Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers (issue alert)

At times I think professionals who are working with immigrants should get out more. What's the good of shaming? Scolding parents about not enough red meat and fresh fruits and vegetables (and about not speaking English!) sounds obnoxiously patronizing to me. That is especially true when I get into immigrant advocate mode -- which is almost automatic when I'm serving as an interpreter.

I think there is something that gets into people, even the most goody-goody do gooders, that finds it hard to resist bullying people who are powerless and dependent. The people I was helping on Saturday don't have private doctors. They don't have dentists. They don't have insurance. Many of them have incomes that are both low and erratic. So what can they do if they want their kids to go to school? The kids have to have all sorts of shots and exams to go to school. So the parents avail themselves of free exams and inoculations. They get through the insults by sit there and acting submissive and grateful.

If I were a total maniac I would have slapped the nurse who scolded the Guatemalan woman for not being able to speak
English. What purpose could such an outburst serve other than to satisfy a sadistic urge to bully a harmless and available victim? And I'm sure that that nurse, if challenged, would righteously declare that she was only thinking of the woman's own good.

Even so, the pre-school physicals assistant experience was worthwhile for me. I liked the clients if not all of the providers. And at the end of the pricks, pokes and scoldings ordeal, the kids got a free backpack stuffed with school supplies, courtesy of Fairfax County.

7/23

It began with an Arlington Auto Care mechanic from Guatemala. ``If You ever want to sell your Corolla, let me know. I want to buy one for my son for school -- to go back and forth.''

So I called him. Never heard back.

But he had planted this idea. Really he did. I hadn't thought of selling our 1997 Corolla ever. When I bought it through a broker who goes to auctions in and around Seattle, I had announced that this was it, the last car I would ever buy, we'd be buried in a common grave -- so to speak.

But a day after César planted the sell idea, we had a flat tire on the way to the Washington and Lee Swimming pool. So instead of jumping into cool water on a 100-degree July day, we sat in the minimal shade of a sweet gum tree sapling on Quincy street and waited for the AAA truck. Now, granted, I know very little about the ways of automobiles. But I do recognize that, no, it is not the car's fault when a tire goes flat. It is the fault of a loose nail lying in wait on Glebe Road. A Citgo mechanic pulled it out an hour later, patched the tire, reinflated it, and off we went.

But something, something irrational probably, started to flicker. Trouble. A 13-year-old car, even a Toyota Corolla, could mean trouble. Years ago, when most cars in America were American (with built in obsolescence) Consumer Reports had advised: use a car for six year and get rid of it. According to their statistics, to keep a car for more than six years amounted to asking for trouble.

So 13 years -- that would be double trouble. Not really. Cars have gotten much more reliable since I read that six-year rule. I think.

But speaking of Consumer Reports: a day went by and then there we were in the Columbia Pike Branch of the Arlington library, combing through back issues and specialized editions published by Consumer Reports. They were full of car-buying advice. The only criteria we focused in on were frequency of repairs, cost of repair and general reliability.

Get thee hence and buy a Honda Civic, 2007, 2008 or 2009, CR barked at us in no uncertain terms.

Also, long, long ago, CR had barked in no uncertain terms that if you're out to buy a used car, go to a rental car firm. At least, even though the milage may be high for a newish car, you can be pretty sure that the rental agencies change the oil in their cars now and then.

At an Enterprise agency on Fairfax Blvd. we met with Ryan who had, yes, a 2009 Honda Civic, silver, waiting for us. We did the obligatory ``test drive.'' Allowed as how Ryan could have our Corolla for $2100, which knocked the Honda price down to around $15,000 counting taxes and registrations and what not. Paper work, of course, can take hours. During the lulls, we saw photos of Ryan's week-old son Henry. His wife had been in labor for only 4 hours. And Henry was their first child -- a vaginal delivery. We were impressed. Four hours! ``I was very proud of my wife,'' Ryan said. We also so a photo of his Irish setter looking dubiously at Henry. But, we were assured, the dog, George, was a good friend to Henry, ever eager to lick his face.

During other lulls we discovered that Ryan was preparing for two local triathlons. This in spite of having been a competitive snow boarder who landed right on his head from a 20-foot drop during a meet in Vancouver, BC. There were several broken bones. And a sinister MRI result showed assorted spinal chord lesions and various compromised vertebrae. He experiences back pain. He does physical therapy and ``lifts every morning.'' Somehow the Washington and Lee swimming pool came up. Oh, I remember. I said I would head there after all the car sale business was done. He said that he used to play lacrosse on the W & L play field. But swimming was his real sport, the one he excelled in in High school. And, in view of 100-degree days to come, Ryan was glad that triathlon meets included a swimming component -- cool off time.

I seem to have gotten off the actual subject of buying a car, which is just as well. Car-buying is anxiety-provoking -- for me, anyway. I know that there are some people who think it is fun, just as some people think that gambling is fun. Those are the people who enjoy saying things like, ``You took $2100 for a 1997 Corolla?! That's terrible!! I coulda got twice that much, minimum. And you paid -- how much? -- like $15,000 for a used Civic?! That's crazy. I could get one for half that, maximum! That sales guy really took you for a ride.''

At some point during the paperwork lulls, I noted to Ryan that I used to be a journalist. And every year I would check the ``least trusted professions'' polls. And sometimes journalists were least trusted. And sometimes it was used car salesmen. We laughed. And he noted that there are always loud mouths who celebrate your car purchase with an insulting monologue that includes words to the effect that ``that salesman really took you for a ride.''

Footnote: in many circumstances, not just anxiety-provoking ones, I revert to my olden days professional knack for interviewing people. It's not just to allay anxiety or kill time. I really do find most people interesting in one way or another, and I like to find out what way that is. James Joyce said he never met a boring person. I don't concur. But I find his claim to be inspiring.

Footnote to footnote: Ryan still snowboards -- in West Virginia now, not in the Cascades or the Rockies.

7/15

I keep thinking these days about Miguel de Cervantes and his novel ``Don Quixote de la Mancha.'' What got me started was hearing a Spanish scholar give a talk about the treatment of Spaniards, Jews and Muslims in plays that were popular in England during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Not a pretty picture. Jews, Muslims and Spaniards were portrayed as devious, libidinous, licentious, nefarious and duplicitous. The scholar contrasted this to the way that the Jews and Muslims were portrayed in Spanish literature during the same period.

It is hard to set aside the horrendous realities of the expulsion/extermination of Jews and Muslims (and Protestants) by the inquisition from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries in Spain. But, as Nietzsche notes, art serves to protect us from the horrors of reality.

I can't remember any Jews in the 1,000-page alternate universe of ``Don Quixote.'' But there's the legend that Cervantes himself was of Jewish extraction. And his protagonist, Don Quixote, is completely uninterested in Roman Catholic spirituality, opting instead for the noble knight errant creed of ``righting wrongs and protecting widows and the weak.'' When Quixote's sharecropper-turned-squire, Sancho Panza repeatedly declares himself to be an ``old Christian'' (as opposed to a descendant of Jews or Muslims who converted) it comes across as a joke. The illiterate and earthy Sancho's claims to genteel status are farcical.

Speaking of Sancho -- during his wanderings with Don Quixote, he comes upon his former neighbor Ricote, an expelled Muslim who emigrated to Germany. The two are delighted to be reunited. Ricote is disguised as a Christian pilgrim. He's headed back to his former home to dig up a treasure that he had buried for safekeeping when he fled.

He reports that his wife and daughter are safe if not happy in North Africa. Ricote and Sancho share a drink and part -- a melancholy incident.

One of the oddest little jokes in Cervantes' compendium of humorous adventures comes right at the beginning. In a prologue, Cervantes claims that he is not the real author of ``El ingenioso caballero don Quixote de la Mancha.'' No, he found the book, in manuscript form, in a box he picked up at a flea market. The manuscript was in Arabic and signed by one Cide Hamete Benengeli. So Cervantes, who happens to be on good terms with a Muslim convert to Catholicism, has his friend translate the manuscript. And there it is: a monument of world culture, ``The first European novel,'' the Spanish equivalent of ``Hamlet'' or ``Faust.''

An odd little sidelight on this bit of wit is the sorry fact that for four years Cervantes was a hostage in Algiers, held by pirates for ransom. You'd think he would have been right up in the front ranks of Arab-haters.

Now and then when I find myself indulging in, even cultivating, a morose pessimism and cynicism I end up with a sort of spiritual indigestion. The only remedy is remembering triumphs of goodness and greatness. Among these are the greatness of Cervantes and his idealist, Don Quixote.

Contemplating them is like Harry Potter warding off the soul-destroying attacks of death-eaters. He focuses on happy memories, he recalls his many friends and helpers. Oh how pleasant it is to see, then, the forces of evil banished.

6/20

I don't like to use the word ``whore'' when referring to sex workers. They do what they do to make a living. There are worse jobs and better jobs.

But some of our representatives and regulators. They make a good deal more money -- as congress people and bureaucrats -- than I ever did. And yet they turn tricks. That's when I start thinking of the term ``whores'' in the old fashioned judgmental sense. They take money and favors from and/or pal around with oil, gas and coal barons. They spend lots of time -- doing what? -- with plutocrats' courtiers and lackeys. I'd say that that kind of whoring is simply a vice, simple greed and vanity.

I'm not saying, however, that I am absolutely sure that I wouldn't do the same if I were in the carbon sluts' positions. And I'm not saying that I'll never use another drop of gasoline and turn on a light that uses electricity from a coal-based generator.

But in this case I feel like a duped employer. I pay taxes, I pay corrupt representatives and regulators salaries that seem to me to be opulent. And then I turn around and find that they are on the take, selling me out, turning tricks on my time and making excuses.

The solution? I don't know. I see that MoveOn.org has dozens of solutions. Good luck to all that. But at this point I'm stewing in my own cynicism.

Except for one thing. I see no point whatever in blaming president Obama. He's not God. He wasn't asleep at the wheel. Blaming Obama is one form of opportunistic cynicism that I don't want to stew in.

6/15

Talk to a Gates of Ballston neighbor for a while and you'll probably hear something like this. ``Every week they take $104 out of my pay, Social Security. I'll never see it. I can't collect it. I don't have a work permit. And I send money home to my family. I have a son, 11. I haven't seen him in five years. I can't go back to Bolivia. I wouldn't be able to get back into the States. I had to pay $13,000 total to coyotes to get here in the first place. Borrowed at 20 per cent. And man you better pay it back. Those guys will take your house, everything they can get there hands on if you don't. I've been here five years. I've paid back the loan. It's hard, not seeing my son. He's growing up. He's a big kid now. I bought this thing, this camera you put on a computer so that they can see you back home and you can see them, and you can talk and hear one another, like a telephone. But I couldn't make it work. It came with a CD that's supposed to set it up. Maybe I was trying with the wrong kind of computer.''

This young man, we'll call him Guillermo which is NOT his real name, works construction. He's had jobs from DC to Seattle and lots of places in between. He keeps his rights to a little space in a little apartment here that he shares with a group of fellow Bolivians.

Failing Skype, Guillermo was settling for e-mail. That's how we met. A bunch of UU volunteers go the the Gates of Ballston community center a couple of nights a week to help people at the computer lab there with information technology. Even I can help someone set up an Yahoo e-mail account, with a little help from a fellow volunteer, a techie from India. Mainly, I'm there to interpret Spanish/English for the tech heads.

But the Skype thing . . . even Aneen the techie wasn't too sure about that. For one thing, the computer lab desk tops don't have the camera capacity. But even so, Aneen had never gotten into face-to-face-with-sound communication.

Trying to be funny, I told Guillermo that you have to talk to someone under 30, or preferably under 20, to unravel those kinds of mysteries. And, of course, we shared the melancholy thought that maybe Guillermo's 11 year old son would eventually figure out how to Skype his dad.

6/13

At a wedding feast yesterday, I was seated beside an 87-year-old man who had been to a lot of places and done a lot of things. He allowed as how in his lifetime he'd seen a plenty of technological and scientific progress. But when it comes to ethics and civilization -- nothing, no progress at all. When it comes to slaughter, ethnic cleansing and bullying on all levels, we're back with Ghenghis Khan, Tamburlaine, the wars of the roses and the crusades.

Now this guy seated next to me is a member of ``the best generation.'' He had fought in World War II. As I say, he's been to a lot of places and done a lot of things.

I was taken aback by his bleak assessment. Not that I hadn't lived through a lot of history's disheartening moments. I was born during a war. Then came another war. Then came another. Then came the two current wars in western Asia. Off on the sidelines were lynchings at home and invasions abroad, particularly in Latin America. There were little side shows in Grenada and Panama to boost flagging poll ratings. No; not encouraging, not one bit encouraging.

And yet . . . . Well, there we were at this feast, celebrating the union of two women. They were legally married in our nation's very capital. Now, there, that is progress in my lifetime.

Before I had any idea what certain words meant, I had heard a lot of playground abuse based on who was a sissy or a pansy or a fairy. By junior high I had somehow figured out that homosexuality was the crime of the century, the worst -- it was even illegal, people were enticed by cops and then thrown into jail.

Then, little by little . . . . You know the cultural history landmarks, the Stonewall uprising and subsequent front page stories. By the mid 1980s, one of my wife's work colleagues married his boyfriend in a public park. Now admittedly, it was not a legal wedding, more a consecration ceremony, with music and testimonials. Also, it took place in Seattle, the Left Coast, sodom on the Pacific, ``no better than San Francisco!'' in the opinion of inveterate scolds. Also, the boyfriend was dying of AIDS. And my wife's colleague was HIV positive. There was a definite rueful quality to our jollity.

But yesterday's jollity was unalloyed. Any kind of jollity is progress, of course. But unalloyed jollity? Yea, yea, yea.

Then there's the smoking thing. As a journalist, I was pretty much resigned to having a ``4 o'clock headache.'' Newsrooms in the '60s and '70s became smokier and smokier as the day went on and deadlines came and went. Then suddenly -- no more smoking in the newsroom! Granted, this was not necessarily a moral gain. Employers were being pressured by their health, liabilty and fire insurance providers.

There was an uproar among the smokers, who knew perfectly well that it was impossible to write without smoking. Or it was at least impossible to write well. Look at the book jackets. They had author portraits on the back: Sartre, smoking; Camus, smoking; Hemingway, smoking . . . . Even so, the ban prevailed. And no more 4 o'clock headaches for me, the stoical non-smoker.

I have two daughters. The freedoms and opportunities that have opened for them as a result of their mother's generation's struggles, and the struggles of previous generations of women, are incredible.

And speaking of freedoms and opportunities. I went to a segregated high school in Baltimore. In my senior year it was integrated. Some of the faculty noted that this was the end, the absolute end, of civility and civilization. I was warned by one genteel English teacher to never under any circumstances fraternize or befriend ``the colored.'' Then, suddenly, or so it seemed, we had a black president, the best man, in my opinion, who has held that job in my 71-year lifetime. Not to mention African American heads of corporation, heads of law firms, stars of sports teams, TV shows and music sales charts. And, more to the point, all the people I see on the bus and the metro -- every skin color, lots and lots of different languages, all going to work or to school or to play, together in one bus or one train.

Maybe centuries ago, in the years of the Mongol invasions and genocides, some temperamentally sanguine Sufi made a list of hallmarks of the historic progress that had taken place during his 71-year lifetime. And one of his contempories may have looked at it and said, ``Silly, silly fellow.'' There is always someone who, like Bertolt Brecht, will say, ``He who laughs has not head the bad news.''

But I'm not stupid. And my imaginary Sufi is not stupid. Progress may not be universal and entire. But it is real.

5/23

Normally I keep my head down
when the subject of Guatemala comes up. 13 years ago I was an acompañante in
Victoria 20 de enero, a village in the Quiche province (north central). All of
the inhabitants of Victoria had been refugees from the 36-year civil war there.
All of them were Mayan. Out of the population of about 7,000, I had extended
conversations with maybe 100 individuals. They all wanted to talk about their
was experiences. Almost all of their stories ranged from heartbreaking to
horrorific. Massacres. Tortures. Mass graves. Corrupt authorities. Genocide.
Ethnic cleansing. Exile. Expropriation of poor Mayans’ land to enlarge holdings
of wealthy ladino (mestizo or caucasian) landowners.

Mostly I listened and tried
not to cry. The people with whom I was chatting displayed the famous Mayan
stoicism. They usually had sympathic little smiles on their faces, as if they
were sorry to be making me uncomfortable.

And it wasn’t just the
stories that were making me uncomfortable. I knew that my taxes were subsidizing
this hot little side skirmish of the cold war. All a Central American
politician had to do was say that some annoying faction was Communist and, bam,
they were getting millions of dollars worth of armaments and ghastly training
in ``counterinsurgency,’’ including extensive torture instructions, at our
School of the Americas in Georgia. The hot little cold war venture went back at
least to the fifties when we overthrew Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically
elected president of Guatemala, because his opponents alleged that he was a
Communist.

The opportunities for
discomfort regarding Guatemala and much of Central America were almost
limitless. And the news from there – well you know – if it’s not horrifying,
American newspapers don’t print it.

Yes but . . .

Today I interpreted for a
man from Rabinal, a town in north central Guatemala. He is the director of a
school there. His name is Guillermo Chen. All I know is what he told a half
dozen Arlington Unitarians about his institution, the Nueva Esperanza (New
Hope) School. Bilingual instruction (Spanish/Achí Mayan). Half and half boys
and girls. Emphasis on Achí Mayan culture – spirituality, healing, history. One
tutor for 25 students. Expanding into full high school curriculum. Plans for
university. This is a town that has a history of grotesque massacres. The
founder, Jesús Tecú Osorio, is a survivor of a famous massacre in Río Negro. A
strapping lad, he was spared to work as a slave for one of the murderers of his
family and neighbors. In New York earlier this month Tecú received the 2010 Roger Baldwin human rights award.

This Nueva Esperanza story
astounded me. If you’ve ever seen school in Guatemala you know that the
students are mostly boys, girls stay home. Instruction is entirely in Spanish.
Mayans, though the majority of the population, often amount to an exploited
lower caste.

According to Guillermo,
neither the municipal nor the provincial authorities contribute to the
maintenance of Nueva Esperanza. Bilingual education is a no-no according to the
official norms of Guatemalan public education. According to Guillermo, support
money comes mostly from organizations in Canada and Europe.

>Listening to horror stories
is distressing. But listening to miracle stories can be shocking in its own way
– tears of joy vs. tears of sorrow.

Anyway, at times I found it
very hard to keep a steady voice while conveying Guillermo’s message.

If you’d like to check it
out for yourself, take a look at www.fne.cosmosmaya.info.

4/28/10

Earlier this week I got a call from a cemetery in Philadelphia. The caller began by apologizing for giving me sad news in ``such a way.'' He wanted to know if I was willing to have my family grave plot opened so that my aunt Doris could be buried there. True I didn't know that she had died. I didn't know anything about her, really, except that she a classic North Philadelphia accent (coofee for coffee, payment for pavement . . .). And that she was the mother of my cousin Patty, who had committed suicide about 40 years ago.

Yes, sure, fine. Even though aunt Doris didn't have a proprietary right to be buried in a plot that some relative had purchased years and years ago, I was glad to join with my dozens of cousins in granting her that special privilege. In truth, I didn't understand exactly what the cemetery man was talking about. I'm not sure that I had ever seen that cemetery. Maybe when I was a pall bearer at my uncle Woodrow's funeral a few years after Patty had died. Neither of my parents is buried there, proprietary rights not withstanding.

The thing was, the call got me thinking about Patty. She really was the only cousin that I had actual fun with. And she was schizophrenic. She once told me that only one side of her brain had developed. The other half was atrophied.

That side of the family was extremely religious. Now and then an aunt or a cousin would express concern about my ``walk with Jesus.'' And they would send me tapes and pamphlets and videos about the importance of salvation, if only as a way of avoiding the eternal torments of hell. With Patty it was more about sitting together on the piano bench, playing Diabelli duets and yelling ``not, not like that!'' and pushing each others' hand away and wiggling on the bench to get the other one to fall off and then giggling too much to either hit the right keys and or mount any attacks by pushes or pulls or smacks or shoves.

Patty was brilliant in school. She was given an early admission to one of the Christian fundamentalist colleges. Then she started becoming erratic. She was in and out of institutions. Hundreds of people were praying for her.

I lost touch. I went to a very non-Christian non-fundamentalist college. Then I lived in Mexico for a while. Then graduate school. Then work in Puerto Rico, followed by work in Houston. Patty stayed in Philadelphia, apparently in and out of institutions, harmful to self and other. I was never clear about the sort of harm.

When I moved back to Philadelphia to take a job, I got in touch with Patty. She was living in a sort of halfway house. I invited her to dinner. She was taking the strong drugs that people took in those days. Mental hospitals were being closed, being replaced by what seemed to be pharmaceutical institutionalization. Patty gave me a poem that she said she had written. When I read it, I was struck by its intensity. I was also struck by the fact that it was almost identical to a poem by Sylvia Plath, the one about her infatuation/obsession with her father. I found it troubling, partly because of my own uncomfortable relationship with my father.

A few months later Patty called me on the phone. She announced that all her problems were the result of hypoglycemia. She was cured. She was living in a psychiatrists mansion as part of a project connecting hypoglycemia with schizophrenia. She invited me to the house to see a brief movie. I accepted. In the movie she went into a sort of seizure and then as a result of carefully administered orange juice, she regained consciousness and smiled. As we were talking after the film she said that she was convinced that schizophrenia was entirely physical. She said that one of the clear diagnostic indicators was grooved fingernails. I looked at my fingernails: grooved! We laughed.

When I met him at my father's funeral, Patty's father said that he wanted to send me some information. It was not what I feared and expected. It was a long list of male relatives and the various automobiles that they had owned. All I remember is that uncle John had owned a Stutz Bearcat when he was in a 1920s jazz band.

At funerals, both Patty's parents would thank me for caring about Patty, and then they would explain how she had botched up there family life in ways that I couldn't quite follow. I mean Patty was dead. But she was still exercising some destructive influence?

Before she died I visited Patty in the psychiatric ward of a city hospital. She was there recovering from a fall. She had jumped out of a 10th story window. It was in her psychiatrist's office. Somehow the fall hadn't killed her. Or at least it didn't kill her right away. It was strange sitting there at a day room table with Patty, trying to think of something to say. Strange to remember that I used to push and shove and tickle this person on a creaky piano bench. She seemed to be in a trance. She was doing some occupational therapy -- making Christmas tree ornaments out of paper (no scissors needed). She gave me one: purple and pink strips braided into a kind of star. When I got up to leave, she focused her eyes. We looked at one another intently and she said, ``Thank you.''

I gathered that internal injuries from the fall were not healing. A week later a heard that she was dead.

4/21/10

Not that I go to all that many funerals and memorial services – maybe one or two a year, maximum. By the time she was in her late 90s my mother was attending such
events at a rate of about one a week. But I think that even my late mother
would have been startled by the wake/funeral/memorial service that I went to
earlier this month. For me it was bizarre.

The deceased, Louella (all names here are disguised), was a relative of mine by marriage. She had died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism. After her morning
shower, she went into the living room to lie down on the couch. Lying down was
her only comfortable option. She had done something to her back. She was taking
Percocet, a painkiller. According to her Google-informed adopted son Ramón
blood clots are a possible side effect of Percocet. Those using it are advised
not to remain stationery for prolonged periods. Stationery, however, was the
only state in which Louella was anything like comfortable. She started feeling
faint as she lay on the couch. Clots were blocking the arteries that connect her
heart and the lungs. Louella’s husband Adam called 911. When the medics arrived
eight minutes later, Louella was dead. She didn’t respond to resuscitation. She
was taken to an emergency room. Fifteen minutes of resuscitation efforts there
failed. Louella was 66.

None of all that qualifies as bizarre. We all hear similar reports from time to time. The bizarreness came a few days later at the wake/viewing. Adam, sobbing,
kept kissing Louella’s corpse as it lay in an open coffin. I don’t know. Maybe
bereaved husbands do that all the time. But white Protestant Anglo Saxon
husbands? Othello, yes. But Adam? I admit. I don’t know. But never mind that.
Things got odder and odder – at least by my white heterosexual Anglo Saxon
Protestant standards. Ramón, the
adopted son, sat weeping on a love seat in a funeral home alcove. Last time I had seen Ramón he was
punching Louella’s breasts. She was trying ineffectively to fend him off. Adam,
a little more effectively, was trying to pull Ramón away from Louella. That
must have been at least 15 years ago.

Later I heard that Ramón had pulled a knife on Louella. He started calling her a ``fat b****.’’ He stole money and jewelry from her. He would show up drunk and
high at his parents’ back door, howling. They got no-contact court orders.
Ramón was in and out of special schools, juvenile detention centers and, eventually,
adult prisons. Louella feared Ramón. She started a support group for people who
had adopted difficult children. The members became her best friends. Dozens of
them came to her memorial service (at the Unitarian Universalist church she
attended in what is allegedly the wealthiest county in the US. It happened to
be the nearest congregation to where she lived in distinctly non-prosperous
Queens. Adam and Louella were highly educated lower middle class. They worked
for various non-profit agencies as members of the ``helping professions.’’ They
lived in a one-bedroom apartment with an ever-changing assortment of large
rescue dogs.)

By the time he was a late teenager, Ramón had moved out of the tiny apartment. Louella was so afraid of him that she avoided him completely. Adam however had lunch with Ramón once a month –
when he was out of jail. When not in jail, Ramón was sometimes homeless. He and
his pregnant girlfriend lived on the streets of Brooklyn and Queens for a
while. The girlfriend miscarried. The couple broke up.

Eventually, somehow or other, Ramón earned his high school equivalency certificate. He took a course in janitoring. He found a job. He got an apartment. Adam didn’t want
to know Ramón’s address or phone number. Now and then police with warrants
would visit Adam, asking how they could find Ramón. Adam didn’t want to lie. He
could say, ``I don’t know, I can’t tell you,’’ with a clear conscience.

Ramón would call Adam now and then. Sometimes he would talk to Louella. The day Louella died, Ramón ``felt something.’’ He called Adam and asked to talk to Louella.
Adam said, ``She’s not here.’’ ``She’s passed, hasn’t she?’’ Ramón asked.
``Yes.’’

This conversation was reported to my by Ramón as I sat with him on the funeral parlor love seat. He slouched forward. His back was heaving. I put my hand on
it. He wept for about five minutes. When he stopped he tilted his head toward
me and said, ``Thank you. I guess suffering is necessary. The thing is now I
can never . . . (pause) . . . I wasn’t good to Louella. She was good to me. But
I wasn’t good to her . . . (pause) . . . I’ll tell ya, I have mother issues.’’

For sure. When Ramón was 2, he was with his mother when her crack and heroin dealer came to their apartment. After some physical violence (according to the child
welfare report) the dealer shot Ramón’s mother dead. After that, it was a
series of foster homes and children’s shelters for Ramón.

Ramón didn’t elaborate on what ``mother issues’’ meant to him. He got up – six feet tall, white shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck and not tucked in to
black jeans that were alive with shiny steel zippers, studs and D-rings. Ramón
shambled over to a prie dieu set up beside Louella’s open coffin. He crouched,
sitting sideways, his back to the assembled mourners, some of whom eyed him
warily. Many of them were familiar with Ramón-outrages stories. Ramón, however,
just sat next to the coffin, sobbing, his back heaving. But he didn’t carress
Louella's folded hands or kiss her pale cheeks and forehead.

Later he asked Adam for Louella’s car.