Tuesday 5/5/09

Cinco de Mayo-nachos at work and all my Spanish speaking mates will be up and going and smug. When I was younger the proud smugness of the people I encountered from Mexico and Guatamala and Hondurus, El Salvador would invariably piss me off but now in my maturity and having worked closely with these folks I understand and I am smug, in my turn, for them when ever we are in the presence of those who don't know about Latin culture and the superior mothering and food and the devotion to "Our Lady". I mostly know, of course, those without money who must work for a living and I have spent time with those who can barely read and who live with oppressive superstitions-I learned gratefully to always touch little ones when admiring their beauty and health otherwise the family might fear that I am a witch trying to curse their baby. Also something I have learned is that baby's belong to the mothers and are not inordinately praised because they have not yet grown into their own and any beauty, cleverness, health is a reflection on the mother for a temporary state of well being from the warm gentleness they are growing up in.
One of my friends at work who is smart won a scholarship to Yale from high school. He grew up in his Spanish speaking,devout Catholic family with strong ties to their land and people in Mexico. His parents had lost their jobs due to spitefulness of the foreman and my friend contracted juvenile arthiritus-the kind that cripples but he kept going even when he and his girlfriend got pregnant and he has graduated and continues with his community organizing. His wife is in a graduate program-she is getting her masters this month and continues on the doctorate work. His father won the lottery and bought a ranch where he grew up in Mexico His mother is depressed now that the children are grown and successful. The baby of the unexpected pregnancy is a wonderful, very smart little first grader who is tall with outrageously curly hair. Her father worries that her spanish is not quite up to par because whe has not been saturated with Spanish-the lament of all immigrant parents.
My mother's family spoke both German and French but dropped the languages utterly when they immigrated and settled land from the Oklahome land rush-I want to study that phenomonon-where were the people who had lived there and gathered there for centuries? My father showed me the great medicine bowl where the indigenous people gathered for trading, and celebrating,etc. I wonder what the story is and I don't know it. I plan to research this duringmy retirement which is only three weeks away.
My daughter is a true bitch. I never understood how to hurt people in that way of the popular girls, the cool girls but she does and she says she is that way becvause I am a bitch!! What a hoot as they say. She is so into black culture in a way that I never was even when living with R-in the end he was so full of rage towards me for my stuck up ways. I just preferred my ways of Jung and astrology and philosophy and Jane Austen which are still my ways only now I am riper.