Stories are the best Mother’s Day gift.
First story: Mom at 6, looking down at her exasperated mother from the branches of a guava tree in the backyard of their house in San Juan. The Sunday dress she had worn to church was torn beyond repair. Her legs were scratched up, too. But she was flushed with accomplishment and the sun was shining. She shrugged off the scolding.
Another tale was from when she was even younger, a faint memory of finding Lola H’s diary and tearing off a page here, then a page there, a paper trail that Lola H followed down the stairs to the giggly culprit. A stronger memory of the talking-to she got when she was discovered.
Save for Mom, the women of the clan, the mothers that came before me, are silent now, alive only in the stories. Their names conjure up sepia-toned worlds in a sun-browned land: Macaria, Sinforosa, Maxima, Isabel, Honorata, Teresita.
Maxima married an older widower, becoming stepmother to three children before giving birth to five more of her own. Only two of these children survived to adulthood. She raised my grandmother Honorata, Lola H in later years, to adore her father. Lola H had more stories of him and precious few of “Lola ‘Sima.”
Isabel was born out of wedlock to a woman who later married and had a son. She adored her half-brother. She married Francisco, who was half-Chinese and liked to laugh.
They had seven children. Isabel left school after the fourth or fifth grade, and her husband later lorded his seventh-grade education over her. In my childhood memories, she is a background figure, eclipsed by her ebullient husband who loved to glad-hand everyone and eat ice cream with us granddaughters when we visited on Sundays.
But it is Honorata Castro Cruz, our Lola H, whose life brims with stories we know. Her earliest memory is of watching little silver fish swim in the river.
She met her husband Luis when she was in high school and he a pharmacy student at the University of Santo Tomas. He knew to be the first to greet her father when he came courting. She loved how the scent of Piedmont cigarettes clung to his white suits. She called him “Count” and he called her “Henriette” after they saw the silent movie “Orphans of the Storm” with Lillian Gish.
They opened Pharmacia Cruz and she taught elementary school, her seven children growing up alongside her students. Luis fell sick and died months before World War II ended in 1945. Lola H would live for another 54 years.
A daughter would bring her to Chicago in the 1960s, and our family would welcome her to Alhambra in early 1991, where she would sit and ask her questions.
The man she fell in love was slight and quiet and kind. He liked reading “Popular Mechanics.” At their home, he would tease her and give her bottom a push whenever they walked up the stairs. She loved to say that sometimes, she could feel a gentle pressure behind her when she climbed some steps. And, of course, she remembered all of Mom’s antics with a smiling shake of her head.
The shape of stories about Mom, who is 93 now, depends on the daughter it relates to. She does, after all, have six girls, “my half-dozen.” Many stories end in tear-inducing laughter, and all magnify how she loved us first and loves us best.
Do you remember how she woke us up strumming a guitar she didn’t know to play? Her pan-cake makeup and Max Factor lipstick were always on point, her Paloma Picasso perfume never too heavy. She still laughs a lot, even when there’s little reason for it.
We lose our stories if we don’t tell them. And it’s in the telling that five generations of mothers speak to me still.
Anissa V. Rivera, columnist, “Mom’s the Word,” Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Whittier Daily News, Azusa Herald, Glendora Press and West Covina Highlander, San Dimas/La Verne Highlander. Southern California News Group, 181 W. Huntington Drive, Suite 209 Monrovia, CA 91016. 626-497-4869.
