I wrote this seventeenth chapter of my online memoir during one of the weeks of the Easter Season with spring in force. Our fig tree, potatoes, onions, begonia, hibiscus, onions, green onion tops, ferns, swamp lilies and Kalanchoe are prospering and the weeds are also thriving that gained ground when our lawn was damaged by the drought that is well over now but lasted for months. I cut the grass and work on the lawn often, but with s motorless reel style mower and frequent rains it can be a challenge for me to keep it presentable. But the effort helps me to keep a number of things together – it provides me with exercise and helps me to stay aware of things that need to be tended to. I am very much aware of the Season in every sense. I am also aware that my wife is celebrating her 60th birthday on the 20th of April. In 1977 my mother turned 34 on a Sunday on November 13. I made her a card and bought her a simple gift. Dad did not do much it seemed tome but I may be forgetting something. We had a big Abbeville Thanksgiving with both sides of the family in 1976, but in 1977 I am pretty sure we were just arriving in Mexico from the United States and we were moving from a country that celebrated tis very AMerican holiday to one that did not… But again my records are very limited and my memory could be flawed. I do remember Christmas and New Year’s Eve in December of 1977. That was in Cuernavaca a city in a state not far from what was in those days the Distrito Federal in which Mexico CIty – the largest city in the world at that time – was located. I have a lot of memories to sort through. But they are never going to be fully resolved into any particular synthesis. But I do spend more than I can afford on seeing a therapist online to help me deal with feelings and memories among other things. On April 13, after going to anticipated Mass, Clara and I ate supper and watched the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood on one of our streaming platforms. The biopic of Fred Rogers (played by Tom Hanks) is the story of the host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and a journalist who was impacted in his own family and life by his encounter with Rogers. Rogers was presbyterian minister and other things besides a television icon. The journalist whose story ended up being on the cover of Esquire Magazine was able to connect to the deeper, spiritual power of Fred Rogers in a very personal way. I admire the film and the story behind it, but Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were things I watched sometimes as a child, but his take on the world always seemed like it came from a different place than any I had ever lived in….
What we were living in 1977 with my baby sister, Sarah, was an adventure not in healing our feelings and learning to find a well adjusted life. It was wholly a life of insecurity. But it was also a life of beauty and new sights and learning. For me it was a time that I would go back to over and over again in memory and reference…
On April 10, 2024 Clara and I had supper at Jalisco’s in Abbeville. That is the same Mexican Restaurant where we reconnected 3 years ago on the same day of the same month after not seeing each other for about 45 years. I have an online therapy session every two weeks and that one ran from three to four that afternoon. That is not my usual day and time for this appointment but due to a technical glitch we had to reschedule the session. Thursday, I donated plasma and got paid, I got home and did some things along with picking up a takeout lunch and then had an insurance sales seminar online at 1:00. Afterwards Clara and I took a nap together and when I woke up I had received my paycheck for my work as a Commissioner in the last election, I drove to the bank to deposit the check because the money gets to my account quicker than if I deposit it digitally in my app. I woke Clara at the time we had agreed and then we went to the health club where we regularly engage in various forms of exercise. I paid our dues for the month. We changed there and went to the free concert series in our hometown’s main square that is called “Sounds on the Square”. The band playing this concert included three generations of the Leblanc family of musicians and others playing drums, several kinds of strings and brass instrumentalists as well as a number of vocalists of both sexes. The group was called the Bad Boys. Clara and I danced several times as well as listening to the music. My mother showed up and I danced with her as well and Clara captured our dance on video. Because I was working on this draft of this chapter, that dance reminded me of all that my mother and I have been through together. I thought of the dances we had shared over the years and the dances I had seen her do with my father. I also thought of how the dance I described at Mount Carmel in a recent chapter of this memoir came at a time when she and Dad rarely danced except on the rare occasions hen simple expressive dances were included in the worship gatherings of the Charismatic celebrations we attended. In some ways, our time in Cuernavaca was a low point in the romantic aspect of my parents’ lives. It was one of several low points – but their lives had a number of high points in their romance as well. So many things have happened since then but it is to those times that our story now turns.
On the next day, Friday the twelfth, my wife and I had coffee together, then I went to the post office to check my mail, then to the dump to bring our recycling. Because our city does not offer recycling pick up. I thought about the fact that although there were many beautiful and picturesque parts of Cuernavaca — which did impress me as well – I was deeply and unfavorably impressed by the midden beside a major street where people from our neighborhood came and dumped their garbage into a natural ravine. Once again waste management was very prominent in my view of society. I longed to see pollution diminished throughout the world, that feeling went through all my years of life as a recurring theme.
At the DIsciples of the Lord Jesus Christ community on the Damascus Ranch in Channing, Texas near Amarillo we had prayed the entire DIvine Office (or Liturgy of the Hours) except for the Office of Readings and almost all of it as a group. We worked hard and had some time to play as well but we had what in current English vernacular were called not Matin, Lauds and Vespers but rather Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer and Night Prayer. It was a life soaked in so much Scripture. The traditional Roman Catholic system of Liturgy when it includes the mass and the Liturgy of the hours is an enormous amount of scripture. Read, reflected upon, chanted, sung and prayed Scripture as well as some poems and prayers produced by recent editors living the faith at that time. I did love all of that. Any understanding of my life at that time is woefully inadequate if it does not take into account that I had what mystics call “Consolations”. I prayed and I felt that God was deeply present to me and my fellow believers. These feelings affected my imagination, body, intellect and will. There is no doubt that such a sense of the DIvine was the greatest payoff in my life.
When we were in El Paso I rejoiced in the prayers of the people there that fully expressed the Charismatic Gifts, expressions and traditions in connection with the liturgy. Sometimes I wondered if I shared a particular sense of how things should be prioritized and how they should be understood. I did not believe that I was necessarily in harmony with all aspects of each Christian community we fellowshipped with – nobody could have been in harmony with each. But I did believe that we were all involved in living Communion with God in Christ.
But I had a sense that lf I had a destiny it was in the Presence of God that was going to take in larger parameters in the world. When I was in prayer one or two nights before we left El Paso, it was a prayer time before I fell asleep, I had a sense of Christ as though I were seeing him in an almost causal way as he had been in his earthly ministry before his crucifixion, death and resurrection. I felt his greatness as a great man, somehow different than any image or story I had heard before. I sensed that some of the men I saw were his apostles and they were all speaking in a language I did not speak or understand. I felt the holiness of the moment and then it passed and I fell asleep and in the days to come I pondered it but did not speak of it much if at all, I had no words to share how it differed from other experiences of visual and imaginative prayer. Life meanwhile was somewhat distracting from my mystical and inner life. Our family was invited to appear on a Christian television show and we were all to be interviewed together with a little interview for each of us, including little Sarah. The interview was set for the day before our train left Juarez for Mexico City. Sarah mysteriously hurt her hand and Mom stayed with her while Dad and I did the interview. After the interview the man in charge gave me a hand powered device that could play a recording of scripture on a sort of record.
In the next few days we were brought across the border and to the train station. We set off on our journey to Mexico CIty. On the way we listened to the Spanish spoken around us, detecting the few words and phrases we knew and trying to put them to use. When we were back in the sears, the four of us gathered after any foray to fins food or restrooms or views, we would try to use a few Spanish words in our family prayer and conversation. The net result of all this was really to make it clear that we spoke almost no Spanish and struggled even with the simplest signs and announcements on the train and in stations. It was a new world that was opening up as we looked forward to reading, speaking and interacting in a different monolingual society. There were bilingual French and English elements in the life and community we lived and experienced in Louisiana. Tonga had been bilingual as well. We had toured Europe as well in areas where we spoke nothing of the local tongue. But we felt the difference, a few people spoke to us in English but most people did not speak any English outside of their English classes in elementary school. We were not tourists or tied to a university with a large English speaking population. We were diving into a society right beside the United States in an effort to be part of the life there and to grow as the missionaries that perhaps God had called us to be. Yet, it was still very much a question what we were possibly called to do. I loved my parents but I deeply pondered and intently wondered if God had perhaps a connection with our moving into a world of new possibilities while we had still so little to define our path in a way that might lead to some kind of career security. But I did think that we were doing something very different and that we were living a life in which our whole family shared a life and a purpose which was admirable in itself. Yet there were a variety of themes and contours in the shape and fabric of our lives and our belief that a mission in Colombia was the direction we should be heading in once we learned some Spanish. .
Sister Antoinette who had been Mother John Marie’s main contact for us was the driving force and organizing power behind our first stays in Mexico CIty and whatever welcome was available But there was another figure who played a very large role in making our way in the city. That was Father Carlos Talavera RIvera. Among the contacts in the Archdiocese was Father Carlos Talavera Ramirez who was the head of the Comunidad Justicia y Alabanza, Justice and Praise Community. Father Talavera had been ordained in 1948 for the Archdiocese but his ministry now focused on the Charismatic Renewal in Mexico and the service of that popular Christian movement to the poor. In a few years in 1980 he would be ordained and consecrated as an auxiliary Bishop in the Federal District’s super diocese. My parents, with my younger siblings, would serve under Talavera many years later when he was bishop of Coatzacoalcos, but I was doing another thing at that time. We would stay with Father Talavera’s wealthy family members in relative comfort approaching luxury for a little while. In Mexico CIty, we somehow had the invitations to interact with many aspects of the Justicia y Alabanza Community gathering and ministries. We had a volunteer translator who was a very intelligent German engineer married to a Mexican woman who was very fluent in English, German and Spanish and possibly other languages as well.Capable and distinguished in so many ways, he was very possibly the least capable and most inadequate interpreter I ever encountered – and in my life I encountered many interpreters and translators.
Joseph was somehow not aware that instead of hearing Spanish and then saying the equivalent in English, he would hear the Spanish speaking people speak to us in Spanish and then tell us the same thing in Spanish. He would then hear what we said in English and repeat the English words to the audiences and people around us in English. It was staggeringly weird and funny. People would try to clue him in and he could not grasp what he was doing. People with much less command of the languages involved would repeatedly have to jump in and fulfill the duties of interpreter but he continued to attempt to do the thing he seemed incapable of doing..
His efforts only went on for a few days, but the memories of those days have remained among the most metaphorically charged after all my life. I remember working with Elsa, the very attractive girl I met with her family on an English assignment for her classes and learning a few more words in Spanish. The Climate in Mexico City was much cooler than in El Paso/Juarez because the elevation was 7, 349 feet. It was nice to be cooler as fall and winter seasons were approaching and there were many new foods to try. I was aware that we were also meeting not only the poor and middle class but some rich people as well. However, we never built on those relationships over the years. Although our family would work and fellowship with some very wealthy people in the course of our lives. I am pretty sure that none of those original contacts in Mexico City were part of that network.
. While we had begun to make inquiries about the Language school we now went there. Cuernavaca was at 4, 954 feet and the climate was warmer than Mexico CIty but still much more moderate and cool than that areas at that latitude at sea level. It was greener and more lush as we rode the bus toward Cuernavaca. At that time and for many years afterwards, Mexico had many classes of bus tickets for many routes – it may still, but I am out of touch. At the lowest levels there could be live chickens tied together in small bunches for transport, no cushions on the seats and small holes in the floor. . At the higher levels there could be immaculate conditions, on board restrooms, baggage handlers and an attendant or two serving drinks on board. There were probably five classes of bus from Mexico City to Cuernavaca in those days and this was probably the second from the top – why I am not sure. The ticket may have been a gift from someone in Mexico City. My mother was to stay home with Sarah while Dad and I were able to attend the courses at IDEAL. In addition to the classes we had lunches served to us which were typical of the region or some other region with the details of the pertinent region’s cuisine explained, I remember sopapillas, various tacos and churros.. Our instructors often met with Dad and I alone. Our homework was to read a conversation or two set in a particular environment written in English and Spanish. Then we would start with repeating those exact conversations without instructors. We would try to learn all we could about glottal stops, tongue placements, aspirations and the finer points of emphasis and pronunciation. After that, we would create ad lib permutations of the text. We also worked on pronunciation drills. Every two or three days there would be a lecture on history and culture and during a couple of breaks a day we socialized with some of the diverse students attending the school. It was in an elegant building with an enclosed garden. While I was attending the school someone there taught me to make pottery ( I had previously taken a class at Notre Dame de La Bayou Dominican Convent in Abbeville, that Dominican Convent building now belongs to Family Missions Company which is a non profit that my parent later founded). I formed, fired and glazed three Christmas presents for each of my family members which long ago disappeared like almost everything I have ever owned or made – but not everything.
My mother was with Sarah across the street in a very different environment. Our family rented a single room for my cot, my parents double bed and a tiny crib of sorts for Sarah. The woman who ran it was cantankerous and spoke no English. Her income came from occasional room rentals and from some tiny pension she got from either from her husband and father who had died a few years earlier or by being a survivor of someone or something else – but it was not a full pension. Her very attractive young daughter of between 19 and 22 years of age, as I recalled with her in their modest but not poor home. I had seen a good bit of prostitution and wondered when I saw her devotion and displays of affection to a married man in the home if she was perhaps such a woman as I had seen doing these things before. But the one man I saw with her was the only man who came to see her and although there was a professional tone to their connections it was different than what I had seen before. He however did bring food and money and wine into the house and Christmas decorations. They were very physical without being x rated in their affections. On weekends he went home to his family. I decided in my own mind without being able to talk to anyone about anything that she was his mistress. He slept in her room, not the other way around. In those days there was no phone of any kind in the house and so I never had to wonder what his communication with his wife and kids from there would be like if he was not with his mistress. When he went to work or business he may have called home from an office or a payphone. I barely got to know either of these people. But I could see they wer ein dealy earned about surviving and keeping their home. The mother seemed to be harassing my mother when she prayed or sang because she had given up all religious practice in the hard times since her husband’s death.
The family also had a young thirteen year-old daughter whom I occasionally helped with her English classes in return for her helping to show me what schools in Mexico were teaching. But the girl stayed busy at home helping her cantankerous mother to keep house and she seemed worried about her sister. Somehow my mother converted the mean and angry woman who ran the home to enough Christianity to take out her Christmas decorations and that included a large and very nice manger scene. The 13 year old, Anita I believe, got me to help decorate and it was a holy time. The illicit couple in the house were also moved in a number of ways too complicated for me to do justice to in this chapter. We shared a christmas feast with the mother and two daughters and we sang badly in Spanish hymns and carols of the season.Our family sang a few songs in English too.
The family had some kind of lapsed connection to the theater and in a kind of half basement below there was a large collection of props in various states of disrepair as well as a number of almost surrealist. Statues. There were times when I sat down there and worked on my school work for IDEAL just to get out of the strange house. My mother had a notepad and a pencil on her person all the time and was busy learning all she could each day from Lucha and her daughter. In addition, a few times she and I went over my lessons. In Abbeville, after leaving El Paso, we had all worked on a Berlitz course in Spanish and bought a simple Spanish- English dictionary. Mom found a little time each day to work with the materials in the dictionary and Berlitz course to systematize what she had written in her notes. Dad and I were both learning Spanish much more rapidly than ever before but I was learning a lot faster and eventually we ended up in different streams. One of my teachers was a very pretty young woman and there were never more than three students in a class. This seemed to upset my mother who was worried about the sexual aspects of everything in my life always and always according to her own particular point of view. Before I had the pretty girl Dad and I were in a class where one man told us every greeting used in Mexico in his experience. These varied from the formalities of the remaining traditional haciendados in the anterooms of their villas who when greeting a fellow aristocrat new to their home used words that might translate as “Welcome Your Grace, You are in your home and on the land my family holds from God.” But he also ran through the run of the mill greetings until he reached the ruffians of a particular neighborhood in a particular seaport town who, he assured us, greeted one another with the words translating as “Have a good day fucking your mother!” I made a comment about something my mother had said about sexual norms in the school, I parroted back words I really did not understand and another American woman, a student who was actually renting rooms from the school itself and had an apartment, a microbusiness and a somewhat difficult reputation in town did not react well. She walked over and remonstrated with my mother in front of the uncomprehending cantankerous landlady. But that was before Christmas. We went to some beautiful Catholic Churches and that was part of our weekend touring. We also went to Protestant church which was virulently anti-Catholic and very unpleasant in a number of ways because a friend invited us Slowly, the life in the house across from the school got better and I did not feel I had to hide in the basement to do my homework. After Christmas, I could speak some Spanish well enough to understand and they began to tell stories about the days before their husband and father died. They put out a few photos and knick-knacks from happier times. Anita walked with me to a little chapel she had wanted to visit, we did this just once but seemed near tears. We learned that the family had never had a celebration from the time their father died till the Christmas we shared. No saints Day feasts, no birthday parties, no secular national holidays and no Christmas nor Easter. Anita felt some hope that hey might have a life again.
Dad stayed on in school after me to catch up and I did some shopping for Mom and touring for myself. We also were invited to dine with the owners of the school and it was very nice, later we ate with a friend we met at their home. He was an older wealthy man but he took time to get to know me and talked told me in Spanish and English mix that I could follow. He claimed to be a nonbeliever but he had a sort of shrine in his house very much of his own design. It had a monument to Jesus Christ in the Place of honor. Then he had other great men, I remember Beethoven, Simon Bolivar, Napoleon, George Washington, Adam Smith, Benito Jaurez and Albert Einstein. I also remember him saying that the world I lived in was divided between three Jews: Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. “It is from the minds of one of these three Jews that most of the forces driving the world forward draw their power.” It was one of many rich cultural experiences in Cuernavaca where I felt somewhat privileged and fostered in my intellectual development. He gave me a copy of Hundred Years of Solitude in ENglish and another in Spanish/ He also gave me a book by Octavio Paz in Spanish with some handwritten and typed notes in English. I read them all pretty quickly.
The most memorable physical feature of life in Cuernavaca was going to church at Santa Catalina de Siena. It was indoor and outdoor, modern contemporary art and architecture and classic tradition. The church was very Mexican, yet generally Latin American and fully international.
When we finished our studies I was by far the best reader but Mom could speak Spanish best of all us, I was second and Dad was third. The opposite of the amount of time we had spent in the very good school to which we had come. In our last days we were corresponding with the ministries in Mexico and we found a place to be in ministry as a family in a poor neighborhood in Mexico city called Cuchilla Del Tesoro, “Wedge of Treasure” near the airport. We would be heading back to Mexico City as missionarieswho knew something about the language and culture of the place we lived.
Before we left I got sick and so did others but I was the sickest and it was hard to find my way to a restroom or lavatory, hard to get a bucket or medical care. I vomited on myself, my cot and the wall. In my fevered dreams I had visions of the mysterious orb of heaven and hell. I would never fully recover from whatever I had. My digestive health would suffer for the rest of my life in some new ways that I will not detail here. I felt somewhat weaker as we prepared to return to Mexico City. I also knew that I would not be enrolling in any school accessible from the poor neighborhood that we were moving into together. I also doubted that I could make much money for myself in a country where I spoke so little of the language still. But although I was worried, I was determined to make the best of things and still find the courage to hope for a good life for myself. In the meanwhile, I also believed that the power of Jesus was driving the world to better places. I believed the path of brining the Gospel was a valid call on my life.
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