Grandfather Die, Father Die, Son Die

One of my mother's most fervent prayers was that God grant her the privilege of dying before any of her seven children. "I'm am not sure I could withstand the agony over the death of one of my children", she would shake her head and say.

And she was granted her wish.

It reminds me of a story I read about a man in Japan who wanted a well known and respected priest to compose a special prayer for him. "I will pay you well", he promised. "It would be my honor and privilege", replied the priest.

However, months passed and there was no word from the priest. "I wonder what could be taking him so long?" Wondered the man. More time passed and nothing.

One day the man confronted the priest at the local market place. "Where is the prayer I have commissioned you with?" "Oh yes, the prayer. I am working on it. It will be ready soon."

When again the months passed and nothing was heard from the priest, the man decided he would travel to the monastery to demand his prayer. "I have waited long enough", he said rudely to the priest. The priest smiled and said, "I have your prayer ready!"

"Grandfather die, father die, son die." The priest uttered with a look of achievement on his face.

"What!?" "What kind of perverse prayer is this?" He demanded. "I will not pay you for such a morbid prayer! Are you mocking me?"

"This is the natural order. If the son dies first, the father, and Grandfather will grieve inconsolably. If the father, dies first, then the son and grandfather will be inconsolable. But if the grandfather dies first, it will be expected since he is the oldest. If the father dies next, that too will be expected. That the son dies last, is only natural."

At that moment, the man was enlightened and gladly paid the priest for his beautiful prayer.

La Muerte, La Calaca, La Pelona: Jose Guadalupe Posada and Day of The Dead

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One of my favorite artists, is Mexican illustrator and cartoonist Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913). His drawings (engravings), reminiscent of Francisco Goya's work, are masterful satires of all classes of society, from the "Los Jodidos" (The "screwed" or poor) to "Los Ricos", the Rich, portray death is the ultimate Equal Opportunity
employer!

The pet names Mexicans have ascibed for Death speak volumes: La Calaca (Bag of Bones), La Pelona (Old Baldy), and La Chingada (The Screwed One).

Posada's death figures are not "monstrous" or "scary" but laughable, a thing not to be feared but laughed at and mocked, and they are not to be confused with the skulls and skeletons of our own Halloween. 

The beauty of Posada's work for me lies in how evenly his satire is distributed across society, and his piercing, unflinching eye for the whole laughable burden of human folly and suffering. No one is exempt; no one escapes.

His "Calaveras", the skeleton figures mocking life's brevity, and death as a grinning and fitting end for us all, have become the iconic image for Dia de Muertos, celebrated each November 2nd, in Mexico.

The annual celebration is a fusion of ancient Precolumbian Indian beliefs about death and the afterlife, and European Catholic ones. After the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, the Catholic church, in its quest to assimilate the local peoples, was quick to encourage "similarities" between European beliefs, and native ones, so All Saints Day, already celebrated on November 2, was combined with indigenous celebrations to honor the dead at that time of year, to become Dia de Muertos (Day of The Dead). 

Native peoples believe that for one day, the spirits of the dead visit with the living, so home and public altars or "ofrendas" are prepared to welcome and honor the wandering spirits.

These are laden with candles, candy, food, liquor, religious prints and statues and mementos, and decorated  with brightly colored "papel picado", cut tissue paper created especially for the occasion. It is believed the tired, and hungry souls will partake of the offerings.

Weeks before, the martket places are filled with candy, sugar skulls, "Pan de Muerto" (sweet bread in shapes of skulls), and a myriad of death figurines, to be used on the altars.

Unfortunately, the holiday also falls near Halloween, so people are quick to conclude that Dia De Muertos is a Mexican Halloween. It is not. And if anything, it is much more like our own celebration of Memorial Day where we take flowers and mementos to the cemetery to remember our dead.

Days before, the grave sites are cleaned and decorated with wreathes made of Cempasuchil (Merigolds), the ancient Flower of The Dead, and also laden with candles and food for the ancestors. The entire night of November 2nd is spent at the cemetery with family members sitting together on the grave sites, praying and singing, and serenaded by roaming Mariachi bands. The holiday is most popular on the island of Janitizio, Michoacan and in the city of Oaxaca, in the state of Oaxaca, and attracts visitors from all over the world.

At dawn, the souls return to their eternal dwelling in the afterlife, and the living clean up the cemetery, and tear down the ofrendas until the next year.

Not surprisingly, the holiday jumped the border (legally) sometime during the Chicano Movement of the 1970's when things Mexican became precious to us Chicanos in the U.S., and Chicano artists across the Southwest introduced Americans to this unique tradition, but with a touch of the North. Altars now became works of art, to be appreciated in gallery or museum settings and were sometimes dedicated to groups of individuals, musicians, artists, actors or to a social or political idea, AIDS, war, discrimination, immigration, instead of only family members.

Tragically, the holiday has been associated with "hocus-pocus", Black Magic, or Satanism, by certain ignorant do-gooders, or religious conservatives and incidents of parents trying to "sue" school districts because their son or daughter was forced to participate in this barbaric or heathenish ritual in the classroom of some liberal educator, are not uncommon.

If you want paricipate in this tradition on November 2nd, you can create a simple altar of your own on a table, dedicated to one or more of your own beloved deceased, decorated with candles, flowers, photos, food and mementos. It's easy and simple, and special.  (Avoid Halloween decorations).

And while you're at it, why not take a moment to have a beer or a shot of tequila with an ancestor for old times sake?

Life As Seen Through The Third Eye

Ever since I read about the Eastern concept of the Third Eye I fell in love it. And after a lifetime of argument, debate, reasoning, and synthesis it is the view that makes most sense to me.

Why man gravitates to a dualistic world view is maddening. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad, love and hate, Heaven or Hell, up or down, left or right. But wait, there is a Limbo, a place between Heaven and Hell, according to us Catholics, though not much is ever said about it these days.

Yet, so much of human experience is a blend or combination of the two extremes. The view that all experience is amoral, and that it is we humans who declare its morality is also tempting.

"No hay mal, que por bien no venga" (There is nothing bad, that in the end, does not turn out for good) my mother-in-law was fond of saying.

Yeah, ok but how long does one have to wait for the good to show up? Like Eternity, maybe? But yeah, some nasty things that happened to us in the past, did turn out for the best (sometimes) and things we thought were "good" turned out being our demise.

You just can't win.

So right turns out to have a smattering of wrong in it, and wrong, we discover in the end, had a teaspoon of good in it, sometimes discovered too late! There's been a rise in the dip of home sales, did you hear? And a rise in decrease of murders? What goes up must come down.

The Third Eye helps us to see this. It is nothing more than Siddhartha's epiphany that a string that is tuned to tightly, or too loosely never plays the right note. But one perfectly stretched, not too tight, or too loose, gives birth to melody.

Jesus said it perfectly when speaking of giving,"Let not your right hand know what your left hand is doing."

An Asian Dream Transplanted: God Bless America

On Saturday, I went to a birthday party to celebrate our grandson's 11th birthday at one of our local parks. My oldest son, Miguel had elaborately orchestrated a typical park party, a piñata full of candy, chips, salsa, guacamole, chile beans while my eldest, Fernando fried up some diced beef and chicken for some tasty tacos.

We found ourselves in the middle of a park surrounded by Asians, Cambodians and Vietnamese families who had spread themselves along a walkway, sitting on rugs, carpets and blankets. Barbecue grills were smoking madly and the men were doing up all kinds of goodies from stuffed sausages, kabobs, to who knows what.

At first glance, one would think these were just families out for a weekend get together at the park, but on closer inspection each group was selling food and fresh vegetables! I recognized a few, bitter melons and ginger but the rest remained a mystery to me. You simply wandered up to the group, surveyed what they were cooking up, pointed, and asked "how much?"

While we were there, several Asians, individuals and small groups, approached our table to eye what we had to eat! They probably assumed we were "selling" too! "No, no", I would stammer and smile, "This a Birthday Party."  It was a bit embarrasing, since there seemed to be no real way to know if any gathering was private or public.  "Ok", I shouted over to my son doing the cooking, "tell the next people who come by tacos are 2 for $5.00!" We all laughed. "Do you think they had a meeting to organize this gathering, or did it just happen?" I asked Miguel.

The women, the matriarchs who ran each concession, sat on the ground, mostly barefoot. They spoke little English, but had memorized "one dahlah", "two dahlah" quite well. My eldest had tried excitedly to describe the scene to me earlier in week but I could not imagine it. He lives nearby and says this goes on all week long! It was like embarking on a trip back to an Asian marketplace in some village in Viet Nam or Cambodia, but transported here to the middle of a park in my home town!

Families laughed and enjoyed each others' company, their kids running around and playing in the playground. One man made delicious snow cones with incredible and mysterious flavors and toppings. I found a red Lima Bean in mine. Now, who would think of putting Lima Beans in a snow cone? Amazing combination and it worked. He had brought a video projector, and a large poster board leaning up against an empty bucket of soy sauce turned upside down, and played musical videos. The music was soothing. As the day wore one, the music changed to Cambodian and Vietnamese Rap!

In jest, my son Miguel said "Let's ask the guy if he has any Vicente Fernandez, Cornelio Reyna or Tigeres del Norte." We laughed.

At one point, I noticed two things: We were the only Mexicans in the park and two, we were the only ones drinking alcohol.  As I sipped on my Tecate, I scanned the park and saw people drinking only water and sodas! Had the families been those of Anglos or Mexicans, someone would probably be drunk by now and raising hell. Here, there was only comaraderie, peace and harmony. I felt as if they had let me into their world.

I thought of racism, the racial hatred and suspicion of foreigners so pervasive in our country and I wanted only to go out to welcome them to America and thank them for bringing a glimpse of their ancient cultures to us.

I kept looking to the street, expecting to see a cop car, or maybe a code enforcement vehicle rushing up at any minute, with guns in hand, to demand seller's permits or some damned thing like that and closing them down.

So please, please do me a favor and don't tell a soul about this. Let them be?

Castles Made of Sand: A Spider's Story

I was watching in awe a reddish garden spider, perched cunningly in the middle of his web on the front porch of my house this morning, presumably waiting for his breakfast, when "whoosh" both he and his web were gone! A bird got him.

I am reminded of Life's brevity. Here one moment, gone the next. Doesn't seem fair. You go to all the trouble to build up a life of security around you and it is obliterated in seconds.

My grand daughter called this morning to tell me of the horrible beating of a man in the apartment below hers. She woke up to a scuffle and shouts and went outside to find a man pale, and standing in his doorway covered in blood; he had apparently been beaten with a hammer. A crowd of people gathered to stare. No one did anything. Finally, she applied a towel to his head to stop the bleeding. Though the man had been rude, even mean to her and her roommate, she saw no reason not to help.

She is shaken. Her false sense of security has been stolen from her.

There is little relief in the thought that we are all in it together, insects, animals and humans, in the locked jaws of fleeting Life. A breath away from our own death. I have often wondered how and when I will die and whether it is ultimately a blessing that we don't know the answer. All we know is this moment.

I want to go (since I must) in my sleep of natural causes. Maybe in the middle of a pleasant dream. Recently, my wife spent a week in the hospital as a result of Pancreatic pain. Next to us was an Asian patient, a mother, with a big family. Often 6 or more visitors at a time crowded inside the room. They often stayed beyond normal visiting hours and were noisy. They irritated my wife, who was in intense pain, and I.

One night about 2 AM when they were particularly noisy and crowded all the way into the hallway, I stepped outside to ask them to please be quiet. They quieted down for a short while, then the noise resumed. When the night nurse came in to check my wife's vitals some time later, I complained to her. "I know", she said sympathetically, "but the mother just died." I felt embarrassed.

The next day, I stood outside the room and looked at the empty bed. She was gone, just like that.

A couple of nights later about 3 AM, as the night nurse attended to my wife, she accidentally set off the Code Blue alarm which is initiated when a patient is dead or dying, and the alert sounded up and down the halls on loudspeakers: "Code Blue, Room 1425", "Code Blue Room 1425" over and over. Medics and doctors came running into my wife's room! "I'm sorry, I'm sorry", the nurse pleaded with the entourage, "I set off the alarm accidentally."

So this is what the end feels like? The moral of the story I guess is: don't lavish too much time building up your web.

A Prognosis: Hope Your Cardiologist Didn't Cheat on HisTest

Face it, we are a cheating culture, a culture of cheaters and we condone it, explicitly or implicitly, despite our virtuous sermonizing against it when we do our taxes, get more change back than we should have and say nothing about it, or were not charged for an item we bought at the store and keep walking towards the door.

I read with horror yesterday about how teachers in the Atlanta School District were caught and confessed to helping their students cheat on achievement tests in order to preserve their jobs and not lose government funding denied to poor achieving schools. In some cases teachers met in a cafeteria and with the blessing of their administrators, erased wrong answers and bubbled in the correct ones.

As a former teacher I can sympathize with wanting your kids to succeed and the pain of seeing them fail. Many a time I lamented having to give failing grades to a student who tried hard or who I particularly liked. It was so easy to just give them a passing grade and no one would be the wiser. The student would certainly have not complained. Statistics show that most students cheat at one time or another on tests and that most do not see it as wrong "because everybody does it".

In fact, I remember at times looking at the answers of the kid in front of me or to my side in class and copying. In high school, I survived Biology by sitting next to one of the brightest  girls in class. She would do all my written work, and I would do all the anatomical drawings of insects, frogs and amoebas for her. We both got A's!

In my college English classes I often caught students cheating by copying essays directly from a book or magazine, or copying each others papers. I read every single paper and I could tell each one of my students after returning their papers what topic they had written about, so it was not that difficult to find duplicates. Easier to spot were those papers copied from professional sources; the vocabulary, diction and sentence structures gave them away.

In one case, I allowed three young men into my class who were on the school's basketball team who simply "had to pass their English requirement to play for the team", according to the coach who personally called me on the phone asking that I let them into my already full class.

On one assignment two of them turned in an identical essay, word for word! It was a no-brainer. At the very least, they could have tried to change a few words or sentences around, but no they were identical! They must have thought I was stupid. Naturally, I asked to speak to them after class, and told them cheating was unacceptable in college. I also took the opportunity to call their coach "personally" to tell him about the incident. Did they learn their lesson? Who knows.

But teachers helping their students cheat, now that's a new one for me. For the most part though, besides writing some prompts with a ball point pen on my wrist or palm once or twice in order to pass a test, I was mostly an honest guy and didn't cheat on tests, especially in my latter years in college (now, on taxes that's another matter), becoming my own anti-cheating patrolman.

Thus, I began each semester with a lecture on the virtues of not cheating the gist of which was the moral: When we cheat, we advocate and condone cheating and make it acceptable for every other person to cheat us, and ended it with this admonition:

 "For those of you who see nothing wrong with cheating on tests, I hope your Cardiologist or heart surgeon did not get his medical degree by cheating on his tests. Good luck."

Berkeleylandia: A Valley Transplant

Fresh out of high school from a small Central Valley California cow town, Modesto, California, I walked straight into the heart of Bohemia, U.S.A. and streets filled with bare feet, reefer smoke, the smell of wine and coffee, tie-died hippies, anti-war protestors, artists, musicians, self-made poets dropouts and losers.

It was the late 50-s, early 60's when I first set foot in Berkeley California and loved it; I was an art student just down the road, at the other end of College Avenue in Oakland, and spent much of my off time lurking and hanging around Telegraph Avenue.

It was the perfect excuse for an artist with a little black sketchbook to gawk at an sketch an incredible assortment of rogue characters, sipping wine or coffee in some cramped joint smothering in the smell of cigarettes, pot, and incense.

Small cafes offered venues of poetry and live music, folk and sometimes jazz combos. Stands lining the streets pawned tie-dyed t-shirts, homemade jewelry and incense. Young people with long hair, torn pants, and scrawny beards lined the streets and I was frustratingly straight, dieing to fit in somehow.

An shady dingy foreign film cinema with two screens and no soda and popcorn concession, was a hangout for audiences hungry for dark and austere foreign films with tedious English subtitles, films by Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Eisenstein, Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel, Cocteau, Di Sica, and Kurosawa. Speechless, I pretended to enjoy the films just to be hip and in the process broadened my world beyond imagination far beyond the Hollywood epics and musicals I had grown up with.

I stayed away from the protests over one thing or another, war, politics, freedom of speech, religious and artistic freedom. Mainly  I was afraid to take a stand on anything. I was a looker, an observer, a watcher. And Telegraph Avenue, that leads straight into the University of California was abuzz with colonies of anti-establishment beings, all at home with weirdness. I loved it. A weird Chicano boy from the valley.

So I was happy just pretending to be a citizen of Berkeley, never giving away my true origins. The underground station KPFA was airing strong then showcasing the best in subterranean folk and rock. On Friday nights they held a live open mike hootenanny allowing local musicians to play. I would accompany my old friend, artist and folk singer Barry Squires who often took a turn playing. I was amazed by the talent the show attracted: mandolin, guitar, sitar, banjo and harmonica players and crooners.

I  loved hanging out at the record and bookstores and spent hours scouring beautiful books full of exquisite reproductions of the masters, architectue and ancient art, books I could never afford. I even liked their smell ever since I was a kid in the public library in Modesto.

My favorite restaurant on one corner of the avenue, served decent Mexican food reminding me of my roots, and my favorite dish was Chicken Flautas, topped with guacamole and served with a side dish of hot salsa to dip into. I never ordered anything else. Once, after telling the owner I was an artist, he asked me if I could design him some new menus. I did, and instead of the fee, I asked if he could trade me free meals and he agreed. I was to eat there free for a long time afterwards.

To this day, I still get a kick out of visiting Telegraph Avenue, which to me and many others is Berkeley and never cease to be amazed how it still is a haven for misfits, drifters and dreamers just like me.