the occasional unrecognized animal sound (maybe coyotes). Yes, the traffic of the main drag, Matlock Road, was not far off, but for a moment, it reminded me of my quiet early morning walks in east Long Beach. There were the occasional co-walkers along the trail with their walking sticks and purpose. Even saw a bike rider now and then. These were folks just being, just like I saw in Dallas and Fort Worth and Waco and Austin.

The headlines coming out of Texas can sway a mind that everyone has lost their damn minds. But what I saw and heard on this trip and the one back in April were people going about their business. People who shared their hospitality like my son and his wife in Arlington and Maria and Ralph De La Cruz in Austin.

Grandpa with Anabella- Fort Worth (Photo by Antonio Nelson Ruiz)
Father and Son with Buc-ee, the mascot at Buc-ee’s (Photo by Antonio Ruiz)
Clockwise: Antonio Ruiz, Crystal Ruiz, Anabella Ruiz, Antonio Nelson Ruiz (Selfie by Antonio Nelson Ruiz)

The serenity of those open fields and the busyness of the highways and big cities showed me that Texas (at least the parts I experienced) is no different from any other state. It’s more diverse than you might think, in every sense of the word. Not everyone is a flaming redneck stereotype and MAGA cultist. People are trying to get through the day and night like everyone else. People remind you that the past is never really past, and the future is built on both the past and present. Trust me, they know the history of Texas, the bad and the good, and they are determined to build a future that recognizes that Texas belongs to more than the headlines that make them look like a bunch of secessionists. There is more good below the surface of those headlines. Despite the bravado of the slogan Don’t Mess with Texas, I met many more people who believed in Hug a Texan for a Good Time.

I’ll be back. There was so much I missed. From museums to national parks, Texas has plenty of surprises. I want some catfish and grits, fried chicken, and those Kolaches. But, let’s try it when the temperatures are not ninety plus. Please.

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