The Angels Around Us...

Consider the expression "no good deed goes unpunished" and how often those words seem to materialize themselves in your life. About a year ago, when my gadget itch got the best of me, I did the crazy act of getting in a line that wound itself around more than one block by six in the morning, just to be able to buy an iPad2 a few weeks after its original release. Somehow I talked myself into spending a good chunk of money in order to get myself what I obviously thought was a well deserved toy, something that I rarely and seldom ever do. My youngest son thought it was very cool, but since he is more of a Microsoft child he was able to contain his drooling to a minimum. However, my oldest son is hands down an Apple geek and it was easy for me to see in his eyes the lust and desire for my shinny new toy. I remember well the words "I can't afford to get you one now, but when they do an upgrade I will hand you down this one in order for me to get a new one" coming out of my parental guilt filled lips. As a dad that always keeps his promise, two weeks ago I got into my hands one of the newly released iPad models and true to my word I handed over my still in mint condition older tablet to my oldest son. In my mind I was sure I was doing the right thing, and much more so because the gift suddenly had coincided with a noticeable unpredictable spat of depression in my son's life. For a while he had been in such a positive and graceful mood that I was starting to think that someone had abducted my teenager and replaced him with an alien pod child. Honestly, it felt as if it all came out of nowhere when my son digressed back into his "why am I taking these classes and life makes no sense" mood, which is a familiar but very unwelcoming place for him and anyone around him. The iPad gift seemed to have switched on a new desire and inspiration for him to write poetry, dig into new reading material, and instantly be able to watch so many new things that I was sure it would somehow be a positive influence to the sudden somber mood that had just recently invaded his mind.

OK, now let's see how good a reader you are and if you are able to keep up with the following: Two weeks have gone by, and in summary we have spent $175 repairing the first broken display, $249 exchanging the now out of warranty gizmo because it decided to stop connecting to any Wi-Fi source with a refurbished one, $49 purchasing an accidental damage insurance, another $49 in a deductible in order to replace the 2 days ago purchased refurbished model because of a second broken display, $89 purchasing a heavy duty protective case to be used to house the not yet $49 replacement by another co-payed iPad that will have to be bought in a few days because of the third broken display that happened only hours after getting back from the Apple store in a freak kitchen accident. In less than a week over $660 plus tax have gone into this good deed I thought I was doing by handing down my previous iPad to my son in fulfillment of a year old promise. As I said, no good deed goes unpunished. I am not going to tell you that I am upset because the truth is that I cannot explain why, but I really am not. Frustrated yes, angry or upset no. I am frustrated that life has to take such a toll on me just to teach me a lesson. I am frustrated because I know that these accidents are surely taking a toll on my son's emotional state too. What started as good intentions can now only be described as a series on crazy events that almost seem like demonic possessions. I have even taken out a little bottle I have with Holy water and gone around my house spraying and praying while two white candles shimmer their glow next to a beautiful gifted cross and an image of the Virgin Mary that sit on my dresser as reminders that I have absolutely no power over a great deal of what surrounds me and my life.

Just as I finished taking my desperate Catholic learned behavior to its climax, I laid in my bed and checked my messages using the still intact newer model iPad that started all this mess for messages and found a note left by what to me can only be described as an angel. A long time friend whom I have not seen in years wrote to me in Spanish "Pasaba por aquí...un abrazo con cariño para ti" which translates to "As I passed by...a hug with affection for you." What a beautiful sentiment to leave for someone that is far away and unknowingly going through a difficult moment. Yes, I can only express this wanting to be described as coincidental message as the words of an angel. You see, she did not know how rough a week I had been enduring. In fact, she does not even know that today she actually was an angel. However, that is what she was without a doubt. In nine simple words she changed my frown into a smile. That is a powerful act that tops every word of encouragement that I have mustered to give to my son this week in my efforts of being a better father by not piling any anger on top of the craziness that has been going on in our lives. The power is not so much from the words in themselves, but rather from the genuine act of caring behind their true sentiment.

So tonight I leave you all with my bedtime prayer so that God has no choice but to listen to me every time one of you reads it...

"Dear Father, thank you for taking the time to answer my prayers by sending your message through my unknowing angel. Heal me, save me, bless me, so that I am able to be a better man tomorrow than what I was today. Give me the chance to also be an angel to someone else in their moment of pain or sorrow. In fact dear Lord, I kneel to you with my heart and soul in hand and beg you to cuddle them with your own so that I am able to recharge my life and follow you without hesitation. Amen."

Dad

March 6, 1981

I was almost 19 years of age, the same age my oldest son is today, when I was rushed away from the middle of my second year of college chemistry mid-term examination to head to the hospital where my father had just suffered a massive heart attack.  He was only 44 years of age, five years younger than I am today and had already embarked in a very difficult road full of health issues that started when he was only 21 years old and was diagnosed with diabetes, and eventually culminated with his death after already having suffered three previous heart attacks starting at age 33.  By the time I made it to the hospital and as I was walking towards my mother whom was talking to the doctor, all I was able to do was extend my arms and reach for her to break her fall as she fainted from the news that my dad had just passed away and there was nothing else the doctor could do for him.  Up to this day, everything that transpired from the moment I was told to head to the hospital until the moment that I stretched out my arms to hold on to my mother is a total blur.  I have absolutely no recollection on how I got to the hospital, how I knew what floor to go to, and who else was with me during all of that time.  Just a few years back I met with a dear cousin I had not seen since then and as we conversed she filled me in on all of the details of those missing moments of my life since she had been the beautiful soul that took care of me in my day of anguish.  Even as she was telling me everything that had transpired, the fog never lifted to reveal any memories of those events.  In fact, the next thing that I do remember was entering the basement of the funeral home where I was being asked to select the coffin that would be used to bury my dad.  It is as if my mind is only able to recollect moments that required me to think straight, making decisions that had to be done right, and everything else is buried under one single all encompassing emotion, deep sorrow.  I have been told that in order for me to remember the true events as they actually happened, I must probably experience the same emotional distress that was weaved within those moments of pain.  This of course is something that I am not interested or willing to do.  I think I am better off not remembering.

I do know one thing, and it is that after 31 years nothing has been able to replace the emptiness left in my heart from the death of my father.  Even if I tried, I am totally incapable of describing the pain, loneliness, and utter emptiness that I still feel in my heart because he is gone.  After all of these years, all I am able to do in order to make myself feel better is to replace my sadness with the memories I have of so many great and beautiful moments that I shared with him.  I can from this experience testify that only the intensity of the original emotions has decreased, but the emotions in themselves are all still there.  There is truly only one thing that I can say and I full heartily recommend anyone that has lost a loved one in their lives: trying to block, hide, or even understand this indescribable pain is futile.  If you want to get to the other side of your loss you must let go and give yourself the opportunity to feel all of those emotions without judgement.  Eventually and in time most of the pain will at least pretend to vanish and love will prevail among everything else.

I hope that I am able to touch, influence, and make as good an impression as my dad did with me on my own children's minds and hearts.  The man was imperfect in so many ways, yet somehow in the short 19 years that we shared he managed to lock into my being an impressive degree of values, love, and plain and simple goodness.  I have never found myself putting him on a balance and trying to figure out how much of him was on the plus and how much was on the negative side of his attributes.  Inside of me I simply have a sense that he was a good man and a great father regardless of his shortcomings.  Any childhood memories of moments that were not so great are eclipsed by the memories of his compassionate heart, loving demeanor, and dedication as a father.  Will I ever be able to measure up with my own children the way my father did with his or will my own shortcomings tip the scale in the eyes of my sons in the wrong direction?  I hope that my efforts to become a better father are not too little too late.  I would hate to think that what I leave in their hearts and minds might not be enough.  One thing is for sure, I won't give up.  This is my real job, I will always be my children's dad no matter how old they become.

Dad

"Good night dad...I love you dad!"

Today being Valentine's Day, I find it fitting to write a post related to the that sweet nectar that is typically abound when we nurture beautiful relationships with life partners, family members, friends, animals, and even the occasional stranger that manages to touch our heart with a kind smile or thoughtful gesture.  To me, out of all the possible experienced emotions, love stands on its own with probably the most powerful influence in my life.  Books, poetry, songs, letters, movies, plays, speeches, paintings, sculptures and many more have all been utilized over and over again to create some kind of permanent repository for this singular emotion throughout history.  Even the scientific community has dug in deep in efforts to make headway and try to understand the underlying mechanisms that take place in the human body when we experience the various flavors of love.  If you have a few minutes to spare today, take a pause for the cause and go ahead, do a quick online search for "neurology of love" or "language of love" and get ready to discover everything from scientific research, to sexual education, to marital counseling.  The information out there is boundless and fascinating to say the least.

Even more fascinating though is how one single word, love, can conjure so many images in my mind and still prove to be so incredibly hard to describe.  I am not alone though, even most dictionaries are all over the place when they try to pin down a single definition for this incredibly complicated emotion.  However, I can somehow instantly perceive when I am genuinely being loved.  Is that not amazing?  To me, love is by far the most powerful tool that I can use to bring out greatness in someone else.  When I love someone, I reach beyond my own needs and wants to find ways to bring happiness to them.  Is this the same way others feel too?  Or am I speaking a unique language taught to me by my parents since the day I was born?  Obviously I did not always know how to love in this way, otherwise I would of never hurt so many people on my way to becoming a mature adult.

I share these thoughts with you because I think it is crucial that parents realize that as we raise our children, we are inadvertently teaching them a language that will probably be the most important form of expression in their adult lives.  If I am unable to teach them how to show their love or give their love in productive and healthy ways, eventually they might not be able to do the same for their children either.  Worse, my children and their children will find themselves gravitating towards other sources of what might seem as love, but in reality not be love at all.  This particular scenario typically plays itself out in codependent and hurtful relationships that block their progress and ability to grow as individuals in a healthy way.

It was already past ten at night and I was ready to unwind and turn myself in for bed.  My oldest son had two friends with him and they were sitting in the family room playing some video game with the volume turned all the way down.  As I approached the adjacent kitchen area to make sure there were no dishes left to clean or put away, all I could hear were their own silly comments about the characters that each one of them were playing in some frantic battle on his XBOX game console.  Fingers pressing buttons and gyrating thumbs created a spectacle on the large screen television that could easily give an ill child an epileptic seizure.  As I walked away I thought my "goodnight guys!" farewell statement had been lost in the middle of their obviously hyperactive game play behavior.  As I was just one step away from entering my own room at the other end of our home I heard the unmistakable and beautiful expression coming out of my now 19 year old son, "Good night dad...I love you dad!"  This my beloved readers was the most beautiful thing I had heard all day long.  He is without a shadow of a doubt, his father's son!

Dad

What is time?

If you feel up to it and are ready to tackle one of the most difficult to understand concepts tied to human consciousness, I recommend that you dig into the written literature and read all about the various definitions of "what is time?"  Go ahead and start with the basic summary contained within the Wikipedia explanation and if after reading it you are still motivated you are most welcome to take it up a notch and continue on with the various scientific, philosophical, and even religious explanations that have been documented throughout history.  A few years back I found myself investing a great deal of my neurons to this subject and am happy to report that I survived the journey in one piece.  The fact that fascinated me the most was that our entire lives are fundamentally based on the mental perception of experiencing our existence through the apparent physical dimensions of space and time, yet we are dumbfounded when faced with our inability to define such a basic concept.  Even though I was able to gain a great deal of insight to the different views that govern mankind's concept of time, in the end I actually found myself divided between my own scientifically prejudiced mind that wants to find a physical relationship between time and the universe around me, and the probability that such a relationship might all be a convenient construct of my mind in order to experience the reality of my existence.  In other words, either I exist inside of time, or I am time in itself.

Don't worry if you don't get it, the truth is that understanding what is time is probably not as important as realizing that what truly matters is that everything that you experience is happening in the present moment.  I live the moment and once it is experienced it instantly becomes part of the past which can only be re-experienced as a memory in the present moment all over again.  The same happens with the future.  Even though I have not experienced a future event in itself, my concern about a potential future event allows it to exist in the present too.  Ironically, the simple minded comment that I so often hear as the cliche "live in the moment" is apparently all that I can actually do.

Then why is it that I am so persistently obsessed about the future?  If I have no ability to exist in any time other than now, why do I compulsively guide my entire life based on ideas or fantasies about tomorrow?  I seem to live mostly within the illusions of how my tomorrow will turn out to be, rather than focus on how my existence is happening right now.  This all seems to me as being a bit counterproductive and wasteful.  Instead, would it not be much more productive if I simply took care of what is going on in my life in the present moment?  I think so.  Why obsess on moments that are not real yet?  Living in the past is almost as wasteful too since it was only real while it was happening, and in the present it is just a memory which I have no ability to modify.  The most I should get out of the past are lessons to guide me in my path to avoid having a painful present.

As a parent I find it most challenging to apply my own advice with respect to living life in the present.  I have found myself constantly extrapolating all of the possible outcomes and consequences to the challenging behaviors that I experience with my children.  "What if" has become more of my reality than "what is," making it a lot harder for me to enjoy the moment.  I can only imagine how frustrating my own conduct must be to those that surround me.  "What if he makes this or that mistake?  What if he doesn't get better?  What if he hurts himself or somebody else?"  Those are all examples of the constant barrage of future queries my mind selects to focus on top of my present reality pushing me away from the actual moment that I am experiencing.  I have learned to accept the past and rarely dwell on it during the present.  However, I am now forcing myself to learn to accept the fact that I am in very little control over the future and that obsessing on negative outcomes is a wasteful use of the present moment.  In fact, if I am to apply this process of trying to live as much as possible in the present, then the choice is actually simple when I inadvertantly find myself spending any time thinking about the future.  It then makes perfect sense to imagine a great future full of positive outcomes and beautiful moments, which in turn then makes my preset much more pleasant and enjoyable.  With this realization I come full circle to discover that I am mostly in control over my own happiness.  If at this juncture I add the benefits of my faith in God, I am now more empowered than ever with the present belief that He has all sorts of beautiful promises working their way into my life during every single moment of my existence.

Dad

"Don't sleep with that window open over your head!"

We've all heard stories from our parents describing why it is that we should not expose ourselves to bad weather without the proper attire to avoid becoming ill.  "Don't walk barefoot around the cold floor of the house...cover your head from the rain...wear a sweater when going in and out of the house at nights...don't stand in front of that fan...take off those wet clothes..." are all among the many bits of wisdom we all tend to ignore in our youth and figure are hocus pocus elderly advice.  All it takes is a one time incident of getting sick after not following their advice to begin to integrate their voodoo wisdom into our own fundamental logic to hand down to our own children.  I for one am not really sure which one of the rules I broke this time that has led me to get bronchitis in one lung and pneumonia in the other, but I am sure that if I trace it back I probably did something I had been warned by my mother a million times not to do in the past.  Today, after a week of a constant fever between 101 and 103, a miserable cough, shortness of breath, and a good amount of pain in my chest, I find myself pondering how not breaking one of the dozens of rules that I was taught as a child could of saved me from all this misery.  See, even as an adult I still manage to not listen to what's good for me!

The story goes that my great grandparents after migrating from the Spanish Canary Islands had acquired a great deal of land in the beautiful island of Puerto Rico.  In those days it was customary for brothers and sisters to own adjacent properties, and with large size families this meant hundreds of acres needed to be crossed before you could leave a family name behind in order to cross the boundaries of other islanders that were not related to you.  Most of the wealth was measured on how much land and animals you owned and very little value was given to cash at hand.  When the need for money became real, the sale of land was the typical outcome to solve the shortage.  Times were tough and owning land to cultivate or raise animals was a major source of income that typically separated social classes, plus it had the added benefit of being able to feed your own family too.  There was no electricity, plumbing was non-existent forcing the young and able to make multiple daily trips to water wells, and sanitation was all about outhouses at the time.  In those days, becoming ill was an ordeal of great magnitude to contend with since hospitals were not in abundance and it was all about having to make arrangements for a doctor to come to your home on horse to treat whomever was ill.  Medical supplies were scarce and treatments were extremely costly.  Dysentery, tuberculosis, and pneumonia were the three major culprits in life expectancy being so low for the families of those times.  My maternal great grandmother caught pneumonia and every effort was made to heal her and bring her back to health.  Land was sold to pay for medical attention and her medications and just a few weeks after fully recovering, one night she stepped up to close an open window so the rain would not come inside their home, and this single exposure to the inclement weather caused a relapse on her recovery provoking a double pneumonia that lead to her eventual death shortly after.

This is just one of the tales from my mother's side of the family that instantly changed the behavior of every single descendant from there on to never approach an open window during the night without making sure adequate clothing was worn for such a trivial task.  It stuck and it made an impact so deep in my family tree that I can guarantee that at least up to my branch, every descendant has been properly briefed on the correct protocol of window closing during the night when it's raining.  This all sounds simple enough, yet I know as well as you do that our family culture is a great influence in not just our belief system, but also some of the most trivial decisions we make day to day.  The way we greet our elders asking for their blessings, the pause we make before answering simple questions while our brains evaluate the most adequate response for the occassion, even the level of eye contact that we project when casually conversing with other people are all part of our heritage.  The truth is that I believe that very little is truly random and that the majority of our day to day interactions and behavior are a sweet mix of our culture, family values, and inherited personalities.  Tone of voice, volume, expressive demeanor are just a few of those traits that can probably be traced back through our family tree.  Yet is it not also true that each one of us are so very different from our brothers and sisters too?  Some quiet and shy, others loud, expressive and outspoken.  Beautiful, is it not, the apparently random texture that covers our children and also the common river of our genes that run deep inside them?

Most of all I like being aware of all of this that I write about above.  It warms my heart when I am able to remember the tales of my ancestors in order for me to pass them down to my own kids.  It humbles me when I get sick after doing something dumb like sleeping with the window open above my head during a cold night, even though I must of heard my parents warn me so many times to not do this when I was a child.  It amazes me when I hear a friend tell me how much alike my oldest son looks like me, even though when I peek at his pictures I am freaked out not to be able to see the resemblance myself.  All of these things force me into a quiet contemplation of trying to figure out "why" this is all so, but I eventually discover that the real answer behind it all is a beauitful thing called "life."

Dad