Family memories

My parents met in Barcelona while they both worked for Telefonica de Espana, in downtown Barcelona, Spain. The year was 1970. They were both young and beautiful. My Mom always tells this story about the moment it all “happened”. He saw her,and he fell in love. Just like that. When he tried to mumble a few words to impress her, he mistakenly said “Your eyebrows are beautiful”, instead of “your eyelashes are beautiful”. And of course, my mother - who was a sassy Spanish nineteen year old young woman - didn’t waste the opportunity to charge against the poor young man. “You mean eyelashes”, she said, as she rolled her eyes at him and proceeded to walk away. My father would later tell me that he didn’t even know what to say after that, but that she was so alluring he had to try again. And he did. They dated for a whooping nine months - and didn’t speak to each other for three of those months, after a mutual co-worker tried to break them up telling her that he was also seeing someone else. But somehow he still knew she was the one. “Why don’t we get married?” he asked her while on a reconciliation date at the Arrigat club. “That way nobody will be able to break us up”. My parents wed August 6 of 1972. She wore a stunning figure-fitting white dress and white pamela hat, and he looked like Clark Gable. She turned twenty that day, and he was twenty three. I still don’t think I ever saw a more dazzling couple in their wedding day. He looked concerned on a few pictures - the weight of a new life and all of its responsibilities perhaps - and they both look so very young. I sometimes stare at these pictures when I need solace in my life. This is where it all started - where I started. With these two exceptional individuals falling in love, and doing something about it.

Life threw a few curved balls at my parents, but they made it thirty two years together, and it is all in these wedding pictures - the promise of a life together, the vowing to never giving up, the commitment before God and before the people they loved. They were my Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, minus the scandalous adultery. The respect, the support, the love, the unconditionality of it all. It was always there, regardless of storms. If you knew my parents together, you know that there was an invisible bond between them. They had each other’s back. I know my father wasn’t always the perfect communicative genius my mother needed him to be, and my mother wasn’t always the soft spoken woman my father needed her to be, but there was rhythm there. Jazz in constant movement.

I love that story my mother told me oftentimes about the club Borracho in Balmes Street, where they used to go to when they were dating in Barcelona, and how the dj always played for them the same record: The Isaac Hayes Movement. It became one of the main albums of my childhood memories. Every time they played it, I pictured them sipping on some tall drinks, launching at that club, and just watching life develop slowly before their eyes - before marriage, before children, before tough decisions and life changing moments. Just them, listening to Isaac Hayes, being young and strong, and unstoppable.

My mother became pregnant a few months after they got married. The horrendous stories about how my sister’s delivery happened haunted me for a very long time. The hospital’s midwife didn’t feel like missing out on her life that day, and unwilling to wait for my mother to naturally be ready to deliver, she proceeded to induce labor. Two different shots of labor inducing meds - one more than the recommended dosage at the time - didn’t do it, so this monster climbed on my mother’s belly, and physically pushed her baby down the birth canal, by applying unbearably painful pressure on her pregnant belly. My mother screamed and screamed. My father hadn’t made it to the hospital yet, so there was literally nobody there to stop that midwife from endangering both my mother and my sister Carolina, and nobody to comfort her. My mother finally gave birth, and vowed to never have a natural birth again - my brother and myself were c-section deliveries. The panic was so extreme that when she had to give birth to my brother she had to be sedated. When it was my turn a year later, I apparently made my mother burst into an uncontrollable laughter in the elevator, while dilating and with growing pain contractions. I like to think about it as a first sign of my true nature. I do like to see people happy, especially if pain is hitting them. So there she was, nine months pregnant, about ready to push this baby out of her, and instead of panicking again, she just...laughed. The doctor looked at her in disbelief, and said to have been the first time he had seen a woman laughing in the middle of so much pain. Such a fantastic entrance. I only wish she would have had the same experience with my siblings. All mothers deserve magical moments when they are bringing those babies into this world.

On my sister’s first birthday she fell very ill. They rushed her to the hospital, and doctors dreaded to give the young parents the unbelievably tough news: their daughter had kidney cancer. Years later my mother confided with me that she always wondered if that midwife had caused the disease when she overdosed her with labor inducing meds. My parents then embarked on a life-long trip with my sister’s health. My mother was soon to be expecting another baby - my brother Hector. This had all the initial elements of a bumpy ride.

I have heard the stories many times. My sister Carolina was diagnosed with a nephroblastoma - Wilm’s tumor. Doctors at Hospital Vall D’Hebron’s Residencia Maternal in Barcelona moved quickly. My sister’s left kidney needed to be removed, and they rushed her into surgery that same day,October 4th of 1974. It has always given me chills. There were twenty children fighting cancer alongside my sister in that same pediatric oncology floor; my sister was the only one who survived that year. For the next almost three years after that surgery, and after months of chemo treatments and living in the hospital, she had continued setbacks and major scares, where she had to be taken back to the hospital with high fevers, or worse. Cancer was trying to kill her, but she fought like possibly only small children can - without fear, without expectations, without a clear notion of life and death. She didn’t know she had something to lose, so that little angel flapped her wings tirelessly, and never stopped. Can you imagine the strength of her will? She beat all odds and all bets, and I remember often looking at her in awe years later, knowing the battles she had to face without even getting a chance to blink - and how it made me feel weak, and unworthy of sharing her same bloodline.

In the middle of all that chaotic life and death reality, my mother gave birth to my brother Hector February 26th of 1975. He was a premature baby, entering this world a few weeks ahead of schedule. He was tiny and wrinkled, and my father’s pride and joy. I suppose there is something special about a father’s first son - an invisible connection, an understanding of self, a mirror that looks back at you and never lights up. My father loved him dearly, but I am not sure my brother knew that.

Those were days of incredible stress. Carolina wasn’t out of the woods, and the new born baby required as much love and attention as any other baby would. Both of my parents worked, and between hospital visits, making a living, and changing diapers, I don’t know where or how they found their common ground. But they did - with and without the family’s help.

Most of my family lived in the same neighborhood in Barcelona: Horta, in the district of Horta-Ginardo. A vivacious, loud, village-like, and mostly charnego and migrant conglomerate, not far from the legendary Gracia district and its neighborhoods of Vallcarca, Coll and La Salut. We lived at 17 Carrer de Lorda.

I have yet to be able to explain why I have always loved Barcelona so much. Even as a child, there was an almost magical connection. I want nothing more than to be able to find the right words to describe the colors I saw, the clear skies that always stared back down at me, the scent of a Mediterranean Sea that blended with the culinary expertises of the inhabitants of the old neighborhoods where I spent most of my childhood - whose food scents brought so much peace to my young soul, for some reason.

I remember specially my grandmother’s Rafaela’s apartment in the street of Santa Rosalia. She was not the best cook of the world - that title belonged to my other grandmother, Ramona - but there was a certain element in her over-cooked macaroni pasta with tomato sauce and tuna that always made me look at her with admiration and respect. I loved her so dearly! Her apartment was a big three bedroom, one bath apartment in one of those buildings built to withstand centuries. Third floor, no elevators, and the enchanting smell of old traditions, old folks, old furniture, old memories, old clothes, old perfumes, and old recipes all around. She had two balconies overlooking the traffic afar, and the buildings around her. The humming of traffic turned out to be a soothing element for me, something I didn’t discover until years later. But I think my favorite part of those balconies was the view right under her, in the patios of neighbors on the first floors, that had plants, chickens, cats, and dogs. I remember a German Shepherd I often saw walking around his enclosure. I wanted to be there with him, and play. I never liked seeing dogs or cats outside, not even as a child. I worried about them. I wanted to protect them.

My grandmother didn’t have dogs or cats, but she always had a parakeet. She would open the cage and let the bird fly around and spend some time outside of his cage. It was one of those details that escaped me as a child - how caring she was with her little animals, and how amazingly good her heart was, because not everybody that has birds understands that interacting with them makes their lives better, and allowing them to fly is a real gift to the caged animals. And there she was, loving those birds enough to want to see them happy. She was amazing. I grew up in a home where my father also deeply cared for his animals - fish, birds, and dog. How blessed was I, to be surrounded by such exceptional human beings?