Inspiration Redux

It’s Finals Week, and all my inspiration is tuned into making it over the hill. So, I grabbed this from the vault. The following was inspired by “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion for my English 404 Creative Nonfiction class.

Language
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I’ve been told that the inspiration for writing is everywhere. Just open your eyes, I’ve been directed. The person or object in front of you, even when it’s a computer screen or the view of the backyard through your office window. Look up in the sky like when you were a kid, and you stared out your bedroom window and conjured up images from the cumulous clouds above the Patterson Projects in the South Bronx. It doesn’t matter where it comes from as long as you write something. Oh, they’re very insistent. The inspiration is there and everywhere. I must open my eyes, ears, and mind to the possibilities.

For a long time, I couldn’t write a thing. Well, that’s not accurate. I could write a love letter, a script for a radio show, a television news report, a technical or policy paper, or maybe sneak in a poem or two. Still, these were either the duties of a job or some frivolous moment to fill while I waited for something more serious to come along. Filling time. That’s how I sometimes thought of creative writing. You know, the writing where you open your heart and soul and scream words onto a page until they click into moving pictures. Or, to put it another way, they can walk into living worlds and settle down to rest as long as they want.

Education
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

A million other writers and I have said it before, writing, authentic writing that spills out honestly when you grab the courage to free yourself, and your soul will follow, is difficult. Almost impossible if you’re not honest with yourself. Writing on demand can seem easy when you’re just pecking away at the keys in the hopes that something comes out and all that seems to appear on the screen in front of you is gibberish that even your eyes can’t translate. But you did exercise your fingers and proved that you could type. Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it.

When I was a television reporter, and I had to crank out two-three scripts in the span of a couple of hours (without the aid of a computer or Grammarly), you had notes, and maybe you had a chance to watch the news film (probably not) or the video (doubtful). You had to tap your memory banks, write a story based on fact, make sure it made sense, and ensure that it weaved with the visual element into a minute-and-a-half report that was succinct and clear enough that someone at home would take that time to watch it. Not sure I would call it “creative writing,” but you did hope it moved someone’s feelings or mind an inch. This is before the internet when people did sit in front of a television at an appointed hour or at least had it playing in the background over dinner and watched and heard crime stories or scandals or some stimulating “if it bleeds, it leads” news report that had spun out of your electric typewriter only an hour before. My goal was, to tell the truth in the best way I knew how and my inspiration was the reality I had witnessed or at least gotten other witnesses to share their stories.

Language
Image by Willi Heidelbach from Pixabay

The Creative Writing I do in college is different and more challenging. Some people can do any number of processes, exercises, and techniques to get their creative juices started. I start writing simply enough. A title. A thought. An incident from my past. A word. A single word. What’s important is that I start typing. Type. Type. Type. Take a breath and then start typing again and be confident enough to ensure that a stream of sentences flows across the screen and that it makes some sense. Okay, maybe not at first. It’s my first write. Perhaps it will be gibberish at first. It’s a beginning.

Then, I go over it, the writing. Sometimes, I’ll study it on the screen, making immediate changes as I go along. Or maybe after the fourth or fifth versions (I’ve done upwards of twenty versions during the course of writing a piece), I’ll print it out and read it aloud, listening to the cadence of the words, the connection of those words, the specific words themselves, hoping that I’m not repeating the exact words, nouns, prepositions, adverbs, complex sentences that run into each other because I sometimes forget that there are such things as periods or commas or semi-colons. Grammar not being my strong suit sometimes. Always thinking what’s a better way to say something (Word Hippo is my thesaurus friend). To visualize it first and then splash it across the page so that whoever reads it stops for a moment to absorb it, to bring it into themselves and allow it to fill their head and soul with the music of the words and beauty of the picture that is flashing before their imaginations. That’s when you know. Yeah, it’s all good.

Lifelong Learning
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I don’t want to stop there. I want to be continuously inspired to make the words sing louder, and the picture is brighter, the colors forcing you to look at them while at the same time they burn into your very essence and your heart dances gleefully and more heartedly than the first time you read or heard my words.

There’s so much more to learn. To exercise my fingers across this page, to tap that thing inside all of us so that those unique words just come forward and wrap me and you in ecstasy.

Yeah, that would be good.

Inspiration

The following was inspired by “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion for my English 404 Creative Nonfiction class.

Language
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I’ve been told that the inspiration for writing is everywhere. Just open your eyes, I’ve been directed. The person or object in front of you, even when it’s a computer screen or the view of the backyard through your office window. Look up in the sky like when you were a kid, and you stared out your bedroom window and conjured up images from the cumulous clouds above the Patterson Projects in the South Bronx. It doesn’t matter where it comes from as long as you write something. Oh, they’re very insistent. The inspiration is there and everywhere. I must open my eyes, ears, and mind to the possibilities.

For a long time, I couldn’t write a thing. Well, that’s not accurate. I could write a love letter, a script for a radio show, a television news report, a technical or policy paper, or maybe sneak in a poem or two. Still, these were either the duties of a job or some frivolous moment to fill while I waited for something more serious to come along. Filling time. That’s how I sometimes thought of creative writing. You know, the writing where you open your heart and soul and scream words onto a page until they click into moving pictures. Or, to put it another way, they can walk into living worlds and settle down to rest as long as they want.

Education
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

A million other writers and I have said it before, writing, authentic writing that spills out honestly when you grab the courage to free yourself, and your soul will follow, is difficult. Almost impossible if you’re not honest with yourself. Writing on demand can seem easy when you’re just pecking away at the keys in the hopes that something comes out and all that seems to appear on the screen in front of you is gibberish that even your eyes can’t translate. But you did exercise your fingers and proved that you could type. Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it.

When I was a television reporter, and I had to crank out two-three scripts in the span of a couple of hours (without the aid of a computer or Grammarly), you had notes, and maybe you had a chance to watch the news film (probably not) or the video (doubtful). You had to tap your memory banks, write a story based on fact, make sure it made sense, and ensure that it weaved with the visual element into a minute-and-a-half report that was succinct and clear enough that someone at home would take that time to watch it. Not sure I would call it “creative writing,” but you did hope it moved someone’s feelings or mind an inch. This is before the internet when people did sit in front of a television at an appointed hour or at least had it playing in the background over dinner and watched and heard crime stories or scandals or some stimulating “if it bleeds, it leads” news report that had spun out of your electric typewriter only an hour before. My goal was, to tell the truth in the best way I knew how and my inspiration was the reality I had witnessed or at least gotten other witnesses to share their stories.

Language
Image by Willi Heidelbach from Pixabay

The Creative Writing I do in college is different and more challenging. Some people can do any number of processes, exercises, and techniques to get their creative juices started. I start writing simply enough. A title. A thought. An incident from my past. A word. A single word. What’s important is that I start typing. Type. Type. Type. Take a breath and then start typing again and be confident enough to ensure that a stream of sentences flows across the screen and that it makes some sense. Okay, maybe not at first. It’s my first write. Perhaps it will be gibberish at first. It’s a beginning.

Then, I go over it, the writing. Sometimes, I’ll study it on the screen, making immediate changes as I go along. Or maybe after the fourth or fifth versions (I’ve done upwards of twenty versions during the course of writing a piece), I’ll print it out and read it aloud, listening to the cadence of the words, the connection of those words, the specific words themselves, hoping that I’m not repeating the exact words, nouns, prepositions, adverbs, complex sentences that run into each other because I sometimes forget that there are such things as periods or commas or semi-colons. Grammar not being my strong suit sometimes. Always thinking what’s a better way to say something (Word Hippo is my thesaurus friend). To visualize it first and then splash it across the page so that whoever reads it stops for a moment to absorb it, to bring it into themselves and allow it to fill their head and soul with the music of the words and beauty of the picture that is flashing before their imaginations. That’s when you know. Yeah, it’s all good.

Lifelong Learning
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I don’t want to stop there. I want to be continuously inspired to make the words sing louder, and the picture is brighter, the colors forcing you to look at them while at the same time they burn into your very essence and your heart dances gleefully and more heartedly than the first time you read or heard my words.

There’s so much more to learn. To exercise my fingers across this page, to tap that thing inside all of us so that those unique words just come forward and wrap me and you in ecstasy.

Yeah, that would be good.

American Pancho

My final revised essay #2 for English 404 Creative Nonfiction is the following.

American
Photo by Sumire Gant

There was a time before the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s cries of I have a Dream. Before Civil Rights laws ended official discrimination and hypnotized America into believing that racism was dead. A Catholic priest in a monk outfit called me Pancho when I was thirteen years old at an all-white seminary for future pedophiles (I mean priests), where I was the only Puerto Rican Dominican boy.

I’ve always wanted to be a Catholic priest since probably the first time I became an altar boy at ten or eleven. There was something special about the church's ritual, high holy mass, the religious statues, incense burning, the blessed cross, the priest robes, and the dead Latin words that we had to learn as altar boys (sorry, no girls allowed). I wanted to be a priest to comfort the sick, look after the dead, and serve the church.

The man in the monk outfit believed, in 1962, that he could mock me with the name Pancho because there was a white comedian of Hungarian-Jewish origin named Bill Dana, aka William Szathmary, who thought it would be funny to ridicule millions of Spanish-speaking Americans, both native-born and immigrant American whose only dreams were to dream upon a star for the American Dream. Dana thought it was hilarious to create a broken-English-speaking character named Jose Jimenez to prance through white television before white audiences acting like it was all good fun, mocking our accents and culture and our ability to understand what the fuck he was talking about (sort of like a Latinx version of Stepin Fetchit).

American Pancho
Photo by Antonio Ruiz

He stereotyped us at our expense, giving this Catholic priest the cojones to color me Pancho (Pancho, Jose, it’s all the same. Foreigners) like he didn’t know my real name. Or maybe he thought that all Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, and Mexicans were called Pancho instead of Antonio or Emilio or Margarita or Estella because we all looked alike or spoke Spanish only or Broken Spanish English even though I stopped speaking Spanish in the second grade after a Catholic nun told my parents

We don’t speak that foreign language here
this is America, and in America 
we speak English (Or is it American English?).

My second-grade teacher

I was taught to be a loyal flag-waving pledge-of-allegiance-reciting American like the American-born citizen I was. Still, the priest made me feel like I was different from the other boys with their blond hair, red cheeks, freckles, blue eyes, Irish and Italian names, and excellent friendly American names like Anthony or Tony.

The United States of America, when I was growing up, was not shy of proclaiming itself a white America (like today) because they were the majority and who would stop them? They taught us in Catholic school that to be a good Catholic was to be a good American, and to be a good Catholic, we must bow to Rome and Europe and follow closely behind the Irish and Italian priests in Negro (we didn’t call them black people back then) and Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhoods because as any good Catholic knows if you study the statues and pictures in our churches and schools and homes, Jesus and the Apostles were white like in European white. 

Yep, no doubt about it, and we should be grateful for it. Even after I wrote my name as Anthony, the priest continued to call me Pancho like he had a permanent brain fart and wouldn’t remember my real name, the boy with brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. So, the name became a label, and then all the other students thought they had permission to suddenly not remember my proper name, and they began shouting:

Come here, Pancho. Go there, Pancho. Be our mascot Pancho.

My co-students at the school for priests.

They treated me like an outer space alien from some foreign South Bronx ghetto public housing project who was probably there on a scholarship. They didn’t hide what they thought.

You must be poor because you are brown and come from a long line of those people who are not from around here and speak some foreign language, unlike the dead language of Latin that we are taught daily.

I’m sure this is what they were thinking.

Talk about irony.

My father, who was Puerto Rican, would often proudly tell us that his grandfather was from colonizer Spain. There was no mistaking him for anything but a Spaniard on a dark moonless night. At the same time, there was no mistaking that my mother was from the Dominican Republic. You know, the country right next to Haiti on the same island called Hispaniola, where many dark people who are descendants of Africans live and where my mother had something other than the colonizer's blood in her. African and indigenous Caribbean DNA.
 
Nope, no mistaking where she was from.
American Pancho
Photo by Antonio Ruiz

I knew my name was Anthony or even Tony and I wasn’t Jose Jimenez or Pancho. I did hear about Pancho Villa, but I wasn’t Mexican, and I didn’t think they were talking about that Pancho. If you watched television and movies and commercials or read comic books in the fifties and sixties, you were an American if you looked a certain way. Hence, the name Pancho was to remind me that I was a foreigner from another country, not the United States of America.

My parents called me Anthony when I was born because they wanted me to grow up as a good American boy. So all my siblings’ names, Margarita, Pedro, Virginia, and Jose, were anglicized because that was the best way to prove that we were all genuinely American.

Americans want friendly American names like James, Mary, Michael, and Linda, but I still didn’t get why the priest and the white kids couldn’t swallow a nice Catholic name like Anthony or Tony but Pancho rolled right off their Catholic tongues. 

I read somewhere that Pancho is primarily a male name of Spanish origin that means free, a shortened form of Francisco, as in the name of Pancho Villa, the Mexican Revolutionary.

My feelings are raw sixty years later as the memories flood my head. I still don’t know why the Catholic priest chose Pancho (maybe Father Pancho sounded better), choosing to ignore my nice Catholic name, perhaps because it was so difficult to swallow. Naïve, I soon learned that there was pain in a name. But that didn’t stop the priest and everyone else who thought Bill Dana, aka Jose Jimenez, was hilarious with his broken English while wondering why Pancho here spoke good American English even if it was with a Bronx accent and despite being born in the United States of America in the most diverse city in the world called New York City and being given a nice Catholic name by parents who loved each other and came to America in pursuit of the American Dream just like the Irish, the Italians, the French, and the Germans. Instead, I was constantly told to go back to where I came from.

The funny thing is that my Puerto Rican father was born an American citizen, as are all Puerto Ricans since 1917, and I was an American citizen, and they still couldn’t bring themselves to say my name, Anthony or Antonio; hell, I would have even settled for Tony.

Now I see that those who called me Pancho did not appreciate the irony of the name Pancho, also a shortened form of Francisco as in Free Man, used by a Mexican hero and revolutionary who set out to make a nation Free, as in, I am a Free Man named Antonio.

Language

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

Language
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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.

Language
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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.

Language
Image by Willi Heidelbach from Pixabay

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.

Language
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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.

American English

One in a series of essays about being American.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The woman in the black and white hijab like costume told my parents that we all are in America now and in America we speak English not the Kings English but the American English because while we are descended from England (well, some people are) because they founded this country (not really) and they built this country (definitely not really) we must therefore speak English (not really) not the King’s English because we fought a revolution against the King of England that’s why we don’t speak the King’s English but the American English that we speak everywhere otherwise how will Spanish-speaking (that’s another poem) people understand their orders to clean the bathrooms or push racks of clothing down seventh avenue or cook in their restaurant kitchens or wash their dishes or take care of their lawns or their children or whatever it is that we do when they’re not looking while some of us speak that non-American lingo hoping they don’t hear us because we know what they will do when they hear that non-American lingo and start screaming like banshees that they can’t stand to hear our mumbo jumbo como esta usted foreign lingo that came from our brown and black mouths and yes there are some white people on those same islands and countries that were raped and conquered by those European Spanish people from the Europe side of the world where the King of England lives near but doesn’t speak that foreign lingo that they say they can’t or won’t understand and refuse to acknowledge it but meanwhile they live in cities and neighborhoods with Spanish names and eat at those restaurants with Spanish names that they swear ain’t the same because that’s hip and cool and they tell me they love them some carnitas and burritos and arroz and beans and tacos and Cuban sandwiches but hate that we speak that foreign lingo in their presence puncturing their sense of identity as an American speaking you know American English because we might be talking about them and it is important that they always understand what is being spoken around them except for their hundred year old polish grandfather or eighty year old Italian cousin who came to visit and has no idea what the fuck they’re saying and the nice German girl they met while on vacation in Berlin at the Octoberfest festival the one they wanted to show her their sausage sandwich because hell who needs lingo when everyone can use hand signals and pictures to show what they mean but they still complain that everyone should know how to speak American English even the people who speak the King’s English even the damn people who come from China and Africa and the Middle East and they wonder in American English why won’t those people stop talking that foreign lingo shit because they’re convinced that they must be talking about them otherwise why wouldn’t they talk like every other red-blooded American with no accents and using simple words that they can understand without looking them up on google insisting that one or at the most two syllable words only in American English is sufficient (there you go using a big word) for them to understand while some of us dream that we could knew more the one or two syllable American English words like French words and yes Spanish words and Japanese words and Arabic words and even German and Italian words so we can communicate with as many people in the world and learn to share and learn their lives and maybe learn a thing or two that all of have in common and those things we don’t have in common and not worry about whether they’re talking shit about us but yeah it would be cool to learn a couple of curse words in French (connard) and Italian (figlio di puttana) and German (Mutterfucker) and Japanese (マザーファッカー) and Chinese (混蛋)and Spanish (hijo de puta) and wouldn’t that be cool so that the next time some fool tells all of us that we can’t speak anything but the American English (what exactly is that again) we could riff off some of these words and impress them because they wouldn’t know if I was talking about them or their mother and father or the close-minded mind that thinks all people in this country speak exactly the same without any accents because there are words that only they in their part of the country knows those words and an accent in New England is going to sound different than one in Alabama so really they need to get their asses out of their heads and learn a thing or two that might make them uncomfortable because they don’t know it yet but it might help them with that German woman or Italian man or how to order in an ethnic restaurant unless they’re going to stay in their neighborhood in their block in their house all their life damning anything and anyone outside their comfort zone learning nothing seeing nothing doing nothing being nothing all because they refuse to learn something because they think they already know everything there is to know and it is only spoken in American (tell me again what that is) English demonstrating once again how small how narrow how dumb a life that must be and that they really are so proud of it even if it makes them smaller than a grain of sand a speck of dirt that is so insignificant (no big words please) that there is no hope for them and that is sad for them and this country and all of our futures.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

100

The following was an assignment in English 404, Creative Nonfiction, to write an essay of only 100 words.

Language
Image by Lucia Grzeskiewicz from Pixabay
100 English words. That’s how many I probably knew in the first grade. My Puerto Rican father, Dominican mother sent me to Catholic School at five years old to become an American. The nun with the stern scowl, black and white hooded costume, a long chain of rosary beads hanging from her hip told my parents, “This is America. In America, we speak English.” The nun didn’t have to say only at the end. My parents knew what she meant. 
Language
Biljana Jovanovic from Pixabay
My mother’s English was terrible, so television became my teacher. By the eighth grade, I couldn’t remember 100 Spanish words. 
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