When I was very little, my parents went on a trip somewhere and left me in the care of my paternal grandparents. I must've been three or four years old. My grandma cooked something for me, and I spit it right back on the plate. "I don't like canned vegetables," I told her. "If you want to feed me, they have to be fresh, like my mother's." The first thing she did when my parents came back was telling them that I could never stay with her again.
For the most part, my father's family never approved of his relationship with my mother and, even after thirty-five years together, they still think there's hope he will leave her for another woman. As a result, we were never very close to them, but my dad always made an effort to change this situation. Every year we would dress up and spend Christmas Eve at one of my aunt's house, where my sisters and I would get the same generic sweaters we got the previous year while the rest of my cousins got leather jackets, expensive watches, and longer-lasting hugs. My grandma was the one who always kept us all together, and the main reason why we even went there. She would use her money --which wasn't a lot --to buy presents for each family member; her granddaughters would get a pocket mirror or something similar to that, while us grandsons would get either socks, a keychain, or a little leather coin purse. Exactly two years ago, the last time I ever saw her, I bought her a Calvin Klein coin purse that also had a keyring on it; she loved it, but I think she failed to get the joke.
As I got older, she would always give me a hard time for being one of only two of her grandkids --out of fourteen of us --who wasn't married or at least in a committed relationship. I told her this proved I was, indeed, her smartest grandchild. She always scoffed and told me I should find myself "a good woman". I don't know what she meant by that. Women who come into our family are always treated like dirt: my mother, my uncle's three wives, and all of my cousin's girlfriends and wives have been through Hell. This is a very sharp contrast with the men who come into the family: my aunts' and cousins' husbands are treated like royalty. Being a dude who marries into my family is one of the sweetest gigs a man could possible hope for.
When I moved to Mexico City on my own at age 16 I would visit her almost every weekend, mostly to do my laundry. It was a very long trip that I can't remember ever making; I just remember getting there with my red and black duffel bag full of clothes which would promptly go in her washing machine. One time she took a Kermit The Frog t-shirt I owned and bleached it "to restore it to its pristine white color". She said:
-Your mother never taught you how to wash clothes. That shirt was all dirty. It took me an hour, but I washed the dirt away. Now keep it that way.
My grandma almost fainted when I told her the shirt was supposed to look like that: it was beige, not white. I embarrassed her.
The t-shirt had been a present from my best friend. Now they're both dead: my friend died on New Year's Day, 1999, and my grandmother died a few hours ago, on Christmas Eve 2010. It was going to be the very first Christmas that all her kids didn't spend together due to illness and ongoing tensions between them. I don't think it was a coincidence; maybe she just figured she didn't have a job to do here anymore.
Rest in peace, abuelita. I already miss not having someone to mess with at family functions, and you raised the greatest man I've ever known. Say hi to my grandpa for me.
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