Feline Warrior

I watched the movie “Quinceañera” last night and it gave me weepish memories. Good but sad; easy but hard; weepish but… well, just weepish. Just like how hearing the song “Unforgettable” (by Nat “King” Cole - solo) makes me long in a deep and achy way for my Grammy.

Watching Tio Tomás Alvarez with his grocery cart of champurrado, chatting with the ladies, in his garden with the green bottles reflecting light, his niece and nephew’s images nestled with love and care among the Holy Virgin statuettes… it took me back.

The movie “Like Water for Chocolate” (”Como agua para chocolate“) does the same kind of thing to me, although it’s truly been years since I’ve seen it. The abuelita in that movie also evokes rivers of tears.

But these tears, the weepish memories, are for feelings, sensations and the desire to have them back (melancholy?). I miss my Grammy constantly. I think of her still just about every day. Her singing, funny little dances and oh, that food - I don’t believe I will ever have anything like it again in my lifetime. Food that is infused with love cannot be duplicated. The food prepared by my Mexican grandmother Rose was such that I cringe and want to slap anyone who uses the words “Mexican food” and “Taco Bell” in the same sentence. Or at least as if they are one and the same. (If I hadn’t clarified that, I’d have to slap mySELF!)

So as a child, I might spend a week in the summertime with my Grammy. Her Los Angeles neighborhood, at one time beautiful and sweet was, at the time of her death (Lord, 17 years ago…?), changing drastically. The graffiti was becoming more prominent and the beautiful little stucco houses were showing signs of impending doom, the creeping in of gangs.

Anyway, there we’d be, the two of us, riding the city buses to get to our destinations of the day. We’d go sometimes to Olvera Street, shopping, looking around, sometimes eating. Orange Crush in the bottle - glass bottle, that is. You just can’t tell me an Orange Crush tastes the same from plastic. Oh, she’d embarrass me by calling -loudly- my full name if I somehow managed to get out of her sight for a moment.

In downtown LA, we’d go to the tortilleria, where I’d be in awe of the women moving with such precision at the conveyor belt. We would eat churros, which are the Mexican version of my favorite kind of food - fried dough with sugar. (The American version being, of course, funnel cake.)

Stopping to get Chinese sometimes, a special treat breaking up the special treat of her cooking, if such an idea even makes sense. Oh, me practicing my flute in the living room while she cooked, her Spanish-language radio station blasting at the same time… my little heart suffering little fractures until I’d stop and she’d come into the living room and say, “Mi’ja! Why did you stop playing? It was so beee-youu-tee-ful,” and then the fracture would instantly heal - and expand with the joy of receiving praise from my Grammy.

Mass in Spanish… I understood not a word, but I loved it just the same.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned, maybe, that at least when I was a wee lass, being bilingual wasn’t exactly the way to be. My mom didn’t speak Spanish to us, we didn’t learn it at home. And despite my growing up in California -with all those Spanish names for cities, brown people everywhere and being connected to Mexico and all- I grew up in a place and time where being Mexican -even half- wasn’t cool. I mean… somehow it might come up conversationally in school and a kid would say, “You’re Mexican? Huh. You’re not like them…” shaking his or her head towards a group of cholos.