Written Work   

To whom it may concern:

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This is an excerpt of a longer story where I describe my father from my point of view. In the longest version, I write about his struggles and yearning dreams to be returned to his land (tierra), despite being captured in the cyclone of cities that never let go. At the end we move from past to present, and it seems he’s let go and made some peace with his new home. There is a moment of reflection where I step as fully as I can into my Apa’s psyche, and a tone of acceptance is a wrap for my narration.

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Genre:

Memoir / Western-SciFi

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Title:

Walking with Apa

There is no talking about Apa without talking about his tierra.

* * * * *

He comes from a land where stars drip into steep arroyos and tall, stately plateaus alike. Droplets of rain frequent the loose dust packed by hooves of plenty kinds. Lush trees reach their willowed branches out as far over the land as possible, just to sway their leaves into the red earth. I can remember being swung while my Apa pulled the stronger branches back and forth to scare me. He would tease and tell of the times when all this brothers and youngest sister played tag swinging and crawling from branch to branch, never once touching the ground. 

“Como unos changitos,” he said with a smile that deepen’d his engraved wrinkles, but flooded them with an almost vainful abundance of pure youth. His round cheeks so high, all you could sneak from his side lopped, crescent eyes was a hidden sparkle. A cave teasing a bit of its jewels and treasure. Guess my father was like his tierra in that way. His state was the most abused from mining after the conquering of Mexico. Colonization ripped the guts of the earth out in search for gold. Before that, our people, the Zacatec, were those of first who believed in the healing properties of minerals. Nature was respected in the way that everything taken from the earth to survive during a lifetime, was returned back to where it was found at the end of a person’s life. City’s just consume. My Dad felt consumed, misplaced- all he wanted was to get as close to returning to his land as possible. 

This new neighborhood is strange in it’s people yet familiar in flora and fauna. It’s not uncommon to see peacocks at the setting of the sun, coyotes harshly and hardly illuminated only by rust colored street lights after sun fall. Fauns sloshing through the dewy grass of the early morning. He asked me to go on a walk with him after dark one day. A self taught anthropologist, cultivator to our garden of hybrid fruit trees, Don of our family and his many brothers, keeper of mischievous histories and chilling legends. To walk out into a darkness so crisp with him, is to expect anything and accept everything that it is and could be. It could be nothing. In the mundane, strenuous cycle of school, parties, discovering who you are, shows, friends that all demand your time- all parents want is a minute with you. So on occasion we walk and point out silly things.

“Think about how big the world is,” says Apa. I look up at the stars. Think about how little and how many we all are. All our problems, big and little. “And we have spot right here” he says rolling his Rs. A Mexican who somehow sounds Russian when speaking English. I look down at our house. He came to first know home in a different country. Does he know home now? I think about how he must feel as an owner of a price of land on this big planet earth. How it must feel to know it’s not really yours still but it still means something.

 “Think about how far it is to go out to eternity.” He is still talking about what’s above us. “Go and go and go and never reach the end. Nunca llegar, imagínate. Que es junto a jamás?” (“What is next to never?”)

“Forever”, I respond. 

I think about how time is a man made concept, yet everything that can ever happen, already happened, and already exists in alternate universes all depending on where you are in the fabric of time and dimensions. “Don’t think about it. You’ll go crazy,” still rolling his Rs. 

I think about how many years I’ve been thinking about it and how many more years he’s been thinking about it, and how he maybe wanted me to see and feel what he saw and felt. Wonder. Appreciation. Awe. Security. Fear… that’s when you go crazy. I really feel crazy. That’s Apa.