I was barely able to walk up to my grandmother in her kitchen chair as I just learned to walk. She had just finished eating an apple to the core; the only thing that was left was the little brown seeds and stem. Her way of being was antiquitous and her mannerisms were that of people who were humbled with a gentle soul. She never wasted anything and prayed every night at her alter filled with statues, candles, and religious materials she had collected over the years from various sons and daughters and who knows where else. She was of strong faith, which is what led my grandfather and her to have so many catholic-induced births. When she prayed did so incomprehensibly under her breath. Among the various people she prayed for there was a lot praying for her 12 children and their children and eventually their children’s children, all inherently self-less prayers. When she ceased to live I went to church while living in Stevens Point, Wisconsin (for part of college) after a few years of not attending in order to honor her. I felt misunderstood in my black attire and within a predominantly white church. I did not feel the impulse to share my grief with anyone. That was the first time I ever felt that alone and recluse.
Her memory as a young child was that of growing up on a farm during a horrible thunderstorm, the thunder hit a light post, the lightening followed the post’s line to the barn where the sheep staying, and a sheep was killed. I think this traumatized her at that age because she never left the house during a storm.
My grandfather was born in the 19th century. I wouldn’t even tell you how old he lived because it seems unreal. Okay, he died when I was nine, going on ten. He was a year shy of a century older than me when he passed away.
When I was ten I thought of being 20, and now I’m 21.9 and I have no children to speak of, I think my grandmother had a few by this age. I have a greyhound I adopted recently and sometimes I cook him food out of monetary necessity. He’s three years old and pees on the floor because he has a weak bladder and is weak-willed; he never lets me know when he has to go, he just does right in the middle of the floor in bucket loads.
My grandmother was walking with us through this what seemed like a dense forest with a path leading to the Rio Panepec near the home my grandfather built. The leading manufacturer of oil in Mexico called Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) owns the land that lies directly behind the house my grandfather built. PEMEX is the sole supplier of all commercial gasoline stations in Mexico. While driving through Mexico to visit our much extended family I screamed I want to go to “Pee-MEX”, with emphasis on Pee. My family has never ceased bringing it up in charming-anecdotal-story-telling-time, they brought it up recently at my age, I probably said this ten years ago.
The forest that we walked through on the way to the river is no longer as dense and the river is no longer as filled with water and organic matter. The sedimentary stones that inhabited the rivers were often taken out with large machines to be used for something human, and probably the fish too. My grandfather lost some of his hearing in one of these rivers. People used explosives to stun the fish for harvest, my grandfather had been swimming that day, and consequently the human auditory system cannot take it well either.
One of my earliest memories seems to be in the river that ended the path. I walked into the river on my own and as I looked down and then around me it was as if I learned that day what it meant to feel tall. I saw my feet, but was still standing in shallow water closer to the edge, the water not reaching above my two-year-old waist. When I looked towards where my family was dispersed in the river, the feeling of tallness was projected even further within my memory because it seemed that they too were standing tall in the water. And as cheesy as that memory seems, I would never trade it in for gold teeth.
