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Showing posts from 2012

Los perros finos de San Antonio

They are all over the city, running geese with tails and woofs.  Many  have mange, others have the signs of wounded battles, and others are like these, bones and waiting for the last day.  Los perros flacos, and I saw this one a few weeks ago when I was reading at the Memorial Library on Culebra.  There are two of them:  one is a black pit, I call him "Negro," who loves me now, and this white one, "La Flaca," her bones crackle when she walks.  Negro runs the show, I guess. You need to get rid of these dogs, the homeowner says.  She says that people dump dogs here, and the City hasn't been able to catch them.  Since I've been feeding them, they come to me, and Negro jumped into my van this morning.  He's ready to go.  You ready for the doggie garden?  It was the deer strips, I think. 

The lady lawyer from San Antonio

In San Antonio, a city not about The Alamo

There is music here.  A tango of polkas played with accordion.  There is kindness that fills the ache of lovelost that this city repairs in your soul from its people.  It's not the margaritas, it's the people who make you smile and  laugh again.  I don't know where this comes from, exactly, but I know that part of it is from being hated for so long, and how love is the only response to make it better.  This city is not about the Alamo, but the alamo -- the cottonwood trees the mission was named for, and the wet of fall and faces who have come this far.  This is not a perfect city, no, it is troubled too.  But when I saw this yesterday, I had to take this photo because Day of the Dead is coming on November 1st.  And in the days leading to this, our Halloween of telling those who have passed that they will get their favorite meal and drink that day, maybe a cold cervezita, here is my San Antonio.  (Upside down cause I can't fix it, but hey, it's the calavera doing

Why I haven't written

I don't know.  My laptop was stolen this summer.  Then I had to move, find homes for the cats and Perez my dog.  Can't take them where I live now.  The Willie Velasquez project is wearing me down. I know that it will help million of students but I can't seem to get my community, especially the activist women, to understand what I'm doing and how much help my team needs.  It's such a beautiful story of a boy's calling, and how he changes the world.  Yet I can't get my fellow activists to see what I've embarked on -- for all of us.  If we'd had some funding the interactive would be out by now and I could start working on the Lydia Mendoza book like I want.  Instead I'm so tired, want a vacation, haven't been to a doctor in 15 years and I guess I'm gonna go all crippled with a pauper's funeral.  Why doesn't my community value our work more?  We deserve so many stories, this is the freedom we are searching for.  So much I want to say.

Daddy, 93 years old, is the Valentine's Day King at the nursing home

I am the oldest of eight, with all the expectations that come with it.  Because I'm also a writer and an artist, I have disappointed my siblings, and my father thinks I'm very successful -- he has to think that, I"m the oldest.  My father was a demanding man, a World War II veteran, and a man who dreams of working on his tractor again. He doesn't remember the whippings he gave me, and I barely remember it myself.  This year, he's been named the Valentine's Day King at the nursing home where he lives here in San Antonio.  I cut his hair last night and gave him a manicure -- "you better make me look good, mija."  He's excited, and so am I.  He says I'm gonna live to be 100, and that he's gonna leave me his Social Security check.  I don't want the first, and I can't get the second.  Here we are on his birthday last month.  It was his second pinata, ever, and he made a speech thanking all the residents for coming to his party.