I am the oldest of eight.  I am going to tell you something my siblings won't face -- the drugging and drinking that has destroyed us as a family. Alcohol.  Drugs.  All my siblings, addicted now or in the past, except me and the disabled Daniel.  The reason for prison, death, and jail and/or -- for three of my brothers -- each a separate story but the same one too. My father, Roberto Renaud, passed away a few weeks ago.  He was 95 years old, and had spent the last three years in a nursing home here in San Antonio, Texas.  He was a brutal father, but he tried.  He tried.  A sharecropper who worked infinite hours in the Texas Panhandle.  A WWII veteran. His family, an old Tejano family, has a family plot, a camposanto, outside of Raymondville.  It's all the family has left after the U.S. Mexican War.  It's a windswept acre of land a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico that includes our family's graves beginning in the 20th century...

Because of my brain surgery, I haven't been able to drive.  A few weeks ago, two teenage black men got on the 550 bus during rush hour.  In Texas, if you don't have a car, that is a liability, because we really don't have good mass trans. The taller kid was in a mood, and they sat at the front, which is generally reserved for mothers with babies, elders, and wheelchair riders.  The young man, let's call him Trey, sat besides an older, dishevled, white guy who was taking all the leg room, rocking to his IPod music. Trey told the white guy to make room, but the white guy, let's call him Mr. Z, didn't move an inch.  He was not about to be instructed by someone like him .  I could smell his fear.  Their voices got louder and louder, amidst the clamor of voices, the smoky, sweaty, murmuring of working-class accents, and the roaring bus. Young man, what has your mother taught you? The teenager looked at the older black woman behind him, and stopped fidget...

Susana didn't come to my mother, her mother's, funeral in 2000. Says she's not coming to my father's funeral, who is in hospice care in a nursing home. And hasn't visited our disabled brother in twelve years. I know she thinks she's too good for Texas.  Well, so is Wendy Davis. She is a licensed therapist, and a dharma leader in the Bay Area. D H A R M A.  She yelled this to me as I was recovering from brain surgery in February. Tell me, how did she enter the helping and healing professions?

La Bloga: Poetry: Laurie Ann Guerrero, Pablo Miguel Martínez, AWP, "Haciendo Caminos," the First Biennial U.S. Latina/Latino Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, Immigration Art y Mas--

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. 

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 f...