middleagedmiddlechild.

I am Felix & Noelia’s third child, their third son. 

Vietnam separated & complicated the arrival of my brothers.
I was born into a suburban safe house, a happy family.

Briefly, I was the baby. Then came a fourth son; finally, a girl.
Hand-me-downs & shared bedrooms didn’t blunt
what was there all along: Knowing I was loved, I was not alone.

Working with my students today on 100-word memoirs, I leaned (as I often do) on the cherita form. This one was easy : ) 

I sat at the kitchen bar, a little out
of arm's reach, watching my kids. 
They had cleared their plates. 
They talked & laughed freely.

I was outside of it, 
gleefully if not comfortably 
new to this kind of irrelevance
in their lives. 

I sipped my drink & listened to
references I didn't get about
shows I hadn't seen or
friends I'd never met.

They'll be gone one day very soon. 
For now, it is enough to know
that they love each other
& share this table, this time. 

_{Vivian Maier, East 108th Street. September 28, 1959. New York, NY}

A tube, panels of lights & the promise
of knowing, of seeing, of discovering
our limits, our smallness.

You confront a silence & darkness,
a weightlessness & wonder
nothing can prepare you for.

One day, here where the days 
lose any meaning
you know below,

you leave the ship,
tethered to your machine,
protected from what's natural.

You drift in an airtight
bubbleheaded suit,
a flag on your sleeve.

Back home, loved ones stop
looking skyward, a distance
you can feel & see.

I'm whiplashed into now. 
Wiping sleep from my eyes, the dream
lost before I allow

myself to grasp it, to plough
the meanings I knew while asleep. Sunbeams
color the blinds, and I'm up, brush teeth, shower,

and put on the uniform of the eternal now,
a school & a job mine for what seems
like forever. Become Mr. Garza somehow

to a campus just awakening. Children in full flower,
fair & eager & scared & gleaming
in effortless, lithe power.

Room after room, the what's & how's 
of a subject made redundant, teen-
age wasteland in the flesh, all bowed 

under the burden to follow 
in someone's path, a pristene
record & resume. But how

to silence their inner voice, louder
each year, that the meaning 
is in the measuring? Can you roust 
them to see their beauty right now?   

My ring
Brushed pattern on gold -- 
that's what we chose together.
It's worn smooth since then.
May 22, '05.
Ani le dodi. Amen.

Gran'pa's peacoat
Remnant of a war
hangs with hoodies, pajamas.
Eighty years ago
he answered the call to serve --
never sailed, but he still served.

Batman brush
A gift I don't use
but I'll never throw away --
Avon Batman brush. 
It cost her a lot back then.
She always gave all she could. 

_{Tanka inspired by Joni Tevis’s “Three Relics“. Image Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Pharmacy) ca. 1942.}

She was always the tough one,
always awake on long drives,
always endured injury quietly.

Now she moves gingerly,
a cane in the house, 
a walker in the trunk.

There are weekly updates
on medicine & therapy,
on diet & sleep.

Sunday afternoon she watched
me & my son playing football 
in the street,

my boy a flash
of sweat & purpose. 
Pure boy. 

"You're lucky to have a dad who plays."

He nodded, uncomfortable
with emotions that he feels 
needn't be spoken.

She plucked a dead magnolia leaf
from the sidewalk, pivoting
back into the house. 

I’ve walked these streets before, decades ago. We’d drive the six hundred miles south for Christmas, for funerals, for two weeks every summer while Dad served his time in Army Reserves. What I remember of the streets isn’t much — the panaderia with the best cochinitos, the two story building pockmarked by time where Papa Romulo ran his tailor shop & his cantina, the shops we never entered, the shops that used to be. With every walk down those dusty hot sidewalks, I wanted to get back to the house of my mother’s childhood, back to the pomegranate tree & the screen door with the bell, back to our BB gun and the mesquite trees with their undulating thick branches shading the packed dirt. I haven’t been down those Rio Grande streets in decades.

As I’ve said elsewhere, there’s little there for me now but dusty graves & deep memories. My mother’s childhood home, the only home I knew there, has bougainvillea where the salt cedar once soared, tin foil on the front windows. My brother Raul has the aluminum lawn chairs from the back yard, chairs sunbaked over time from candy-apple red to rust. The display cabinets from Mama Tulitas’s store are in my parents’ garage, once stocked with fresh bread, now packed with gardening equipment & hundred-year-old hat blocks. Not everything is lost.

Recently, I zoomed in on these Rio Grande City streets — or to be more precise, on an alley where my great grandfather Papa Pedro worked as a blacksmith. Click by click, I walked those streets, found that alley, advancing by digital leaps, the camera of all things on a tab nestled between a recipe for Dijonnaise grilled chicken breasts & student submissions waiting to be graded, the camera lens advancing fifty feet at a time in pixelated bursts, landing on sharp focus high-def ground. Getting closer & closer to the terrain if not the hour of this time of hard labor, of honest labor, of manhood, of Mexicanness I never knew. A daydreamer at heart, I don’t need much to conjure up a living laughing version of the strong, serious, mustached man in the photo (one of two we have of him). The digital search / journey awakened nothing my mother hadn’t already shared decades before with the five of us kids walking through the Valley heat, interrupted by her childhood friends running errands. We rolled our eyes. They ignored our boredom, relishing the blessing, the surprise, the luxury platicando. A pin was always in a map somewhere. Now I had seen it.

I went looking for it again in the Library of Congress and found a Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Rio Grande City from May 1894 (one of two the LOC hosts). Even back then, the town had a meticulous geometric order. Sanborn marks the equidistant east-west water lines running beneath a land where water means citizenship, where water means life, where water is a commodity almost as valuable to find as natural gas. Each lot in nearly equal proportions with its neighbors, each street in rectilinear dignity with / apart from the others. From this gods-eye view, Sanborn commemorates each owner shaping the stuff of creation, innovating & compromising within the perimeter of their respective lots, making this little postage stamp of a world their own.

Some homes built as far from the “traffic” as possible. Some buildings (businesses, clearly) constructed as close to the street as safety & city codes will allow. Sanborn color-coded the maps, a different color for each material. Tile. Stone. Wood frame. Brick. Sanborn Fire Insurance imagined a plan for one particular kind of disaster, the kind of disaster that struck one mile west of where the blacksmith shop once stood, that struck my mother’s childhood home on Fairgrounds Road at the Rio Grande City home I knew, that struck July 2, 1981, my twelfth birthday. I had spent that night fifteen miles away at my paternal grandparents’ house in Roma. My great grandfather was long dead. I don’t know where the water lines were in 1981, but I see now where they were in 1894. The time of Sanborn’s map was a time of caution, of preparedness, a time of knives & saws, of clothes lines & woodstoves, of hand carved existences.

My great grandfather had strong rough hands moving quickly in the heat, moving briskly from fire to anvil. He bent iron. It was right there, just outside the frame of the map.