Captain Kirk to Enterprise...

"I am from Arecibo, Puerto Rico!" These words have come out of my mouth more times than I will ever be able to count. The statement in itself brings images in my mind of so many different colorful memories of my life. When I ask most people where they are from, it is typical for the reply to be a simple, "I'm from..." followed by the location they come from. Not much more, not much less. This is probably true for more than 90% of the inquiries I have made through the years with respect to people's place of birth. If I am not familiar with their particular place of birth, then I ask a little more about where abouts their homeland is and how close it is to some familiar landmark. The eventual supplemental information again is delivered just the same as the original response. I see nothing wrong with this, I am just setting you up for what to me is a bit of a familiar and different experience.


OK, now try asking someone from the beautiful island of Puerto Rico where they are from. Typically their eyes widen a bit, a gentle smile reveals itself through their lips, and a "I was born in Puerto Rico!" reply finds its way to your attentive ears. The phrasing or wording might slightly vary depending on how specific they want to be, for instance, there is no chance they will leave out their hometown if they are from Ponce or San Juan, so it would sound more like "I am from Ponce, Puerto Rico!, but the same visual and verbal cues would be embedded into their statement as in the original version I mentioned earlier. I guess this is all tied to an enormous sense of pride which is passed on to us generation after generation from our parents, school, and our culture. I am sure this is true for many people in many other parts of the world too.


It is interesting to note that this sense of pride is almost never diminished with the reality that obviously this beautiful tropical island has as many flaws as any other overpopulated place in the world. There are drug and crime problems, heavy traffic, cleanliness issues, hurricanes, the heat and humidity, and so much more I could add. Yet all of these collectively do not degrade our sense of pride and the bond that we have to our original place of birth. We always seem to see beyond all of those flaws and any ugliness for which we are completely aware and obviously affected by. So in essence the common thread that allows us to see past any imperfections is probably love. We truly love our heritage, our country, our little piece of paradise.


I find that this overlooking of what is obviously not a perfect picture is very similar to what most of us do with our children. Imagine, if I can be proud of my homeland, my heritage, and my beautiful Puerto Rico, how could I not be proud of my sons. So even with all of the problems that I encounter on a daily basis with my children, all of my complaining, and so much of my apparent misery, I still have an enormous sense of pulling out my chest reaction when I say "these are my sons." You should know that it is not just in my mind, this is very real to me. I believe what I say and how I say with pride those words. I am sure that the most influential reason for this pride again is love.


As a young boy I grew up with my two sisters being two and four years older than me respectively. My younger brother, which I had constantly requested his delivery since the age of four, did not join the family until twelve years later. So for at least twelve years I grew up in the company of two sisters only. There is good news and bad news tied to this statement. The good news is that I grew up appreciating and respecting females from an early age, which put me in a very nice position to not screw up as often when I was finally in my dating years. Notice that I said appreciating and respecting, I did not say understanding, that would most definitely be a stretch. The not so good news is that I could probably write a blog all on its own with the subject "Surviving My Sisters." Stories of being forced to render homage to the Queen of the Ice Chair (they built it with snow, I was the tester who was stuck in it when my pants froze against it), or the oh so frequent "if you tell mom..." warnings are all but too clear in my mind. However, I was the easy go lucky kid, so as long as the two precious queens of the jungle were willing to play with me, I was pretty content and willing to play cheetah in return. Amazingly, I have never digressed to wearing women's shoes, playing with Barbie's (unless they are real of course), wearing any makeup, or for that matter swinging on ropes like a monkey.


The roles were clear and obvious when our parents left us to our childhood play. My oldest sister was the boss, and everyone else, well let's just say we were her humble subjects. Anyone that found this arrangement to be wrong did not get to play. I will tell you why now days I hold absolutely no resentment to the childhood dictatorship. It is simple, within all of the bossing around there was an amazing amount of love. Yes, it was fine for her to do as much enforcement as she found fit during our play time, but forget about anyone else trying to do this to her brother or sister. In fact, she is without a doubt the picture you will find in any encyclopedia when searching for information as to what will happen if anyone tries to touch a baby chick while the momma hen is around! It was more than once that I saw my oldest sister wrestle to the ground kids bigger than her to teach them a lesson for having messed around with her little brother...thank you baby.


Interestingly enough those roles did not carry through to adulthood allowing me to grow to be my own man. In other words, even if she is still Queen of the Jungle in my eyes, I have never had to "say uncle" for a very long time in order for her to let go of me. We are equals within each other's eyes and an amazing amount of respect and love flows between us. The same is true for my other sister and my younger brother. We are all imperfect in so many ways, yet we find each other to be just right when it comes to our relationship as brothers and sisters. I experience the most impressive show of caring whenever I am not doing well regardless of the reason. My mother, sisters, and brother, all of them will call and inquire from me to share so that they can do whatever is in their power to be supportive. Love is such a beautiful thing, especially when it is unconditional and limitless.

I would be lying if I told you that I was a strong man that is able to handle whatever comes my way. This is far from being true. I have a deal with God in which I offer him my humble life to deal with all of the challenges that I am facing with my sons, but in return I pray that he does not throw at me a load that I will not be able to bear. I know well that nothing that I am experiencing can compare to so many other terrible pains that some of you have faced in your lives. So I pray that God play fair with me and allow me to continue with my life without putting the load on top of any of my breaking points. The blessings that He has placed on my road with so much love and surround me are what make me strong.

I wish I knew that when you were done reading this post you were smiling. So I offer you this image...

There is this great big Flamboyan tree that sits behind my grandparents home on their farm in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. My uncle being the youngest of nine brothers and sisters, and my mother being the oldest, made it so that we were fairly close in age. Close enough to spend countless hours running around flying kites together, using ropes as microphones in the barn while singing and pretending all to be on a wonderful imaginary show, and many, many times climbing the great big Flamboyan tree which for us was our imaginary Starship Enterprise. On this childhood icon we nailed light switches connected to absolutely nothing that would act as transporter devices, and so much more. Contained on one of the branches was a plastic container filled with all sorts of colorful broken glass from which we would do jewelry to dangerously hang around some of our characters. Trinkets were ingeniously created to serve as communication devices and phaser guns. My uncle was always the captain of the vessel (Captain James T. Kirk), my oldest sister the first officer (Mr. Spock), my other sister the communications officer (Nyota Uhura). Tell me, what character do you think I was relegated to almost always play? Ah, you probably guessed it...I was typically the alien that was not allowed on board the ship and was always defeated and died! Don't worry about me, I had a blast. There was nothing better than finally having the power to not die on command and pissing off the rest of the cast when I would decide to get up over and over again after so many phaser blasts. Only one thing would kill this monster, the threat of not being able to play with them again. Ha, ha, ha!

Dad