A couple of times of week, a man shows up at my place of work. He’s a modest-looking person, and the only thing he has on him is a lunch pail. He walks from building to building on our campus and doesn’t bother anyone but most people know why he’s there — he’s selling a selection of mouth-watering lunch items.
Sometimes he has delicious homemade tamales made by his wife. Other times he has hot soups, or caldos, with crackers. He’s been visiting us for years and still, not everyone knows his name but most do love his food.
On…
“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…” Matthew 6:26
Every Wednesday morning, at 6:00 a.m., come rain or shine, I open my laptop for a Bible Study with a couple of buddies via Zoom. Even Bible studies are done this way, during this time.
We get together to study scripture, but inevitably, we get to talking about life and share family updates. …
We all want to more about what people were thinking in black and white photos. The older the photo, the more mysterious. People standing in place for longer than we can imagine, waiting for flash of the bulb, often not smiling. Yet, they were saying something as they tried preserve their moments in history.
Each Saturday, I volunteer at a local museum and I rummage through old photos, deciding what is valuable to keep in the museum’s collection and what should be discarded. Often times it is a hard decision. What makes something like a photo of people valuable?
A…
Sometimes I feel my life is an episode of “The Wonder Years.” Like Kevin Arnold, the teenager whose life is the center of the show, I can hear myself narrating my thoughts. It seems everyone can hear what I’m thinking but really only I can.
Kevin goes through the ordinary ups and downs of life in the coming-of-age series. He falls in love with his childhood crush. He sometimes hates his best friend. He tries to reason with his parents. His older brother is his biggest nemesis.
We can all relate, but where I see myself in Kevin, is realizing…
In the ongoing search for details on my family history, I have come up with one common thread — my family on both sides have been poor laborers for generations.
For five years, I have been digging through passport documents, census records, phone directories, and birth notices. I’ve found interesting names like Zenon and Maximo. The journey has been exciting and frustrating. You see, for a Mexican-American, this kind of investigative work is never easy.
Sometimes I am envious of my Mormon brothers and sisters, and of others who are of Anglo-Saxon heritage. They can often trace their ancestors through…
Every morning, I turn on the coffee maker, grab my favorite mug, and then patiently wait as the sound and sight of the slow drip, drip, drip happen like clockwork. This ritual is what made me get through a year filled with worldly anxieties and unknowns.
Knowing I could do this each day, have a coffee in a familiar cup, is the kind of thing that reminds me of how the important things in life are always reflected in simple ways. Coffee, favorite TV shows, walks around neighborhoods, passing by pictures of family and friends, reading the newspaper funnies. …
In almost every home, of almost every community, somewhere there is a mom or a grandma awake before anyone else in the household doing what she knows best to bring a family together.
In some households, as the kids awaken, it is the smell of a freshly baked pie crust that greets their senses. Seems like the best way to start a day. The aroma of a flaky crust that will soon be filled with apples or peaches seems so American, and it is.
What is also American is the sight of rice and beans in a simmering pot. It…
There is something about autumn that is like no other time of the year. Days are shorter. Skies are darker but yet people seem warmer.
When you think of it, seasonal changes are somewhat magical. They put us in a different mindset. Colors and smells can alter our feelings and bring back favorite memories of the upcoming time of year.
Fall is my favorite time. It’s such a great season that it has two names. Autumn, what a nice, warm ring to it. Even more than winter, and where I live there is no real winter, fall is a time…
There’s an ice cream parlor on a street corner, just a couple of miles from my home. Late at night when I’m feeling a craving for that old-fashioned scoop of vanilla, the ice cream parlor is my go-to place.
There are other frozen treat shops. You know, the big brand places where you can get an infinite amount of flavor combinations and toppings. They come with all sorts of gimmicks, one of them even holds your ice cream upside down as they hand it to you from the drive-thru window.
And then there’s my favorite ice cream parlor, on a…
Every time I open the mailbox, I get a small sense of despair. From pizza coupons to car dealership flyers addressed to “current resident”, or campaign brochures and credit card applications, these days it seems like each visit to the mailbox is a scene from the movie Groundhog Day.
I’m one of those people that reach into the dark square-shaped hole, take out each piece one at a time, lean over and take a closer look into the box to see if I missed anything, and then stand outside going through each item.
On most days, all the mail ends…
