tim's san francisco: City Attorney's lawsuit exposes right-wing corpora...

tim's san francisco: City Attorney's lawsuit exposes right-wing corpora...: When I showed up at the big Save City College rally outside the Department of Education offices, I kept asking people: Why are we here? Why...

If 72 is the new 30, then I must be turning 8

I saw somewhere that 72 is the new 30, if that is the case I am turning eight this year.  I believe it because I feel like an eight year old.  Most people I see on a daily basis are between the ages of five to twelve, and some of my best friends are eight years old.   This is a difficult road to travel because chronologically that's 50, most folks by this age are established and looking forward to their golden years.  I on the other hand feel like I am just starting out.

It's a brave new world I want to come into and I still have so much to do and I don't know where to start.  My childlike enthusiasm has never dwindled and I am as curious as ever to discover the world and myself.  I spend most of  my time wondering and dreaming about my adult life. I do not feel like a real adult yet.  Maybe because I haven't done many adult things, never mind that I am married, have a full time job and have raised two adult children these things happened to me but I don't feel like they helped me grow much.  I know that sounds a little harsh, but it's true.

Growing up means taking charge of your life doing what you want to do and loving it.  I have not done that.  I want to do that and if it takes me the next twenty two years to do it, then I have not just taken up space on this planet.  For starters my blog is going to change I know my zero followers will be heartbroken but it has to happen.  I am interested in so many things that I feel I am wasting my blog on myself and not exploring more things that I like and sharing things people are really interested in.   So with that I wish you all a great life and I hope you all will enjoy my new incarnation.  See you on the flip side.

Rediscovering My Salvadorean Roots

  On a cold winter days all I can think of is my mother's cooking.  The kitchen was always warm and the smells that eminated from it were heavenly.  I was a happy child when I was in the kitchen, everything else about my life was dysfunctional, but not when I was in the kitchen with my mom.

  Her recipes especially during the holidays were something we all looked forward to.  I sat there enthralled with the mixing and baking.  The tamales were the first project which started early in the morning standing in a long line in front of La Palma Mexicatessen in San Francisco's Mission District.  I would stand there holding my mother's hand while every other Mexican mom in the neighborhood eventually got there to stand in the same line. When we were finally admitted inside the smells of sauces, and meats simmering assaulted my nostrils.  I could not get out of there with out whining for carnitas and freshly made tortillas. 

  My mother was on a mission though only the dough (masa) for tamales is what she came for and that is all we walked out of there with.  Then we would walk to Casa Lucas, our next stop and buy all the fresh vegetables that would be mixed into our tamales.  One more stop from here and we would be done.  The next stop was the Gallinita a old school butcher shop.  We would wait in a long line there too and I was always transfixed by the Spanish I heard here.  It was not like the Spanish I heard at home, it was rapid fire Mexican Spanish. The men in the back of the counter were always jovial and talked a mile a minute. I couldn't keep up with them but my mother did and she ordered her meat products and then laden down with our purchases made our way home. 

  At home is where the magic happened during the day she prepped everything and by nightfall when everyone was home she would station us around the table to help her wrap her little packages of deliciousness.  I was the closer and in charge of the olive station. I knew my job well, so well that as an adult that is the only part I really remembered it took my sister and I a few years to finally get to the point we can make them.  This year she finally shared with me the holes that were missing in my memory and together with my cousin we shared the recipe so it would not die with us.  We are getting a little long in the tooth and as my cousin pointed out we are now the matriarchs of the family.  Scary proposition, but when she said it I realized she was right and if we did not start teaching our daughters these recipes they would literally die with us as only a memory. 

  I spoke to my neice and we decided to make pastelitos another dessert that my mom made for the holidays.  My sister in law who was more interested in cooking my brother's favorite foods had painstakingly worked along side my mother to glean some of her son's favorites.  One of those was the milk custard that goes into the pastelitos.  I only liked the jelly ones, so I had mastered the cookie part and then used strawberry jelly to fill them, good enough for me, but not good enough for the girls who wanted to learn how to make the milk ones.  So my neice went home with her mom and got her to make the custard and then we all got together with my other cousin's daughter, her son and my daughter and set off to a day of baking at my neice's house. 

  Baking together we talked and regaled each other with stories and memories of my mom.  The girls had had a chance to bake with my mom.  As little girls in order to entertain all these little five, six and seven year old girls she taught them to bake.  They like me were in charge of parts of baking, one would press the little balls of dough into flat pancakes on the press my father had made for my mother.  It is two metal plates fused to a hinge with a metal handle welded to it.  My father was a welder by trade, so this little piece of equipment has survived at least fifty years, and the tortillas presses that they currently sell can not give the right pressure to create the perfect little orbs we need to make our pastelitos.  My father made this for my mother, because back in the day you could not find a tortilla press to save your life around San Francisco.  Now you go to any store on 24th and they have all the tools you need to make food your Abuelita made.  We bought our big tamale paddle there this holiday season.

   The girls talked and we remembered the other things they baked with my mom, like the peanut butter cookies which my daughter has mastered because they are her favorite.  I watched with pride as they assembled the little pies and their hands remembered how to close them so they would not leak out the custard or jelly.  My neice's son is only three but he helped with the press and I knew that he would forever be part of the lineage of this baking tradition that I want to keep up with all these girls and their children and hopefully they will continue with their grandchildren one day.  My mother was with us this day and I feel her presence even more strongly now that I am trying to re-create her gifts to me.

   Today as in many days this past year I again wanted to try to make her bunellos, but again I failed, but I am closer than I have been in the past.  I close my eyes and remember the feel of the dough, the textures and the taste of it because that is all I have left is my memories of these taste long gone, but not forgotten.  My daughter has forbidden me to try to make arroz en leche because it doesn't taste like her grandma's and she does not want to pollute her memory of it with my inadequate attempts and I totally respect that. 

  I will not stop trying to make the taste I remember though, things they may have never tried because I don't know what she cooked for them when I was a work and she had a houseful of kids once again.  All I know is that it is in my hands to share what I know I do not want to selfishly hold onto these recipes because my mother was not like that, she taught all of us and it was our lack of attention that we did not learn more.  I know for myself I did not care how it was made, I was just interested in the results because that is what I loved.   I loved to eat my mother's food it was soothing and it bespoke of love greater than anything I felt as a child. My father was strict and not one to demonstrate affection and he disapproved of my mother's sensitive nature.  I believe through her meals she spoke volumes of love and understanding she could not demonstrate to us in any other way without getting in trouble with my dad. 

   I now appreciate her sacrifices and I appreciate the time and effort it took to make all those meals and special dishes she made for each one of us.  We all have an all time favorite and I know my mother would make each of us whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it.  My kids will always have that special memory of my mom making them exactly what they wanted.  I have no patience for that and after my mom passed it was you eat what I made if you don't you starve end of conversation, but in my defense I did have to work and could not spend all day in the kitchen.  Now I want to go back and give back some of that love and if I don't do anything else in this lifetime I hope that I can at least make people feel special when I make the meals my mother used to make and I hope that I can share what I learn with my children and my neices and they will also continue the tradition.  In this way my mother's love is transcending time and space and I feel her with me everytime I turn on the stove, pick up one of her pots to cook one of her meals.

Guns and Roses

On Saturday night at 10pm I was watching the news about Sandy Hook Elementary not knowing that my school was at that very moment losing one of our own to gun violence. As I watched the news I listened to the rhetoric about gun control and how senseless and evil the person who did this was, not knowing that I would be feeling the same hopelessness.  I watched the grief counselors and psychologist converge on the community not knowing that we would be in need of these same services.

On Sunday I heard Obama recite the names of the dead and express his sorrow to the parents, not knowing that a Mom I knew would benefit from a phone call from him, because I'm sure she voted for him too. On Monday morning I went to school and talked about security measures for our school and then later realizing how security measures we Moms take to keep our sons safe in this city are just as futile.

I slowly came to the realization, that while the nation will mourn the children of New England, no one outside of his family, friends, and people who knew him will help us mourn. No one is helping all our children of color who lose their lives everyday on the streets to guns.  No talk about gun control there,  I know I will not see this young man's face plastered all over CNN for the next month, either his face or nameless, faceless youth who also lost his life that Saturday on 24th Street and Potrero.   Who will help his friends make sense of this and help them heal.  What is worse is that this has probably happened to them on several occasions, never getting any grief counseling and never being told that this is not ok.  This should not happened to their friends anymore than it should happen to those children in Sandy Hook.

 Therein, lies the hypocrisy of this nation the genocide that is occurring on our city streets somehow does not measure up to the so called anomaly mass shootings.  It should also be an anomaly that you can't walk down the street on Mission or Hunters Point and expect to get shot.  It should be an anomaly that students in Oakland probably know more dead kids than live ones. It should be an anomaly that everyone is getting shot and no one is doing anything about it!  I am angry, I am in pain and I know that the first responder to this crime did not break down and cry because of what he had to see, to him it was another black kid shot in the hood and it kills me. I know that the shooter will not be psychoanalyzed and be given the excuse of mental illness and how we should have helped him and looked out for the signs of violence that would have made him choose this path of violence and evil.  He more than likely will go to jail and no one will ask him about his childhood and how come he turned out the way he did.

No one cares, I am a lonely voice in the big sea of indifference but I had to pour my grief out somewhere, and if no one ever reads this it's ok.  It was therapy for me but if one person reads and shares and somehow is touched by what I say then I did a good thing.

My Classic San Francisco

  Nostalgia means a sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or a place with happy personal associations. That is what I have been feeling lately for the San Francisco of Dashiell Hammet and Herb Caen, not the one that is currently sprouting around me.  The Mission, typically the hub of working class Irish  of yesteryear and Latinos in my early lifetime is being overrun by self absorbed, overly entitled offensive East Coast types.  Our eccentricities once endearing are now nuisances for the transplants.  No longer can I walk down my neighborhood and hear a plethora of languages, Chinese, Tagalog and Spanish.  Now I hear the annoyed complaints of hipsters about apps, or malfunctioning i-phones.

  I was missing the fog, the lonely mournful sound of a fog horn over the bay.  I was missing walking down the street alone.  Lately, the streets are overcrowded, everywhere I go there is a gaggle of people, lines for restaurants, Muni, Bart and bathrooms.  Dolores Park once a sanctuary for the displaced soccer players and conga drummers is now so crowded with hipsters you have to watch where you step, because you just might step on one of them, gone are the days of stepping in dog poop. Where do all these annoying people come from and why are they always in my flippin' way???

   Well, I had have enough,  I woke up early this morning 4:30am as a matter of fact and headed out.  The streets were deserted, just the way I like them.  It is only during this time that the City really reveals it's soul.  If I could have a Zombie Apocalyse, it would be to eat hipsters, then they would die out, because the zombies would eat their brains and gain NO knowledge and die off, leaving the City just as it was this morning.  Deserted. Sorry I am digressing,  I wanted to see the backstreets of yesteryear, does bread still get delivered at dawn? Are there men working while the rest of the City slumbers. I had to know!! Apparently on Sunday mornings, not so much I traveled to North Beach, nothing snaked my way to AT&T park and found an open doughnut shop.  The denizens were all there, the Cop, the bus driver, the creepy guy who sits at the back table.  Ok, things were looking up!  This is the San Francisco I was looking for my hopes lifted by this encounter I continued on my journey.
 
    I headed to the wharf, the San Francisco Bay does not change, time passes through it. When you look across and see Alcatraz, you can not tell if there are any inmates looking back towards you. The Golden Gate Bridge stands as beautiful as the day it was built, a gateway to the promised land.  The Bay is splayed out before me and the fog horn sounds it's warning to passing ships.  The waves lap against the piers and the seagulls call out to each other about another promising meal that awaits them.  The wharf is empty of tourist, just pure San Francisco beckons me.  I walk under a light post and imagine Sam Spade's face appearing out of the fog as a match lights his features for an instant as he inhales that first puff of smoke from his cigarette.  I look over the Bay and make my way across the bridge to the other side.

    Marin is only beautiful because of it's breathtaking view of San Francisco I feel so lucky sitting here at the edge of a cliff overlooking the bridge, the Bay and the City.   The sun is up now, it's full glory shining over the Bay.  I feel blessed to have this as my backyard, to see this on a daily basis makes one a little giddy.  I understand why so many flock here, but to truly appreciate this City you have to have been born here.  It is in your blood, it is under your skin.  You live and breathe San Francisco and all it's quirky history it makes you quirky too.  You are a part of something special that no one can touch.  I am a native born and bred in San Francisco.  I will  probably die here and I won't mind it one little bit.  If I never left my little neighborhood I don't think I would have ever missed that much.  I have met people from all walks of life, from around the world and all I have ever had to do is walk outside my front door.

  I found my classic San Francisco, I walked the streets of Dashiell Hammett and Herb Caen and I was transported to the beautiful City I love so much.  It was only then that I could get back to the future and endure the hipsters and East Coast transplants, in their own way they love the City too, if they stay long enough and instead of trying to change her, embrace her.  I think they will understand her and learn like all of us do, that if you love someone or something you love it for all it's imperfections and eccentricities that is genuine love and that is the love of a native San Franciscan.

Summer's End

As the days grow longer and the nights get shorter I sit here and wonder where did the summer go? I am just two weeks away from returning to work and as always I wonder why didn't I do more this summer?  This summer was a crazy one for me because the first month of it was spent burying my past.  So many strong women died that I was shaken to the core remembering their lives and the impact they had on mine.  July luckily was spent biking, hiking, and crafting.  Most importantly it was spent reviewing my life, what do I really want from it.

I think I wasted so much time worrying about a life I don't have and not enjoying the one I do have.  This seems to be the central theme in most of my blogs. I understand this concept, but have difficulty practicing it. My mind just does not shut up.  I have ruminative thoughts that plague me on a daily basis.  I do not think I should be left alone for long.  I talk to myself  too much and eventually talk myself into a tizzy.  I have figured out the things that help and I want to share, just in case anyone else out there is goes through the same things.

Number 1: When stressing about something, take action if you can.  If you can do something about it, by all means do it.  I sometimes stress about the house being a mess or I hate seeing that stupid thing still sitting on the floor and driving me crazy, stop complaining get off your ass and do something about it and voila, it's done and you feel so much better!

Number 2:  Don't believe everything you tell yourself.  Challenge that voice in your head.  My worry is that something bad will happen to the people I love when they are out in the world, honestly I will lose sleep worrying about all the evil in the world and how it will affect my family.  I have to take a realistic approach and tell myself the world is not all bad, yes bad things happen, but not every time my family walks out the door, get over it!

Number 3:  Do something else, when I am in a full blown scare fest I stop myself and do something that requires my full attention, like knitting, sewing little cloth circles, drawing and scrapbooking, once my mind is engaged in something else I forget what I was stressing about.  DO NOT WATCH TV, though that activity is mindless sometimes will provoke more thoughts to stress about, especially if you watch the news.

Number 4:  Don't talk about it with a friend.  What??? I know as bad as that sounds sometimes it is not a good idea to dissect every little negative detail because it just stresses you out more in the end.  Now you have someone else involved in your drama and they will be just as concerned about your craziness and they will try to help, but you and they do not realize half the stuff you were stressing is 80% imaginary.

Number 5: meditate about your thoughts, think of them as leaves on the river.  Acknowledge their existence and then watch them float away, do not act or react to them just let them go.

Number 6:  Be nice to yourself, if you can not stop the ruminating it is okay.  It takes practice and you can not do it if you are worrying about not doing it. It takes a lot of practice and that is why meditation and yoga are called practice, because you really got to work on it.

I still have a lot to work on and one summer is not going long enough to get it all right, but at least I'm trying. That is the key also, keep trying to fix yourself because otherwise you end up doing crazy things like that dude.  I do not want to mention him or his actions or even to think that something as the six things I have outlined here could have helped him, we will never know. I don't want to start ruminating about that one, because that will require a whole new blog.

For now I am going to enjoy the last few days, maybe not hiking around but just sitting here with a computer at my side and my legs up trying to solve the problems of the world.

Legacies

I often wonder what my legacy will be.  Will I matter when I am gone?  How do I accomplish great things, because of these musings, I have gone back to school and graduated.  I continue to look for that elusive thing that will help me make my mark in this world.  That one thing that I am so good at, that others will marvel at my accomplishments and praise me for doing it.

This week I went to funerals of two women, who pretty much were forces in my childhood. The first was my Mother's friend Hayde Hernandez.  This woman was a beauty, as a child I marveled at her and her kids because they were such good looking kids.  As a kid I going to private school, my mom sewed for a living and many of our neighborhood moms went to her for her seamstress abilities.  I always liked this lady, because she was so poised and gracious.  Her kids were nice and they went on to be very helpful in our community.  I always admired that spirit of giving.  They were active in our neighborhood church and are a back bone of what I remember of my neighborhood. 

The second funeral I went to was my sister's mother in law,  Rosa Hernandez she was 101 and I remember when I met her I was only twelve.  Though I knew her son since I was two, I only met her and the rest of the family after my sister married into it.  My childhood was rather painful and lonely at times, my brothers and sisters were all older than me and I was left alone with my ruminative thoughts for hours on end.  I enjoyed reading and discovering other worlds because my world was a little bleak. I remember entering her house for the first time and feeling overwhelmed with love.  My parents weren't very touchy feely, but this family was.  I got hugged at every turn, but not just a little hug, full on bear hugs it was a curious feeling, but I liked it.  I promised myself that I would hug people like that for the rest of my life, because it felt so good and so reassurring. 

Thinking back on the legacies of both of these ladies I realized you don't have to have a prestigious job, or a fancy title to make a difference.  Both these women's legacy is Love, the love they had for their families and their homes.  The differences they made was making everyone feel the same way, loved and important.  They did not worry about making a mark, but they did.  Their marks are deep and wide and more important than any ever made by a celebrity or politician.  Their struggles were many, they came to this country which has always been inhospitable to Latinos, but they not only struggled, but succeeded.  Their children are college graduates, professional people and yet these were humble women.  Women from their time were not given the choice to be able to go to college or school.  Their lives were get married have children, but they did it so well.  Their children, and their children's children will always know about their matriarchs and that they were forces to be reckoned with.

The world is a little less vibrant now, and I know there are deep holes in the lives of my friends.  I only hope they continue to keep alive the spirit of these strong, independent Latina women.  I only hope I can do a fraction of what they accomplished.  RIP Ladies, you will be missed and I will take the lessons you taught me and cherish the moments I spent with you. I will not let your memories fade away from my life.  I will take the torch onward and love my family, cherish the moments of triumph and loss with grace and humility, just like you did.  Thank you for spending time on earth and teaching so many.