"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