Life with my father

By María Eugenia Guerra

 

My father lived a big life, and as broad and full as the story is that you've read on prior pages, I would tell you that is the short version.

The longer one is told on the bright, be-ribboned fabric of the life he and my mother Amanda wove for us. It is a story told across our hearts, a story I write now.

For the last week of his life as he went through the inevitable end-of-life complications of Alzheimer's -- the disease that claimed first his mind and then his body -- my father labored to breathe. That he held open the door for the arrival of my first grandchild Emily, so that I would have the sweetness of her to temper his immeasurable loss, rang the last dulcet note of his legendary kindness. Never better have I understood the circle of our earthly tenure as in the moment I met my granddaughter and said good-bye to my father.

An hour before he died I sat with my sisters Amandita and Melissa and my mother at his bedside, each of us touching him and telling him softly that we loved him. A visit from hospice nurse Tennie Dickey earlier in the day had apprised us the end would come from one breath to the next. And on that afternoon as we sat with him, not knowing with any certainty that he could hear us, we remembered the names of all the family dogs, which took us to happy memories of the house on Price Street and its incredible backyard garden and the merendero my father built for birthday parties and family gatherings. We also remembered vacations to Brownsville and Mustang Island , the organized rituals of our parents shopping and packing for our stay at the coast year after year. One of us asked if anyone remembered that Dad's swimming trunks were always for his whole life green.

Though my father was dying slowly beside us like a complex, precise clock winding down, that hour of evoking who he had been in our lives brought a measure of peace to the imminent and the inevitable.

A few days earlier as we sat at Dad's bedside I had asked Melissa and my mother what their best memory was of my father. Melissa said it was singing off-key, the two of them, barreling down the highway in the company truck making short work of "You Are My Sunshine." I dittoed that memory and added that for me it was flying kites on the hill in the Heights where Mercy Hospital would later be built. My father would carefully assemble the waxed paper kites for my brother Eduardo and me, and my mother would make the tails of old cotton sheets. Our goal was to use as many bolts of string as possible so that our kite became a far off speck in the sky.

Once when we were flying a kite, our kite already airborne, my father said, "Let's send a note up the string." He carefully attached a square of paper, a small tear from one edge to the center, onto the line and we watched it disappear up the string and into the ether. It occurred to me to ask, "But who's going to read the note?" to which he answered, "That's for me to know and you to figure out."

My mother said her best memory of my father was, "All of them."

My father's world beyond our household was accessible to us all. He took us to work some Saturdays and assigned us chores in his hardware store, a wood-floored, tin ceiling expanse of tools, building materials, appliances, sporting goods, paint, and household goods. One of our jobs was to help sweep up the oiled sawdust thrown down to clean the old wooden floors. We were children whose father sold bicycles and bicycle accoutrement -- mirrors, pumps, book racks, handlebar baskets, reflectors, grips with streamers on them. When we outgrew our bikes, Christmas or a birthday would deliver us a new Columbia or AMF floor model. He also stocked Red Flyer wagons and scooters, roller skates, fishing gear, camping gear, bowling balls, BB guns, Timex watches, and transistor radios -- things we put on wish lists, things that might be generously given if an occasion arose that merited a gift.

The Guerra Hardware Company was our tether to the rest of downtown, which in the 50s and 60s was the heart of the City. Our northernmost boundary was the post office in the federal building on Matamoros, the Laredo National Bank on San Bernardo to the east. Our errands included getting the mail, making bank deposits, and picking up office supplies.

Because books and reading beyond the classroom were so large a part of our lives, our Saturdays often included a visit to the Laredo Public Library, which was then located above City Hall on Flores and Lincoln streets.

My father and his friends, who owned businesses downtown or in Nuevo Laredo, observed the daily ritual of el café -- quick visits to the Southland Café or a nearby five-and-dime that had a lunch counter. It was wonderful to tag along and to hear the verbal sparring of these polite, intense men who seemed like giants to me -- Ismael Montalvo, Glafiro Montemayor, Alfonso Treviño Tamez.

Another part of my father's world that he shared with us was bingo night at American Legion Post 59 that is located on Zaragoza Street on a bluff above the Río Grande. My father manned the door or called the games, and we children were the errand runners up and down the stairs from the office to the bingo hall at these well-attended fundraisers. We also ferried Cokes in glass bottles to the patrons, and when the games were over, and while we waited for my father and his co-workers to tidy up the hall and take account of the night's success, we played in the old courtyard that faced Nuevo Laredo. With the bingo caller silenced, we played in the shadows of banana trees and bougainvillea rustling in the night wind, taking into account music from some live venue across the river.

My parents had two sets of children -- Sandra, María Eugenia, and Eduardo, and later, Amandita Margarita and Melissa Leandra. My father took us along to play tennis, all or one of us, and after he finished playing, he'd hit balls with us, inspiring in Melissa a true love of the game.

When I was eight and had my tonsils removed, my father made preparations for my departure from the old Mercy Hospital downtown. For the first time in my life I was speechless, since the separation of me from my tonsils had created a sore hoarseness that allowed me to speak only haltingly and in a hard whisper. My father did all the talking, telling me that Jello and ice cream might be all I could eat for a little while. He asked if I needed anything else, and thinking this was a good opportunity to end up with something I really needed, I managed to mutter a gasp that sounded like "helmet." He drove me to El Cañonazo in my robe and let me pick out a surplus Army helmet that became a prized toy.

I wonder how early my parents recognized my quirky character, that of their second child, one who took to costumes. How well they tolerated this oddity and never made me feel silly or apologized to storekeepers for the garb. From the age of five, perhaps until I was 10, I traveled in costume, often wearing boots, sometimes spurs, and the little Stetson my Uncle Romeo had given me, later graduating to full vaquerita ensembles, and then for a period going everywhere in Davy Crockett drag -- clanking along as I moved replete with doeskin boots, fringed khakis, musket, powder horn, canteen, plastic Bowie knife, and coonskin hat. It didn't take long in the Laredo heat for the hat, which was lined and had been purchased at Joske's in San Antonio, to take on a life and a fragrance of its own. It disappeared mysteriously.

There were several things I loved to do with my father when I was a child -- one was to talk to him while he shaved and the other was to watch him make hot tea, which he sweetened with two lumps of sugar.

We were witness to countless examples of my father's generosity and kindness. Youngsters who had joined the American Little League without a glove would soon own a new Wilson or a Rawlings glove that came from his store. Every morning in his store he set aside money that would be given to the limosneras, the beggar women, who came through downtown. On bitter winter nights he heated bricks in the oven to put under blankets in the doghouse. In the Flood of 1954 he used his truck to move families who lived along Chacon and Zacate creeks, this without us knowing for all of a day and a long night if he was himself safe.

There were stories about my grandfather Armengol's life as a boy at Los Ojuelos, how the Guerras survived raiding Comanches, how my grandfather had met my grandmother, a school teacher, and how the Guerras lost Los Ojuelos. The stories never stopped; they just got richer. His war stories as a young air corpsman were told as much for him to remember an event as to pass on to us a salient moral point.

When one of us hit a rough spot or a disappointment, he talked about being airborne as a young crewmember on a B-24 during the war. He recounted the beauty of the English countryside, the English channel, the German farms laid out in neat little tracts, how he thought at first there was nothing to flying in war time -- until his plane hit flak and lost an engine, causing a plume of gasoline to spew into the plane, causing a huge loss in altitude. In an oral history I made of my father's war experiences, he said, "We turned off our heated suits, the intercom, the radio, anything to prevent a spark. After five minutes, the gasoline emptied from the ruptured tank. Another five minutes and the fumes and gas had evaporated. The lack of power caused us to fly out of formation. German fighters loved to wait for bomber stragglers. They would line up and take turns trying to hit the stragglers. Over an open field we dropped all our bombs. We were flying at about 50 feet to get away from the German fighters. Another engine went out and we started pitching out ammunition, flak suits, and parachutes, anything that was not bolted to the plane. We flew so low over the English Channel that we left wake over the water. We dismounted 10 50-caliber guns and pitched them overboard, which let us gain another 25 feet of altitude as we tried to make landfall." My father and his crew, most of them boys in their early 20s, landed safely mission after mission and the rest is history, and we got the point of the story -- things are not always what they seem, and being resourceful can save your life.

As my father's disease became more pronounced over the last couple of years, the war stories were told with increasing frequency, sometimes to strangers, sometimes to his banker and financial advisor, and sometimes to his attorney. No doubt his years in the service shaped the rest of his life and all of ours. Just before he stopped being able to articulate very well, the stories were less about war itself and more about coming home from war, how important it had been to find my mother when he got off the train downtown.

That my father was afflicted with Alzheimer's disease allowed us a long good-bye. As sad as it was to see him fall to its cruel ravages, we saw him fight to keep his place. There were some funny moments which brought immense relief to Melissa and me as we tried to make sense of how the disease was changing him and all of us. But all along the leave-taking, there were moments of deep meaning and poignancy. His eyes were huge pools of love and compassion. Where words failed him, his long beautiful hands never did. Once when I wept sitting next to him and thinking he did not see me crying, he offered the ubiquitous white handkerchief from his pocket and said as he's said a thousand times with a kind admonishment, "No, no. Para qué lloras?"

More than half a year ago as he lay in the hospital bed in his room at home, he took my hand and motioned me close to his face. The ability to complete sentences had left him in earnest, and so I experienced the moment more than I heard it. He began by saying, "God!" as though a little frustrated and struggling to find words. "You are above and beyond…." he said. Unable to finish that sentence, he started another, "That one who is always investigating you, that one is defective!"

I miss my father, no more than any of my siblings who have their own cherished memories of our life with him. I love how he woke us as children, how he called us in from play, the whistle he made to call the dogs. In these later years I think of his conversations of forgiveness, redemption, and the life after this one -- incredible exchanges while we worked or drove around the ranch perimeter. I thnk of the sweet compassion he showed our livestock about to meet the hot iron at round-up. I think of how our ranch coffee tasted on cold mornings just after sunrise.

On the way home after the funeral services I thanked my sister Melissa for all she has given of herself over the years to carry the weight of arranging the care that went into making my father's last year comfortable. Amandita told her, "You were the apple of his eye, Meli." The words struck Meli like little blows and we wept in the car, knowing there are no truer words than those.

My thoughts turn to Emily, beautiful and new to this life. I think of stories I will tell her about her great-grandfather José and the kites she and I will fly until they are mere specks in the sky. I will show her how to cut a little square of paper and send it as a note into the vast blue sky.

I got it, Dad.