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A Dog in Honduras

At one time, I was a good-looking dog, that is before I came to live in Tela Vieja. Right now, I’m living quite well under a shack behind a hotel with sand for my bed and cool breezes at night.

I arrived here, young and skinny with a toned body. My face was handsome until the fight with the pit bull over territory. He bit off my left ear and left a bloody stump, which the sand flies feasted on for days. However, the right one looks okay and my teeth are sound.

 Before I came here, I lived with a man whom I called “Jefe”. Along with his wife and son, we lived on someone else’s property in a small wooden one-room house. It had a tin roof, dirt floor and a door to close at night. The kitchen was out back, andconsisted of a pit with a spoke for cooking and a concrete slab for a table.

The son was small and frail with grayish skin that resembled a fish. He might not have been well because he stayed in bed most of the time and when he did come out, the wife put him in a hammock by the palm trees. He could not walk or maybe he did not know how. I was not sure but maybe we could have played together.

The wife was not nice to me. She worked all day, cleaning and taking care of the son. Her body was hunched over and she had deep lines running through her face, which did not add to her looks. She never missed a chance to hit me with the broom whenever I sneaked into the house for shade or in search of food scraps. I usually ran and hid in the weeds which  made her angry.

I loved Jefe!   I knew what he thougt and what he was going to do because it was easy to read him. “¿Perro, que estas hacienda?”,  he would sing or say to me with sluryy words. He was a happy man who worked hard in the fields returning home covered in dirt. He was stocky and round with brown hair and an unshaven face topped off with a black hat and a feather sticking out on one side. He had the widest brown eyes that smiled at me when I pleased him.

Jefe loved to play games of paper with other men. They would sit around the concrete slab out behind the house and throw paper at each other. The paper had funny drawings on it and every time Jefe played with them, green paper that was kept in his pocket ended up on the table. If Jefe gave away many green papers during the game, we went hungry. During the last game , I think he finally made the connection with giving away the green but it was too late.

For two weeks, the family did not have enough food. Jefe would say, “¿What do I do now?” to the air and the son cried endlessly, “I’m hungry. When are we going to eat?” The wife walked around talking to herself and pulling out strands of her hair. She beat me senseless when I got in her way.

At the end of the first week, Jefe had to steal mangoes from the neighbour’s year. The wife screamed at him for embarrassing her and he spent the rest of the day with his head hung low with shame. I had a hard time trying to eat those mangoes due to their shape and my mouth but my stomach was knotty and hurt from hunger.

The end of the second week Jefe broke down and stole a bag of rice from the Mercado. He stared at me and I swore he said, “Meat would go nice with the rice. ¿Como cocinar?” Later I heard him ask the wife, “Should I season it first?” In addition, she was too quick with her instructions on seasoning ‘tough meat’.

At that point, I knew there was no choice but to take my chance on the streets. I made my way down to the hotels near the beach. I figured food was not far from where humans playbecause humans and garbage were inseparable.

My life is now on the streets and I cannot complain. I hunt for food in the morning and at night; the dumpsters behind the hotels are packed with discarded meats and moldy bread. Weekends are wonderful because the city people rush to the beach with their picnic baskets. They invade the area for leisure and pleasure and I can smell the food in their baskets. Sometimes its arroz con frijoles (rice and beans) sometimes pan de coco o (coconut bread) and on rare occasions pork or steak. My stomach growls and I salivate at the aromas.

When they leave on Sundays, the discarded food, which they call garbage, stays behind. I have to fight with the local perros to get at the food. First, I chase away from the food, down the beach, then run back and grab it before the others get it. The others are the turkey vultures and they are vicious but I can outsmart them most of the time.

Posted on by Anelemc

Family

Webster defines family as:

1: Persons of common ancestry 2: Group living together 3: parents and children 4: group of related individuals

At the age of seven, I defined family as:

 1:The Walton’s 2: The Brady Bunch 3: The Jefferson’s 4: Good Times

However, my family did not look or act like TV families. We did not grow up on a mountainous range but on a concrete, brick and brownstone block in Park Slope, Brooklyn before it was super chic to live here. Had no idea the suburbs existed with family rooms and dens and a “deluxe apartment in the sky” that came with a Doorman did not thrive in the “ghetto”.  Eventually, I came to understand the difference between “the ghetto” and “the projects”. None. Like peanut butter cups with chocolate or M&M’s with the candy coating- one does not exist without the other.  

Family defined by me as an adult is a group of fragmented, mentally ill, alcoholics (some) and sexually frustrated (most) peoples strewn together not by choice but as Webster further defines- forced to co-exist with some civility and respect. Describes my family nicely although respect is optional and civility must be enforced at times. I will  include the word ‘dysfunctional’ which,  translates to, “Severely messed up”and/or “Non-repairable”. Mí familía would not rate on the top ten lists, composed by a good psychologist, as the family most damaged and/or fragmented. We are the product of our roots, which started as seedlings and shaped by environments and genetic components. What we longed to become, we did not.  

My family serves as a marker, a validation of non-existence within the group, for my position as the youngest placed me in the “seen and not heard” category. Number four is ‘the loneliest number’.

Posted on by Anelemc · 2 Comments

Father’s Day June 18, 2000-excerpt

Today I called the “semen donor” in Jamaica. The one usually referred to as, my “mother’s husband”, “that man”, “what’s his name again?” Yes, Mr. Noel Emanuel Walsh and the terms of endearment used to acknowledge an emotional void absentee father. Mom loved to irritate me by occasionally responding to those terms of endearment with, “You mean your father? “, overly emphasizing “father”.

In contradiction to my usually controlled, reserved way of getting things done, the placing of the call in itself was a spontaneous, spur of the moment decision. With the ringing of the phone line and the connection established, mi Alma (my soul) pulsated through bouts of hurt, happiness, pain and joy fused and twisted like a Twizzle licorice stick.

William, my eleven-year old half-brother, answered the phone with his Jamaican accented voice. Although my half-brother had yet to meet me, I have known him for years through bits of gossip on the semen donor. I knew what school he was attending, how he lived on the land, his features and his mother’s menopausal pregnancy by way of my cousin Joyce. Mom and Joyce would hold quiet conversations about Noel E. that included William and the hush tones fueled my curiosity through the years. Did he look like us, how was his personality? We’d have to meet eventually although I figured, the meeting would occur after my father’s death.

When my brother answered the phone, I asked to speak with Mr. Walsh and after politely asking me to hold he placed the phone down and called him. I heard his slippers shuffling towards the phone. “Hello” he answered in a voice strained with age. “I’m your youngest daughter, Elena. Do you remember who I am?” “Of course I know who you are”, he replied and the guard rail around mi Alma cracked and the residue of past wounds were comforted by recognition from a long absent father made everything okay. We spoke for an hour and made plans to meet during my travel to Jamaica within the coming week. I was an emotional mess at the end of the call and questioned what had the most effect: the shock of reaching out to Dad on Father’s Day or he remembering who I was.

“He remembers me,” I cried to mom.
“Why shouldn’t he?” she said.
“We’ve set plans to meet when I arrive in Jamaica”.
“You made plans to meet?” mom questioned.
“I’m going to see my Dad”, I cried.