BeginningsWhen I grew up in Los Angeles in the fifties, it was a different world. There was a serenity and peace to it, not like today. Our neighborhood was like a little village within the larger village of the city of Los Angeles. While it lay dreaming under the hot California sun, the rest of the city moved around it like a restless ocean, and we were like an island on the east side, detached and in our own separate world. It was the barrio, and it was filled with life.The houses lined the streets without lawns, but they all had trees and bushes of blooming flowers. The streets had names imported from other places, incongruous sounding, like McDonald Street, Brooklyn Avenue, and Ford Boulevard. They should have been named Sanchez, Gonzales, Martinez, or Macias.Our house was across the street from Our Lady of Solitude church and school. It was the church where we sat at mass every Sunday morning and it was the church where my mother and father and aunts and uncles were married, and I and my brothers and cousins were baptized. It wasn’t a big church, but to my eyes it was beautiful, like a cathedral in an far away place.There was a custom in those days that happened every Saturday. That was the day the priest performed the baptisms. After the ceremony, the proud parents would come out of the wide church doors and the father would have his pockets filled in advance for the neighborhood children. We’d be waiting on the steps, lined up like pigeons. When he saw us, he’d fling loose change on the steps, and we’d jump all over, plucking it up. On a good day, or if the father was richer than most, a kid could make a whole dollar, if he or she was fast.The neighborhood grocery store faced Brooklyn Avenue and our house was right behind it, so we had ready access to its wide variety of food and products. The other stores in the neighborhood were all specialty stores. There was the green grocer, where all the abundance of fruits and vegetables grown in California could be purchased. I’d beg a nickel from my dad and buy a stick of sugar cane. I didn’t really eat the sugary treat, I’d have it, and carry it around with me all afternoon, sucking and chewing at the juicy fibers until it finally disappeared.One of my favorite stores was one that appealed strongly to my sense of smell. Walking down the sidewalk, you could smell it long before you saw it. There were barrels of dried little fish in on each side of the open door, and that odor mingled with the aroma of a myriad of spices. The names sounded exotic to my childish ears, and I wondered if anyone really used them all; Saffron, cilantro, oregano, anise. The lady who worked there either loved little children or she was terribly lonely because she always had the time to sit and visit with me. It didn’t matter what I chatted about, she always seemed flatteringly interested in all I had to say.The meat market was across the street. It was fronted by large, shiny windows that proudly displayed special cuts of meat. There were always cows heads, usually two or three of them. Their eyes, still in their sockets, stared out sightlessly at me, and I would stare back, wondering. I’d beg my grandmother to buy one, and she’d shake her head at me and wonder why I’d want one. I was embarrassed to admit that I wanted to inspect one of them on the inside. “You could cook it,” I’d timidly suggest, thinking this would appeal to her frugal nature. She refused to buy a cow head simply to satisfy my curiosity. Her purchases were more mundane; steaks, ground round, or a plump chicken with the pinfeathers still attached. The butcher would wrap it in white paper and Grandma would put it in her cloth bag she saved just for grocery shopping.I stood beside her at the kitchen sink as she plucked the feathers from the chicken and cleaned it under the running tap water. I watched as she removed the eggs from it. The first one looked like a regular egg yolk, the next a little smaller, all of them shrinking until they gradually became invisible.“When do they stop, Grandma?” I remember asking her.“When does what stop, meija?” she asked absently, concentrating on her task.“The eggs. When do they stop getting smaller…and just end?”She turned and looked at me. “The eggs? Never. They just keep going, even though we can’t see.”I was staggered. I went to the back porch and sat and contemplated the sheer number of eggs that lay within each chicken, and wondered at everything else in the world that might never end. How could something have no end? How could something simply go on forever? What was forever? It was my first experience with infinity.Soon, the house filled with the aroma of boiling chicken and I went back into the warm kitchen. Grandma was briskly rolling flour tortillas and throwing them on the big black grill to brown. I marveled at the perfect roundness of each one, and she gave me some dough and a wooden rolling pin to try for myself. Mine were uneven and lumpy, but she still browned them for me, as though they were perfectly fine. I looked into the large pot when she lifted the lid to check her chicken and saw the multi-sized eggs innocently bouncing in the bubbling liquid and tried to count them.My aunts set the table and Grandma went to the door and called, “Jose! Raul! Venga!” My uncles would come, along with my father and mother and my pretty aunts; Mary Velia, Connie, and my godmother, Ruby. My father’s youngest sister, Sally, sat beside my grandmother. She earned that place of honor by virtue of being the baby of the family. We would all gather around the table and eat the good smelling food together. I forgot about the infinitude of eggs and felt good to be surrounded by the people I loved most in the world.
(Credit for art above is anonymous, since it was given to me years ago. It's perfect, isn't it?)
