There isn’t much I remember about being a toddler, not sure that most people do, no residual memories left over from before I was five years old. My parents were a couple of immigrants trying to make their way in Ronald Reagan’s America, I guess the earliest situations I can recall took place sometime in ’87 or ’88. I was a single child, or so I thought. There were a couple of pictures hanging on the bedroom wall of the one-bedroom apartment we lived in, an apartment that was the perfect size for a young couple with one child. The faces I always looked at were of two toddlers, they were maybe about one and two years old at the time the photos were taken. Zulma and Richard. Those were the names of my sister and my brother. Despite having seen pictures of them as preteens, I always had the idea in my head that they were younger than me. I thought myself the older brother. Maybe them not being there physically allowed me to imagine myself as the one in charge, that I was the older one looking out for them.
Back then my parents’ work schedules didn’t sync up. My mother worked in the mornings at a sweatshop, sewing clothes together while my father worked graveyard at a big printing press. Mom would drop me off at a nanny (Ague, we called her), she was the mother of one of my mom’s coworkers. That lady became a big part of my childhood, she was my nanny since I was a couple months old and a sort of surrogate grandmother. Somewhere around noon my dad would pick me up from Ague’s house, she lived in the Pico Union area of Los Angeles, and take me home to spend the rest of the day with him. He’d make me lunch, take me to Hoover Park and he’d play basketball while keeping an eye on me as I played in the sandbox and on the slides. I always loved the sandwiches my dad made me. He would cut a pan Francés (bolillo roll to you non-Salvadorans) in half like a torta, slather the two halves with mayo, add slices of Kraft’s singles, freshly cut ham from the carnicería that was on the way home, add some leafs of lettuce, and slices of tomatoes. To drink, nothing washed a meal down like a nice big cup of flavored drink. We always had two gallons of the stuff in the fridge. Every week my dad would buy two one-gallon plastic jugs of it in whatever flavor he was in the mood for that week; grape, cherry, strawberry, pink lemonade, lime. If you could make an artificial flavor of that fruit, it was found in a gallon jug at the local mini market or liquor store for a dollar. Sure we could have bought Kool-Aid and made our own, but these “juices” were mixed right every time.
Sometime around 4 or 5 p.m. my mom would come home from work. My parents only had about an hour to spend together before my dad had to go off to work. They basically had enough time to eat dinner together.
Nights with my mom weren’t as eventful. We didn’t live in the worst neighborhood in L.A., but it wasn’t the safest either. That apartment on the corner of W22nd St. and Magnolia Ave., a large two-story purple house that was divided into four apartments, was still a better bet than where my parents previously lived. I’m not too keen on the exact details, I just know that their apartment was somewhere on Broadway in Pico Union. One night, coming home from the movies or a dinner date, my parents were attacked by a mugger with a knife. My mom was abiut 8 months pregnant with me at the time. The whole thing was going down just a few feet away from the front security gate to the their building. My dad pushed the guy off enough for him to grab my mom by the arm and start running for the gate. He got to it and opened it and bolted for the door of the building. In his haste to get the door open and both of them into safety he didn’t realize that my mom was still at the gate struggling with the assailant trying to get the gate door shut. The mugger had managed to wedge his foot in the way of the door, keeping my mom from being able to shut it. The gate and front door were only about 20 feet from each other. When my dad realized what was going on, he rushed to help my mom wrestle the gate door closed and the couple were able to make it safe inside. Needless to say because of prior experience, my mom wasn’t going to advertise that there was a woman alone with a toddler in that apartment. So, we stayed in, I played with my toys and my mom watched novelas until it was time for bed.
Religion didn’t ever really play a part in my house. Both my parents were raised Catholic but we never went to church. Hell, in my immediate family, the only ones that haven’t been baptized are my dad and myself. My mom has always believed in God and my dad never really spoke about it, at least not while I was growing up. He always wore a crucifix, so I always assumed he had some sort of belief. Someone had given me a Bible storybook, written in Spanish, that contained all the Bible myths in illustrated children’s story book style. When you have drawings of a man fighting a lion with his bare hands, no story is ever boring. Something of the sort is always going to grab the attention of a kid right away.
Right before bed, I used to pray. I used to pray for the well-being of my family in El Salvador (people I had only heard of but never met); for my grandmother, Mama Tilde (mom’s mother); the grandfather whom I never met, Papa Marcos(mom’s father); the two uncles I had met because they lived in L.A., Tio Tulio (mom’s older brother) and Tio Jaime (dad’s older brother); for the only cousins I knew at the time, Patti, Claudia and Jenny (Tio Tulio’s daughters); and for all my cousins, aunts, and uncles in El Salvador. Mostly, I used to pray for my baby brother and sister, the two photos framed up on the bedroom door.
I don’t know if my parents ever corrected me, if they did, I don’t remember. I just went on thinking for a while that because I was the only child physically in the house, I had to be the oldest. Right before I was about to turn five years old my parents planned a month-long trip to El Salvador, I was finally going to meet my family and I was going to celebrate my fifth birthday there in the neighborhood my parents grew up in. Also, by some perverse way the Universe likes to mess with me, about a month before we went on that trip, my mom got pregnant with my little sister. At this point in time, my dad’s work schedule was more in sync with my mom’s, he had switched over to a morning/day shift and they were able to find the time to go ahead and make my sister.
This is the news I went into my trip to El Salvador with. I’ll get into that trip next time.
So come back and I’ll tell you more about my life…
Let me say this... 