Little rides...

As I travel back in time in my mind I am always fascinated by how complimentary my mom and dad's relationship seemed at any given moment.  For example, my dad used to love to drive, while my mom was extremely content to be sitting on the passenger side for hours on end.  At any given instant I can close my eyes and visualize in my head the image of my mom's left had reaching over my dad's right shoulder touching the back of his head as he took us all on a "little drive" which typically meant several hundred miles of sightseeing.  Many times we would start at noon and usually not get back home until dark.  When I was just seven years old and the household finances would allow it, we would get started on a Saturday morning around 5:00 a.m. and drive in my father's Chevy Malibu all the way from Phoenix Arizona to Southern California.  Typically we would arrive just within minutes of our destination opening its doors and would not start heading back to our home the same night until Disneyland, Universal Studios, or Sea World was closing their doors for the night.  One by one we would all fall asleep, except for one of my sisters that typically kept dad company awake most of the way back home.  I can only assume that with my father's Air Force salary and my mother's private school income, the budget only allowed for one day of fun at a time without the extra added expense of lodging.  Incredibly though, I never once heard my father complain about being too tired to take us out on these "little rides."  Every time we would go out as a family we truly had a great time regardless of our financial limitations.

The first time we went to Universal Studios Hollywood I remember being so impressed with all the special effects and secrets the movie industry used to make movies.  My most vivid memory is of us posing for a Kodak moment next to a giant rotary phone and some enormous sized scissors that were used as a prop in the creation of episodes for the show "Land of the Giants."  The show was not a great hit, in fact it was cancelled after only two seasons, yet the memories of being exposed to the magic of Hollywood in the creation of this show remain solid and fixed in my mind.  One by one my childhood experiences create a scrapbook or memories that I am now able to easily flip through its pages and enjoy at will.  Of course not everything is a good memory since in between the great times there were also hard times.  For example, my father had his first heart attack at the age of 33 sealing with that event a great deal of insecurities and worries in all of our minds.  It was bad enough that he had been gone for almost a year serving on a tour of war in Vietnam when he was suddenly brought back home to attend his father's funeral, but then about a year after this he found himself holding on to dear life himself.  In an instant the joy of having our family finally back together again was ripped away with the preoccupation of my father being ill and close to death.  Of course both him and my mother tried to trivialize their new reality in order to not have us children freak out, but the truth is that we all knew that our lives had changed and one way or the other we all needed to adapt.

"Let's go for a little ride..." my mother would say after attending church while pulling out a map of the state of Arizona that we kept in the family car.  In less than a minute my father would find a road that we had never taken before and steer us in the right direction for another day of family time.  If the road would furnish us with some obscure little Indian reservation museum or shop, immediately the car would come to a full stop, we would all get out to stretch our legs and check it out.  One weekend after the other we visited pretty much everything that there was to see in Arizona including the border towns to Mexico.  A lot changed after my father had his first cardiac arrest, but a lot stayed the same too.  Family time remained pretty much intact with the exception that it really took a lot more out of my father to do so many of the things he was used to doing and had taken for granted.  Walking up hill looking for the perfect Christmas tree to cut in Flagstaff Arizona was a much different experience that year.

Eventually my father was forced to retire from his military career much earlier than he really wanted to.  On our last summer before permanently moving back to Puerto Rico he took us all for a three month "little ride" all the way down from Arizona to Acapulco, then back up to Arizona again to pick up our dog and all the way across to Florida, and finally back up to South Carolina where we took a standby military aircraft ride back to our beloved island.  I've written a previous post detailing most of this trip that included a new car, a squeaky and leaking windshield, a new transmission, three adults, three kids, a dog, and towing a uHaul trailer with our luggage for almost 90 days.  As you can see from the highlights, it really was an adventure!

Eventually and finally we made it back to Puerto Rico.  School had already started by then, so us kids basically had to get ourselves back into the groove of learning without hesitation, and our mother went back to teaching again but now in a totally different language.  I guess the hardest one hit with our move back home was probably my dad because he had to adapt to the idea of not doing what he loved to do at such a young age.  Retiring in his early 30's was by far not ideal and had probably never crossed his mind.  At different stages he tried different things including going back to college, but in the end nothing was as fulfilling as his job in the U.S. Air Force.  One thing though never changed, even though we were back living in a small island, we all still packed ourselves into the car to take our little rides as a family.  Sometimes we'd get in the car with no destination in mind and eventually end up on the south side of the island visiting relatives or just driving around taking in the sites.  Typically we'd head out in the early afternoon and not make it back home until at least midnight or even later.

The little rides were not all saved just for weekends only.  During the week, when it was almost bedtime, many times my mom would ask my dad to take us for a little ride.  These midweek little ride requests meant just driving from our home in the countryside until we reached downtown, taking a few different roads to get there, buying milk and some fresh baked bread or treats from one of the local bakeries, and finally coming back home to dunk the still warm fresh bread covered in butter in a cup of hot coffee or chocolate.  Many times, if it was early enough, instead of coming back home after the drive we would take our warm bread bounty over to my grandparents home and eat it there instead.  Both my mom and dad loved visiting her parents and two sisters that lived in the farm house that was just five minutes away from our home.  As we'd drive into the narrow road entering my grandparents farm my father would slowly and carefully navigate his huge Chevrolet Impala between the branches of bushes and trees that would reach out and make their mark on our car if not done correctly.  In the early years the road was not paved, which also meant making sure that you knew where the potholes full of water from the typical earlier rain where located.  As we would pull our car in total darkness in front of my grandparents home, someone would peek through the one of the windows and instantly turn on the porch light as a welcoming gesture of hospitality and love.  Stepping up the steps into their home my mom and dad would typically lead asking my mother's parents to give them their blessings.  Originally a protestant, and before marriage converting to Catholic, my grandparents had become my father's godparents at that time.  I never heard him call them anything other than "padrino" and "madrina", and these titles where always preceded by a "bendición," which translates to "bless me godmother or bless me godfather."  This genuine and whole hearted gesture became a beautiful example of respect and love that I still admire from both my parents.  All of us kids learned to do the same and from the moment we were able to speak we always walked into my grandparents home asking for their blessings and greeting them with a hug and a kiss.

If I consider that my own kids were already talking full sentences by the age of 3, I can assume that for the last 45 years of my life I have been asking either my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and parents for their blessings every day.  This means that as a minimum I have been blessed at least 16,425 times.  In fact, if I extrapolate the thousand of times that I have requested blessings from my loved ones I can probably safely assume that I have easily been blessed more than 30,000 times in my lifetime.  That my dear readers is a lot of blessings!!!  The point that I am trying to make here is that thanks to what my parents taught me at such a young age, I am a very blessed man!

Recently my oldest son has curved his impulses and obsessions towards becoming more independent.  The same powerful forces that drive him to do scary things is currently at work to better himself.  Being sober and wanting to have more control over his own life have brought out of him a great deal of the tenderness that I had not seen a very long time.  I have always hugged, kissed, and given him my blessing regardless of how difficult a moment we might be going through.  Not an easy task if you ask me, but I have always felt it important to be this way.  Since I came back from my absence due to my job out at sea, everyday he has been the one to approach me with a hug when we greet first thing in the morning, or later when I get back home in the afternoon.  I am amazed of how powerful this beautiful habit of showing a loving gesture consistently since he was a child truly has become at this age.  I feel it genuinely, from his heart, and not imitated or forced.  To me it is an amazing indicator of how love can surpass some of the most difficult challenges in an individual's life.  We went hiking just the two of us on Saturday, then with his brother on Sunday.  Later on Sunday night we all got into the jacuzzi together and spent something like 90 minutes sharing stories and jokes.  To me, all of these moments are like those moments in which we would all get into my dad's car for a little ride.  One by one they create pages in the scrapbook of my children's lives so that they can later on, when they are older, go back and see how much they were loved by their father too.

Dad