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Turkey Confessions

24 Nov

Repost of a Thanksgiving essay I wrote a few years ago.

Several years ago, my extremely practical mother decided to visit me in Philadelphia.  Although she was scared that her inability to understand English might leave her stranded in Phoenix or Washington D.C. as she navigated connecting flights, she made the trek east.

Because she is practical, my mom decided to pack the 15-pound holiday turkey she’d been given as a morale boost earlier in the week by the hotel where she worked as a housekeeper.  She figured that since the turkey was too big for her to eat on her own, and I wouldn’t have one in Philadelphia (I don’t normally like turkey, but I’ll eat some of it if with others), an eight-hour long flight was justified for the bird.

But, baggage handling being what it is, my mother did not want the bird to get lost.  So, she packed the frozen bird into her bowling bag-style carry-on purse.  Because my mother doesn’t ever travel without packing and repacking often, she packed and repacked the turkey to determine how to best carry it onto the plane.  However, because she is a little clueless about the reaction of those around her to her oh-so-practical ideas, she gave remarkably little thought to the reaction an airport screener might have to the sight of a skeleton appearing on the baggage x-ray machine.

At the airport on the day of her travel, the screener waited until my mom had gone through the security line and put on her Keds, jacket, scarf, and mittens (she was, after all, going to the East Coast) before calling her over with his index finger.

“What is that?” he said as he pointed to the skeleton splayed out on the screen before him.

“Toor-kee,” my mother responded, in the one word she knew for sure she could say and which would suffice as a full explanation.

He looked at her standing there, an elderly Mexican woman with salt and pepper hair, with complete confidence in the propriety of carrying a frozen turkey onto a plane, and no clue that it was a bit odd.  And then, he shrugged while he laughed through an “ok” and waved her on through the line.

She recounted the story later that day when I picked her up in Philadelphia and was a little sheepish when she figured out that he was shocked because bones in a bag might not look so safe.  She worried about what this man, who’d never seen her before and who would never see her again, might think about what it said about her that she carried bones cross country.

Fortunately for my mother, the embarrassment only lasted a few hours.  Her sense of knowing right from wrong and not having to be born here to learn it was confirmed when, several hours into cooking the turkey at my house, we discovered that in my haste to clean for my mother, I’d returned the knob controlling the oven’s temperature onto the stove incorrectly.  Rather than cooking at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for hours, the turkey had only been cooking at 250 degrees.

And that’s when the head shaking “Ay, mija!” moment, that always seemed to follow a head shaking “Ay, mom!” moment, appeared.  My mom had forgotten her retrospective embarrassment and moved onto things that she knew were real and eternal—her American-born journalist daughter might be more educated and well-traveled than she was, but she would never be as wise.

 

A New Strategy

1 Oct

My mom gets prank-called a lot.

Some are scams, like the calls asking her to give up personal information over the phone.

Others just scare her, like those occurring just after she gets home. “Are they watching me?” she always thinks.

Yesterday, she hit on a new strategy for those calls where she just gets silence–she proclaims, in broken English, “I love you!” That cracks her up, so she then laughs hysterically into the phone.

“Dicen que es bueno reír. Pues en vez de asustarme, ahora me río.”

She cracks me up sometimes.

What I’ve Lost

25 Sep

I started this year with resolutions that included trying to get into better shape.  After several false starts, I finally hit upon a diet and exercise routine that worked. Forty pounds and five sizes later, I’m now faced with the side effects of my weight loss.

I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law thinks I’m dying of a horrible disease.

My 30-year-old friends and colleagues are now taking themselves to the gym.  Apparently, nothing inspires a lifestyle change like having someone you always thought was big, get smaller than you.

And, most disturbingly, I seem to have lost some ferocity.

I say this because I’m finding that people are messing with me in ways they haven’t before.  It’s not even people I know, it’s total strangers.  This was most evident on a recent trip to New York.

While my wife, a friend, and I waited for a subway train at midnight, a drunk came up and started talking to us.   In over a decade of running around in NYC, I’ve always dealt with this by putting up the “I’m ignoring you” face and this kind of “crazy” always just seemed to go away.

Not this time.  After a few minutes of asking (in English and Spanish) which of us would like to make love to him, he’d made himself the focal point of this particular subway station and point in time.  It made me uncomfortable so I finally said to the guy, “Dejanos en paz.”  Just leave us in peace.   I firmly said it over and over, figuring that at least if he knew that I could take him on in his own language he’d stop being gross.

He sneered in response, “Yo soy de El Salvador.  Yo soy judio, tu no eres judia!”

I’m not exactly sure what part of my Spanish made him guess I wasn’t Jewish or why he thought that letting me know he was Jewish was going to make this whole situation any less weird.  In any event, after reiterating for everyone on that train platform that I wasn’t Jewish, he stormed off.

I would have shaken the whole scene off if a day later I hadn’t been meowed at by an elderly guy in Brooklyn.

We were walking down a sidewalk in Park Slope when this unassuming little old man, who seemed to be minding his own business, stopped me mid-sidewalk, looked me up and down and meowed.  Now, I have been catcalled before, but never with an actual meow.

Perhaps more than they should have, these events have shaken my faith in my own “force field.”  You know the “force field,” it’s that thing you do that seems to get you through tough situations.

Mine has always been the ability to be loud and imposing–a little like an elephant flaring its ears.  With the loss of this weight, I’m not sure this works for me anymore. I’m struggling with this new world and wondering how to work my hair into my new force field.

(Repost) The Fifth of July

2 Jul

Reposting this story today because it is my favorite memory of this weekend.

When I was a little kid, we were too poor to afford fireworks. I suppose I can’t blame my pyrotechnic poverty just on being poor, but more on the fact that my mother didn’t think any part of the welfare check should be spent on frivolity. If we got fireworks, we didn’t get clothes, or we didn’t get food. Sure, it was a practical choice, but as a kid, you just want to rip into the hundred dollar “Independence Day” box of fireworks.

Our fireworkslessness meant that in the days leading up to the Fourth of July every year, we’d visit our more affluent friends and watch them light fireworks. Back then this annual ritual led me to conclude that socio-economic status could be identified by the characteristics of your fireworks.

If you had no color, just sound, you weren’t poor, but you weren’t living in a mansion. You lived in an apartment and shared a bedroom with a couple of siblings. The same went for fireworks with no sound, and just smoke.

If you had fireworks that were colorful, but just rolled around on the ground, you lived in one of the houses in a duplex.

If your fireworks shot color into the air, and did so while crackling, at least one of your parents had a full-time job and probably owned a house with a yard and a driveway (or at least they’d found a way to live in one).

In my family, we didn’t have any fireworks before and up to the Fourth of July. We didn’t get to light something and have sound, or color. Maybe, if we got lucky, someone handed us a sparkler. In the bad years, they handed us the punk used to light the fireworks. Yep, there’s the poor kid, the one with the smoldering ember.

Occasionally, when the sounds of Fourth of July were so muddled that you couldn’t tell the fireworks from the gunshots fired into the air, we pretended to be fireworks. I mean, if you’re a nine-year-old and you scream from a low tone to a very high one, you sound kind of like a Piccolo Pete. And besides, by nightfall, no one even knows what’s going on in neighboring yards, driveways, or streets. Everyone is just staring into the sky, looking for something to make the darkness light. That means there is no risk of being seen joining the cacophony of Independence Day sound, while in your pajamas, from just inside your apartment’s living room window.

I watched from the shadows every year until the Fifth of July. That was the day when my cousin Reggie would come over and my mom, and my sister, and my Tía Rosalba, and my other cousins, and I would go to the local park. Salt Lake Park was the one where the big neighborhood fireworks were set off, and the official, city-sanctioned Fourth of July safe zone for amateur fireworks displays.

We never went to the show on the Fourth of July. My mom was scared that going to the park after dark would make us victims of violent crime, and my Tía Rosalba was a Jehovah’s Witness. Her family didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July.

But, on the Fifth of July, Reggie, Virginia, and I made sure to take a magnifying glass to the park. Our families would stake out a spot next to a tree, drag over a picnic bench, pull out aluminum foil-wrapped burritos, and play dominoes.

Virginia, Reggie, and I headed straight for the previous night’s launching pad.

We crawled around every inch of that soccer-field sized patch of grass, looking for unused fireworks. Although not plentiful, and not colorful, little by little, we’d find some fireworks.

At first, we’d find little black charcoal disks. While we weren’t allowed to buy fireworks, and we weren’t allowed to play with matches, we did know what unused fireworks looked like, and how to start a fire without matches, so out came the magnifying glass.

We figured out the sun’s angle, and the length of time needed to create a flame, and voilà, black plumes of ash came up from the earth and “snakes” came to life.

My sister, Virginia, tore holes in the knees of her jeans and Reggie got dirt in his eyes, before we found another unused firecracker.

Lighting our fireworks became easier with each successive find. We’d get sound, and some smoke, and then we’d laugh hysterically and roll around in laughter on the charred firecracker paper and ashes left from the night before.

Although there were never more than about ten unused fireworks for us to light every year, we had gotten the chance to shoot off some fireworks after all. On the Fifth of July we had not been denied the simple pleasure of creating marvels of sound and sight.

We all knew that our scavenging hadn’t made us children of homeowners this year, but it was understood that ingenuity would get us there some year, maybe next year.

Impressed

10 Feb

Mom: I’d like a two piece combo, please.

Pollo Loco guy: Which pieces?

Mom: Leg and wing.

Pollo Loco guy: And which sides?

Mom: Rice and beans.  Oh, and I have a senior discount.

My mother told me about this conversation the other day.  She said that she was impressed by how good her voice sounded in English.

“Para que veas, si se hablar ingles.”

Paying Attention

29 Jan

Every week my mother and I have the same conversation, where to have dinner on Friday night. I call her in the middle of the afternoon and ask her the question. She says she’ll think about it and have an answer when I get home.

And she never does. “No se, lo que tu quieras.”

Today when I picked her up though, she handed me a note. Scribbled on it was the word “Lobster.”

I asked her what it meant and she explained that she’d been watching television and “it” looked good on the commercial. Dutiful daughter that I am, I looked up lobster somewhere nearby and hit upon a Red Lobster.

My mom was sooooo pleased when we found it and I asked her why she wanted lobster, since she’d never wanted it before. “Yo no quiero al paton,” she said. “Yo quiero un steak.”

It was only then that I realized my mom wasn’t asking for lobster, she’d only caught half the name of the restaurant she wanted to try. I figured her giving the television half her attention is more than I normally get from her describing what she saw, so I went with it.

The Camera’s Gone Dark

25 Jan

I wrote earlier this year about how I gave my mom a camera for use in general documentation of things that annoy her.  In the weeks since she’s had it, she’s shot all sorts of petty breaking-the-apartment-complex rules.

I was pleased with her photos.  I mean, after years of having my head cut off in pictures, I think she’s finally mastered the concept of point and shoot.  She’s actually getting pretty good at capturing license plate numbers, littering, and the random shot of someone backing up into the building.

On our daily phone call today, however, she revealed that something had happened to the camera.

“Se ve negra,” she said.

Over the phone, I tried to walk her through all the different things she could do to try to make it work.

I’d forgotten that she can’t really see.  And, I can’t really describe words like “latch” in Spanish.  But we hopelessly fumbled through it.

After a while, my mom seemed to get tired of the call and abruptly ended it.  It kind of hurt my feelings, because I really was trying to be helpful.

A few minutes later, she called back, “Me puse los lentes, y lo hice,” she happily yelled (because we don’t speak, we yell).  “Pero no lo podia hacer cuando estaba hablando contigo. Necesitaba ir a mi propio paso.”

I laughed at my mother’s pursuit of the answer to the puzzle of camera darkness.  She’s dogged in her pursuit of answers to puzzles, and I’m thankful that trait got passed on.

She Always Wanted A Girl

23 Jan

When I was six, I fell off an eight foot fence and into my first rose bush.  When I was 12, I knocked out my two front teeth while playing basketball.  My history of roughhousing, daredeviling, playing in mud, and generally failing to give a second’s thought to what happens to my body is well known to my mother.  She also knows I care even less about polish around the edges.

“I always wanted a girl,” she says.

So, we fight about whether I should try to keep my hair under control (while she controlled my braids, she also controlled my hair).  We argue about when t-shirts are appropriate evening wear.  And, she surreptitiously throws out my old sneakers and sweatshirts when she thinks they’ve come to the end of their meaningful lives.

Today, when I dropped my car off for a smog check, I suggested we kill time by getting manicures and pedicures.

“Que te ha picado?” she asked.

No mom, I haven’t been bitten by a rare Northeastern L.A. bug, I just like how red fingernails distracts people when I use my hands to speak during meetings.

The Day After

3 Jan

For several years, the day after the Rose Parade meant flying east to school.  My sister joined me on these trips in the late 80s and 90s.  As our relationship was of the typical “older-sister-successfully-antagonizes-little-sister” variety, the trips were both hysterical and maddening.

In addition to the company, I remember these trips because we always connected through the Midwest on our way to Boston.  This was the result of American Express’ marketing back then.  It was of the “Join us and we’ll give you cheap plane tickets” variety, and was perfect for students making the transcontinental flight a few times a year.  As we traveled to and from Los Angeles, these flights ensured that we were almost always accompanied by Big 10 football fans heading home from the Rose Bowl.

One year, I fell asleep on the plane.  When I woke up, those around me eyed me with concern.  Finally, my sister fessed up, “While you were sleeping I told them I was taking you back to the institution.”

Nice job, sis.  On the few occasions when you get me, you make it good.

Turkey Confessions

25 Nov

Repost of a Thanksgiving essay I wrote a few years ago.

 

Several years ago, my extremely practical mother decided to visit me in Philadelphia.  Although she was scared that her inability to understand English might leave her stranded in Phoenix or Washington D.C. as she navigated connecting flights, she made the trek east.

Because she is practical, my mom decided to pack the 15-pound holiday turkey she’d been given as a morale boost earlier in the week by the hotel where she worked as a housekeeper.  She figured that since the turkey was too big for her to eat on her own, and I wouldn’t have one in Philadelphia (I don’t normally like turkey, but I’ll eat some of it if with others), an eight-hour long flight was justified for the bird.

But, baggage handling being what it is, my mother did not want the bird to get lost.  So, she packed the frozen bird into her bowling bag-style carry-on purse.  Because my mother doesn’t ever travel without packing and repacking often, she packed and repacked the turkey to determine how to best carry it onto the plane.  However, because she is a little clueless about the reaction of those around her to her oh-so-practical ideas, she gave remarkably little thought to the reaction an airport screener might have to the sight of a skeleton appearing on the baggage x-ray machine.

At the airport on the day of her travel, the screener waited until my mom had gone through the security line and put on her Keds, jacket, scarf, and mittens (she was, after all, going to the East Coast) before calling her over with his index finger.

“What is that?” he said as he pointed to the skeleton splayed out on the screen before him.

“Toor-kee,” my mother responded, in the one word she knew for sure she could say and which would suffice as a full explanation.

He looked at her standing there, an elderly Mexican woman with salt and pepper hair, with complete confidence in the propriety of carrying a frozen turkey onto a plane, and no clue that it was a bit odd.  And then, he shrugged while he laughed through an “ok” and waved her on through the line.

She recounted the story later that day when I picked her up in Philadelphia and was a little sheepish when she figured out that he was shocked because bones in a bag might not look so safe.  She worried about what this man, who’d never seen her before and who would never see her again, might think about what it said about her that she carried bones cross country.

Fortunately for my mother, the embarrassment only lasted a few hours.  Her sense of knowing right from wrong and not having to be born here to learn it was confirmed when, several hours into cooking the turkey at my house, we discovered that in my haste to clean for my mother, I’d returned the knob controlling the oven’s temperature onto the stove incorrectly.  Rather than cooking at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for hours, the turkey had only been cooking at 250 degrees.

And that’s when the head shaking “Ay, mija!” moment, that always seemed to follow a head shaking “Ay, mom!” moment, appeared.  My mom had forgotten her retrospective embarrassment and moved onto things that she knew were real and eternal—her American-born journalist daughter might be more educated and well-traveled than she was, but she would never be as wise.

© Laura Genao 2006

Service With a Smile

28 Jul

I grew up in Bell.  Yeah, that’s right, the city where the city  manager made $800,000 a year and where dead people are alleged to vote.

I made minimum wage when I worked there, but that doesn’t keep me from going back.  You see, my mom still lives there.

That means that she does things like use the library, and call the police, and go to the community center when the cameras aren’t staking out city employees.

And what a difference the attention makes.  For years, she’s had to go get the city-discounted bus pass for senior citizens once a month.  She’s had to take exact change and endure the disdain that the clerk at the counter and the other city employees dished at her when all she wanted to do was buy a bus pass.  I can’t count the hours she’s spent wondering what the hell she did to these people to make them hate the five minutes they had to spend with her once a month.

I know I complain about my mom’s eccentricities, but like many a mother, she’s only weird to her family.  She’s pretty pleasant and charming when it comes to strangers.

Because my mom is a relatively private person (she doesn’t know I put all  her stories on this blog and in my comedy act), I thought the national attention lavished on Bell of late would disturb her.  After all, she bought her bus pass this week with all of the local news channels watching outside the community center’s doors.

But, she LOVED it.  She loved that her service this month came with a smile.  There was a “How may I help you?”  There was a “Let me tell you about all the other things the city has to offer.” She actually saw police officers in the neighborhood.  The attention made her happier, safer. “Se portaron como angeles,” she said.

Sure, she knows the LA Times, the FBI, the Attorney General and others will probably lose interest by summer’s end, but until then, she’s making sure to visit every city office and check out a ton of books from the library.  Oh yeah, and if you’re her noisy neighbor–beware! She will be calling the cops on you.

She’s that kind of mom.

Random Mom Episode

20 Jul

My mom called to tell me she fell in the trash can—-AGAIN!

(Repost) The Fifth of July

3 Jul

Reposting this story again today because it is my favorite memory of this weekend.


When I was a little kid, we were too poor to afford fireworks. I suppose I can’t blame my pyrotechnic poverty just on being poor, but more on the fact that my mother didn’t think any part of the welfare check should be spent on frivolity. If we got fireworks, we didn’t get clothes, or we didn’t get food. Sure, it was a practical choice, but as a kid, you just want to rip into the hundred dollar “Independence Day” box of fireworks.

Our fireworkslessness meant that in the days leading up to the Fourth of July every year, we’d visit our more affluent friends and watch them light fireworks. Back then this annual ritual led me to conclude that socio-economic status could be identified by the characteristics of your fireworks.

If you had no color, just sound, you weren’t poor, but you weren’t living in a mansion. You lived in an apartment and shared a bedroom with a couple of siblings. The same went for fireworks with no sound, and just smoke.

If you had fireworks that were colorful, but just rolled around on the ground, you lived in one of the houses in a duplex.

If your fireworks shot color into the air, and did so while crackling, at least one of your parents had a full-time job and probably owned a house with a yard and a driveway (or at least they’d found a way to live in one).

In my family, we didn’t have any fireworks before and up to the Fourth of July. We didn’t get to light something and have sound, or color. Maybe, if we got lucky, someone handed us a sparkler. In the bad years, they handed us the punk used to light the fireworks. Yep, there’s the poor kid, the one with the smoldering ember.

Occasionally, when the sounds of Fourth of July were so muddled that you couldn’t tell the fireworks from the gunshots fired into the air, we pretended to be fireworks. I mean, if you’re a nine-year-old and you scream from a low tone to a very high one, you sound kind of like a Piccolo Pete. And besides, by nightfall, no one even knows what’s going on in neighboring yards, driveways, or streets. Everyone is just staring into the sky, looking for something to make the darkness light. That means there is no risk of being seen joining the cacophony of Independence Day sound, while in your pajamas, from just inside your apartment’s living room window.

I watched from the shadows every year until the Fifth of July. That was the day when my cousin Reggie would come over and my mom, and my sister, and my Tía Rosalba, and my other cousins, and I would go to the local park. Salt Lake Park was the one where the big neighborhood fireworks were set off, and the official, city-sanctioned Fourth of July safe zone for amateur fireworks displays.

We never went to the show on the Fourth of July. My mom was scared that going to the park after dark would make us victims of violent crime, and my Tía Rosalba was a Jehovah’s Witness. Her family didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July.

But, on the Fifth of July, Reggie, Virginia, and I made sure to take a magnifying glass to the park. Our families would stake out a spot next to a tree, drag over a picnic bench, pull out aluminum foil-wrapped burritos, and play dominoes.

Virginia, Reggie, and I headed straight for the previous night’s launching pad.

We crawled around every inch of that soccer-field sized patch of grass, looking for unused fireworks. Although not plentiful, and not colorful, little by little, we’d find some fireworks.

At first, we’d find little black charcoal disks. While we weren’t allowed to buy fireworks, and we weren’t allowed to play with matches, we did know what unused fireworks looked like, and how to start a fire without matches, so out came the magnifying glass.

We figured out the sun’s angle, and the length of time needed to create a flame, and voilà, black plumes of ash came up from the earth and “snakes” came to life.

My sister, Virginia, tore holes in the knees of her jeans and Reggie got dirt in his eyes, before we found another unused firecracker.

Lighting our fireworks became easier with each successive find. We’d get sound, and some smoke, and then we’d laugh hysterically and roll around in laughter on the charred firecracker paper and ashes left from the night before.

Although there were never more than about ten unused fireworks for us to light every year, we had gotten the chance to shoot off some fireworks after all. On the Fifth of July we had not been denied the simple pleasure of creating marvels of sound and sight.

We all knew that our scavenging hadn’t made us children of homeowners this year, but it was understood that ingenuity would get us there some year, maybe next year.

© Laura Genao 2007

Another Moment With Mom

27 Feb

Mom:  I fell into the trash can again.

Me: You did? How did that happen, again?

Mom:  I was trying to move it with the lid open, and well, I kind of fell in.

Me:  Are you ok? What did you feel?

Mom:  After I figured out I was still alive, I thought it was dark in there.

The Annual Christmas Trip

20 Dec

I went to Puerto Vallarta with my mom a few weeks ago. It was her Christmas gift. Although we’ve been doing Christmas-time trips together for about a decade, I’m still shocked by the things I learn about my mom on these trips.

For example, my mother gets really chatty when traveling. While she is a healthy talker in every day life, when she gets on a plane she goes into hyperchat, and it’s not necessarily linear thought or storytelling. It’s more like she finds pleasure in the sound of speech. She will read aloud each and every sign within eyesight, want to describe everyone she can see sitting near her, and repeatedly discuss and change her mind about which drink she’ll have when the drink cart comes by. I try not to get annoyed (or embarrassed) by this, and have tried to give her the hint that I don’t care by bringing really long books on our five-hour plane rides, but she doesn’t get the hint. Instead, she notes, “Que buena eres para leer.” Yes mom, I’m a really good reader, that’s the only reason why I focused on “War and Peace” during the flight.

The trips also remind me that my mom’s whole physical being is stubborn to a fault. Even after 40 years of knowing one another, my mother cannot understand the idea of being on vacation. To her, these days are like all others—she is in bed by 8 p.m. and up by 6 a.m., and when she wakes around 2 a.m., it’s only to yell at me to turn the tv off because it’s keeping her awake.

I know some will ask why I don’t just get her her own room, and I would—if she let me. Upon even making that suggestion, she notes “si estamos aqui para celebrar juntas, para que me quieres mandar a otro cuarto.” Ok mom, guilt me into having to spend every single waking moment with you. I’m sure that will be healthy for both of us.

Perhaps because I know I’m not changing my mom’s personality, I just stand back and watch her do things I’d never expect from her. On this trip, I realized that she will walk toward any random to do and watch it for hours in search of an explanation. In Puerto Vallarta, she saw an iguana roaming around in the trees by a river and she was fascinated. Once she saw it, and the guy trying to photograph it, she became a spotter for him. “Alli esta,” “alla esta,” “no, vente por aca,” she yelled from a bridge for two hours while the hunt for the perfect iguana photograph was on. If she didn’t have a bad knee, I’m sure she would have been (and would have had me) in the river pointing out the giant iguana. In a million years I wouldn’t have chosen to spending our limited beach hours watching iguanas from a bridge.

As I stand there taking video of iguanas instead of having drinks on the beach, I always feel guilty that my mom and I don’t enjoy the same idea of a vacation. It reminds me that if we weren’t related, we probably wouldn’t have anything in common, and that makes me feel bad. I ponder this every year as I settle in for our long flight home and then my mom turns and asks, “If we go down, I don’t ask questions, and I just follow you if I want to live, right?” I smile, amused that she remembered and believes the annoyed admonition I gave her when she asked too many safety questions during a trip years ago.

Yes mom, when it really matters, let’s put aside all of the little stuff and we’ll both get out alive.

La Señora

26 Nov

My mother is “La Señora.” She’s the one who calls the landlord when the music is being played loudly at 7 p.m., the one who calls the police when kids are trying to skateboard off the roof, the one who doesn’t return baseballs that get hit into her yard, the one that yells at you to get off of her property.

My mother’s brand of law and order, if not appreciated by those under 40, is welcome by her elderly neighbors. But, for the most part, they’re not the ones prone to retaliation.

Yesterday, the under-18 set went to war with my mom. In the way of mischievous kids, they pelted my mom’s house with limes.

According to my mom, her peaceful afternoon was broken by the loud sound of citrus working against gravity. She heard branches break in the hedges, some loud booms on the garage, and a “thwhack, thwhack, thwhack” against the trash cans.

Because “La Señora” doesn’t ever expect to be under attack, she was more intrigued by the sounds than dismayed. After the first barrage she came out to investigate. As she walked the perimeter of the property she found one lime after another.

She went back inside. The next barrage started and this time she went outside—with a basket. She picked up every single one of those limes. “Y no lo vas a creer, eran de esos limones buenos,” she said. Twice she filled up her basket.

She couldn’t believe her luck. Fifty limes, all from the neighbor’s lime trees. All from trees that are normally just outside of her reach.

It was like manna from the heavens, but because she’s Mexican, even better.

Conversation with My Mother

4 Oct

Me:     Te vas a poner la vacuna del flu?

Mom: No, le tengo miedo.  Voy a esperar unas semanas para ver cuantos cuerpos caen.

Translation–my mom’s not sold on the safety of the swine flu vaccine and is watching the body count over the next few weeks before having the shot.

Mother-Daughter Dialogue (Translated from Spanish)

8 Dec

The L.A. area had an earthquake on Friday.  I felt it.  My mom didn’t.  Our exchange about it amused me.

Me:  Hey mom, there’s an earthquake happening.

Me: Mom! Mom! Can you hear me? Earthquake!

Mom: Don’t yell.  I knew there was an earthquake.

Me: Well, at least answer.  Did you feel it?

Mom: No, I heard a dog bark, then I got really hot, so I knew there was an earthquake.

Me: So, hot flashes predict an earthquake?

Mom: Guess so. 

Happy T-Day Weekend

26 Nov

Enjoy your holiday weekend.  Here’s a repost of my favorite T-day story.  By me, of course.

 

Turkey Confessions

Several years ago, my extremely practical mother decided to visit me in Philadelphia.  Although she was scared that her inability to understand English might leave her stranded in Phoenix or Washington D.C. as she navigated connecting flights, she made the trek east. 

Because she is practical, my mom decided to pack the 15-pound holiday turkey she’d been given as a morale boost earlier in the week by the hotel where she worked as a housekeeper.  She figured that since the turkey was too big for her to eat on her own, and I wouldn’t have one in Philadelphia (I don’t normally like turkey, but I’ll eat some of it if with others), an eight-hour long flight was justified for the bird.

But, baggage handling being what it is, my mother did not want the bird to get lost.  So, she packed the frozen bird into her bowling bag-style carry-on purse.  Because my mother doesn’t ever travel without packing and repacking often, she packed and repacked the turkey to determine how to best carry it onto the plane.  However, because she is a little clueless about the reaction of those around her to her oh-so-practical ideas, she gave remarkably little thought to the reaction an airport screener might have to the sight of a skeleton appearing on the baggage x-ray machine.  

At the airport on the day of her travel, the screener waited until my mom had gone through the security line and put on her Keds, jacket, scarf, and mittens (she was, after all, going to the East Coast) before calling her over with his index finger.

“What is that?” he said as he pointed to the skeleton splayed out on the screen before him. 

“Toor-kee,” my mother responded, in the one word she knew for sure she could say and which would suffice as a full explanation. 

He looked at her standing there, an elderly Mexican woman with salt and pepper hair, with complete confidence in the propriety of carrying a frozen turkey onto a plane, and no clue that it was a bit odd.  And then, he shrugged while he laughed through an “ok” and waved her on through the line.

She recounted the story later that day when I picked her up in Philadelphia and was a little sheepish when she figured out that he was shocked because bones in a bag might not look so safe.  She worried about what this man, who’d never seen her before and who would never see her again, might think about what it said about her that she carried bones cross country.  

Fortunately for my mother, the embarrassment only lasted a few hours.  Her sense of knowing right from wrong and not having to be born here to learn it was confirmed when, several hours into cooking the turkey at my house, we discovered that in my haste to clean for my mother, I’d returned the knob controlling the oven’s temperature onto the stove incorrectly.  Rather than cooking at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for hours, the turkey had only been cooking at 250 degrees.

And that’s when the head shaking “Ay, mija!” moment, that always seemed to follow a head shaking “Ay, mom!” moment, appeared.  My mom had forgotten her retrospective embarrassment and moved onto things that she knew were real and eternal—her American-born journalist daughter might be more educated and well-traveled than she was, but she would never be as wise.

Common Ground

24 Nov

Every now and then my mom and I stumble into a scene that reminds us that despite growing up in different countries at different times, we’re sharing the same life lessons.

On Friday night, we were pulling out of the parking lot near our hole-in-the-wall sushi place when we were stuck behind a slow black suv.  The suv sat at the stop sign just in front of us for what seemed an eternity as it flashed its brake lights at us. 

Impatient driver that I am, I became flustered and started venting to my mom about inexperienced drivers.  She egged me on (having herself almost been run down several times on this stretch of road) and I cursed at the suv with the USC license plate holder.  A block later, when the suv weaved to my right,  I promptly and loudly revved my engine and zipped by it.  “Take that, dumb USC driver,” I angrily thought.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught the driver waving at me as she called my name. 

At the next stop sign, I pulled over.  “You guys cannot do that to me,” I yelled out my window.  “Do you know how little patience I have for bad drivers,” I laughed at my friends and neighbors.  “We just wanted to say ‘Hi!’” they protested.

I laughed at myself and was embarrassed by the lack of patience and kindness I exhibit when lost in the universe of my own vehicle. 

My mom then recalled a time several years ago when she was boarding a bus in Mexico.  She had scoped out her seat and was fairly sure she had managed to score some extra arm room when a larger woman with lots of bags sat next to her. 

My mom’s description of her inner irritation mirrored what I had just lived (although she was less charitable about the size, cleanliness, and looks of the woman sitting next to her).  I laughed as she described her bitchy younger self and the unkind thoughts she had had about the woman. 

She continued, “Y luego la señora me dice, ‘Prima, hola, que gusto verte aqui.’”

She laughed at the memory of her embarrassment upon finding out that the woman sitting next to her was her cousin and that they had a five-hour bus ride ahead of them.

Then my mom smiled at me in the full knowledge that despite all of our differences, we share the same instincts and seem to have the same lessons to learn.

La Chusma at the Pool

28 Jun

 Wading Pool

“It’s too ghetto.”

That was the quote from one young woman talking about a public pool that had been in the news this week.

Except that it’s not a new sentiment.  Years ago, when I was a young denizen of L.A.’s public pools, I often heard that feeling expressed.  In my circles, it always engendered the “chusma” debate. 

“Solamente nada allí la chusma,” elders would say as we tried to get friends to go “swimming” with us at Little Bear Park in Bell or Salt Lake Park in Huntington Park or the high school pool in Bell or Norwalk Park in Norwalk.  In other words, they were saying, “my kids can’t swim there, only the really poor and ‘ghetto’ swim there.”

For over three decades, that sentiment has irked me.

So maybe it wasn’t always swimming.  But when you’re a little kid, you call floating in the wading pool’s six inches of water, “swimming.” 

Back then, we didn’t mind the shouts of “Everyone out of the water!!!” when the pool attendant discovered the one kid with chicken pox who decided to come to the pool.  I don’t even think I realized the ridiculousness of the situation until over a decade later.   Much later, when I was 18 and caught that ailment.

We didn’t even really mind having to get out of the pool 10 minutes after we’d gotten in simply to kick the chlorine around the pool.  Human mixers—that’s what we were.

We also didn’t register the danger flagged by the no diving sign on the gate around the two-foot-deep wading pool until years later when we were in high school sitting next to the one kid who did it and cracked his head open.  He was on the Academic Decathlon team.

The neighborhood pool is also where we took swimming lessons.  Nevermind that my first time off the high dive, Mrs. Kamiyama said she’d hold me over the side by my hands until I was ready to go in.  Shortly after I was hanging there she said, “You’re too fat, sorry” and she let go.  Belly-flopping off the high dive made me much more unwilling to go back to the pool than did the “chusma.”  I didn’t go back to that pool until almost ten years later when I was forced to take swimming lessons as part of P.E.  The full expunging of my childhood trauma came during those high school years when my friend, Linda, threw the innards of whatever we’d dissected in first period biology into the pool before second period swim class.

In the years between the belly-flopping incident and high school, I eagerly awaited summer swimming at the Norwalk pool.   My mom, sister, and I would take a 40-minute bus ride, walk half an hour to my aunt’s house, and then pick up cousins Reggie and Gloria and my Tía Rosalba.  After another half hour-long walk, we’d arrive at the biggest pool I’d ever seen.  At 9 a.m., we had free swim.  The kids went into the pool while my aunt and mother sat in the bleachers. 

Sometimes we’d swim for hours.  Other times, it was just a half hour or so.  I never realized why our swimtime sometimes got cut short.  I assumed my mom and aunt had had enough of the sun as we sat cooly in the pool.  The Times’ story makes me wonder if maybe my mom and aunt sensed something amiss in the pool and decided it was safer if we just sat dripping in the park just beyond the pool’s gates. 

And then I think, “No, didn’t a photographer just get beaten up in Malibu last week?”  There the story didn’t cast the aggressors as “ruffians” or the beach as getting “too ghetto.”  Those folks were just surfers protecting their beach, as well as Matthew McConaughey’s privacy. 

I’d like to think that the public pool is still a place where kids can enjoy the sheer glee of playing in the water and calling it “swimming,” even if they don’t really learn how to do that until much later in their lives.  I also hope that knuckleheads aren’t making it a different place, one where parents should legitimately be scared to send their kids. 

Most of all though, I hope that parents don’t think themselves so much better than the places where they live that they’d rather deny their kids some summer amusement just to make themselves feel less chusma.

Then again, maybe I’m just remembering the world the way it was when I still believed they put red dye in the public pool.  

First Date

24 May

I have a pretty good memory.  I mean, I remember almost every class schedule and teacher I had from kindergarten through the 12th grade.  But certain memories elude me.  Among them, a memory of my first date. 

This realization dawned upon me recently as I heard the story of one of our niece’s first dates.

To start, her story goes, she didn’t know it was a date.  As many a girl does, our niece thought she was just ”hanging out” with a group of friends who wanted to go to a movie on a Friday night.  One boy was paying special attention to her, but in her mind, that didn’t mean she was on a date.  Nevertheless, she accepted the attention and was soon hanging out mostly with him as the group made its way to Target, the parental pick up spot of choice.

While our niece and her young suitor wandered around the store, she reached into a bin of m&ms and snagged her finger on something.  Whatever it was, it cut her.

Her suitor, wishing to be a gentleman, expressed concern, but also told her he didn’t like blood.  She tried to shield her finger from him, but when the depth of her wound finally freaked her out a little, she showed it to him. 

The boy fell.

Hard.

Onto his face. 

Apparently, he really did have a violent reaction to the sight of blood. 

His friends tried to help him.  His parents arrived.  Other parents arrived.  He was finally taken to the  hospital.

Our niece was brought home.

In the next few days she found out he’d needed 14 stitches to close up his chin and the area around his lips. 

Although I feel bad for the boy, I am glad my niece has a memorable first date story to tell.  And, because our family is full of storytellers, and others who appreciate stories, I’m glad someone will remember even if she doesn’t.

 

Memory Is A Funny Thing

6 May

I was arguing with a friend today about how old children are when they start to remember experiences they’ve had.  I argued for six being the right age, based on my own early memories.

“I remember getting my first bed when I was about six.  I was so excited,” I recalled with a smile.  “That lasted all of about one evening, because then my mother told me I had to start making my own bed.”

 

El Canal Dos

21 Apr

For over thirty years, my mother hasn’t been able to watch CBS.  This means she’s missed the likes of “Murder She Wrote,” most of “Dallas,” and most recently “CSI.”  The main reason for this void in her life is that the wood-console, big box, Zenith, 26-inch, that she got on layaway at Kmart, didn’t have a television antenna with a good enough signal to allow her to watch those shows without developing a headache from the poor picture quality.  That and the cable company in her neighborhood won’t bring cable into her apartment complex without charging more than the television itself is worth.

In any event, the switchover from analog to digital transmission of television signals scared her.  She wasn’t sure if that meant no more television and she didn’t want to spend the money to get a new one.  No more television meant even more lonely afternoons.  At least before, “la O-pe-rah” was on a channel she could watch.

Because my mom is daring when she’s with me, while out running errands this weekend, I convinced her to use her coupons for a digital converter box.  She was hesitant, “pero si no trabaja, que hago” she asked.  The fear of the future was overwhelming and it didn’t matter that I’d promised to buy her a new tv if the old one stopped working.

We hooked the converter up midday on Sunday.  All told, it took about half an hour for all the signals to take hold.

The first thing my mother watched on CBS was Lorena Ochoa win this weekend’s LPGA golf tournament.  The blue skies hanging over the golf course were bluer than anything my mom had ever seen on this television.

She marveled at the brightness of the colors, the greenness of the greens, the fluffiness of the clouds, and giggled nervously at the prospect of another decade with her big box console. “Parece nueva,” she laughed as she watched her first ever golf tournament. Although golf isn’t her game, and she’s never watched a tournament, it was the perfect thing to watch through a new tv.

The television wasn’t the only thing that looked and felt new.

“Te imaginas, treinta años sin el canal dos, me siento yo también como nueva.”

The Pulitzer

8 Apr

“I didn’t win the Pulitzer today,” I announced as I walked into my professor’s office on a spring day several years ago.

She turned from her computer, confused, and quizzically responded, ”Did you expect to?”

“Yeah, well, our story was a finalist,” I explained.  “I just came from the press conference over at the journalism school.  The story on the crash of flight 800 won instead.” 

She sat up and listened intently and laughed at how nonchalantly I told the story of trying to find out if I’d take my place in journalistic history for a breaking news story I’d worked on the year before I started law school.  

My story was about a crazy, rich guy who’d shot and killed an Olympic wrestler who trained on the rich guy’s suburban estate outside of Philadelphia.  Because I’d been covering news in this small town, attending every community meeting (regardless of how little happened) for almost two years, spending Monday mornings going through police reports about people who’d run stop signs, I’d gotten to know the police and neighbors in town pretty well. 

This helped when I happened to be in the news room on a Friday (my normal day off) when news came of the shooting.  The cops and neighbors knew me, so they gave me information on the shooter.  The clerk at Blockbuster told me the types of movies he liked to rent.  The police told me they were thinking of getting a military helicopter to chase him if he took off in an armored vehicle they believed he owned.  It also helped when I had to spend the weekend in the bushes around the estate. 

There I was, in the freezing cold, holding my binoculars, watching the police take positions around the estate, while they figured out how to remove the suspect who was now barricaded inside his mansion.  Fortunately, some of the police officers offered coffee and a sweatshirt.

The whole scene came to an end two and a half days after it started, notably, just hours before Super Bowl XXX kicked off.  There was no shoot out, no storming of the mansion.  Yes, it was surrounded, but the scene ended with him coming out on his own. 

In the following months, someone else was assigned the story of the trial.  Someone else wrote the book on the story. 

I went to law school.

And all that remained of my history as a journalist was that, for a few years, on the day when Pulitzers were announced, my friend Jason would send me a teasing e-mail with the simple message, “If only that bird hadn’t fallen out of the sky.”

 

I Hate You In The Spring

18 Mar

Some years ago, I had a roommate who, about this time of year, looked at me and noted, “I hate you in the spring.”

More out of curiousity than hurt, I asked why.

She said that in the spring I came home from my teaching and coaching duties only to lift the couch on which she slept soundly.  As we watched telenovelas, I inexplicably pounced on her and tickled her until she said, “Chavo.”  At dinner, I just nudged her off a chair.

“It’s like I’m being attacked for no reason,” she complained.

I told her it wasn’t for no reason, it was just that in the springtime, when daylight lasts forever, and there’s always a game on where I can swing a bat, throw a ball, and have people chase me, I feel strong.  For whatever reason, that means roughhousing ensues.

I agreed to be more gentle with her.  She agreed to at least put up something of a fight.

I recalled this exchange today because I felt STRONG!!!  I’m not turning my blog into a workout diary, but after running 5 miles and doing a gazillion pushups, all I want to do is pounce. 

Not On a Map

27 Feb

In this day of mobile Google maps, wristwatches that use GPS technology to track your jog, and other electronic means of finding where you’re supposed to go, I was pleasantly surprised by a friend’s wonderfully low tech and spot on description of where to find fabulous ceviche in L.A.

“Go south on Soto, take a left at Olympic, and then look for three taco trucks.  The first truck has the best ceviche.”

Her suggestion sounded a little like “Follow the star and you’ll find a baby.”  It was entirely inadequate and so I unloaded a barrage of questions.  ”The first truck? Does it have a name? What if they’re not in order? Can you at least identify a color?”

The response, “Just look for the one with all the people.”

Despite my qualms about ever finding the truck from such a sketchy description, and as I verged on cursing her for a lack of specificity, three taco trucks appeared from among  a row of parked cars. 

The first truck had no distinctive markings.  However, as I peered around its side, I saw hundreds of people waiting for a chance to order.  The other two trucks stood there, notably devoid of crowds.  Not even spillover crowd patronized them.

Of course, I saw the crowd and thought “no way am I waiting in that line for ceviche” as I cruised on by.  The ceviche taste test would have to wait until another day, but I left comforted by the knowledge that there are certain things Big Brother still can’t find.

La Corte

20 Feb

As my mother ages, she’s becoming more and more afraid.  She’s afraid to pick up the phone.  She’s afraid to be out after dark.  She’s afraid of certain foods.  She’s afraid to not be home when the mailman comes.  Sometimes she’s afraid of things that are known, sometimes she’s afraid of those that aren’t.

Recently, she received a jury summons.  You can imagine what that did to her psyche.

To alleviate her panic (first at being called, second at the possibility of being fined for not showing up) I helped her fill out the form.  For those familiar with Los Angeles County’s form, you’ll recall it asks a series of questions.  One of them is something to the effect of “Do you understand English?”  Well, my mother does understand some English.  She argued she didn’t.  I asked if she’d be able to find the treasure if I told her it was on the 12th floor under the bed.

She said yes, so I told her that she shouldn’t be convenient in her use of the “no entiendo” card and, after talking to her about whether she felt she could answer some questions asked in a courtroom and telling her about how jury duty comes as an obligation of citizenship, she agreed not to ask for an excuse.

Then came the date of her service.  She got sick.  Really sick.  Take me to the ER sick.  We postponed jury service.

Then came the next date of her service.  And she got sick again.  This time a visit to her doctor was enough to get her service postponed.

Then came the next date of her service.  Well, you get the idea.

Finally, she felt mentally ready to go.  I’d prepared to go with her and troll the halls of Compton’s courthouse while she did her service (because, of course, she couldn’t go alone).  And then we had a fight about how I should have children because otherwise I’ll have no one to take care of me when I’m old.  We fought like mothers and daughters do when the mom wants kids and the daughter doesn’t. 

As if it would somehow hurt me, she announced she didn’t need my help with jury duty after all and left my house with a “y si ya no regreso, no te preocupes y no me busques.”  Yes, like any good mother, she left me with one of those messages designed to cause perpetual guilt if jury duty did somehow manage to kill her.

But it didn’t.  My mom dutifully took public transportation to the Compton courthouse and showed up for jury duty.  She enjoyed hearing the little talk they do on the importance of service and what it means to the legal system.  She enjoyed sitting in the hall and watching the legal system’s final resting place unfold.  Plus, she was dismissed by lunch, with instructions to return today.

My relationship to my mother has always been one of getting into and out of things together.  It’s getting harder when everything in life is scary, but I’m glad she trusted me on this one. 

The Fifth of July

22 Jun

When I was a little kid, we were too poor to afford fireworks. I suppose I can’t blame my pyrotechnic poverty just on being poor, but more on the fact that my mother didn’t think any part of the welfare check should be spent on frivolity. If we got fireworks, we didn’t get clothes, or we didn’t get food. Sure, it was a practical choice, but as a kid, you just want to rip into the hundred dollar “Independence Day” box of fireworks.

Our fireworkslessness meant that in the days leading up to the Fourth of July every year, we’d visit our more affluent friends and watch them light fireworks. Back then this annual ritual led me to conclude that socio-economic status could be identified by the characteristics of your fireworks.

If you had no color, just sound, you weren’t poor, but you weren’t living in a mansion. You lived in an apartment and shared a bedroom with a couple of siblings. The same went for fireworks with no sound, and just smoke.

If you had fireworks that were colorful, but just rolled around on the ground, you lived in one of the houses in a duplex.

If your fireworks shot color into the air, and did so while crackling, at least one of your parents had a full-time job and probably owned a house with a yard and a driveway (or at least they’d found a way to live in one).

In my family, we didn’t have any fireworks before and up to the Fourth of July. We didn’t get to light something and have sound, or color. Maybe, if we got lucky, someone handed us a sparkler. In the bad years, they handed us the punk used to light the fireworks. Yep, there’s the poor kid, the one with the smoldering ember.

Occasionally, when the sounds of Fourth of July were so muddled that you couldn’t tell the fireworks from the gunshots fired into the air, we pretended to be fireworks. I mean, if you’re a nine-year-old and you scream from a low tone to a very high one, you sound kind of like a Piccolo Pete. And besides, by nightfall, no one even knows what’s going on in neighboring yards, driveways, or streets. Everyone is just staring into the sky, looking for something to make the darkness light. That means there is no risk of being seen joining the cacophony of Independence Day sound, while in your pajamas, from just inside your apartment’s living room window.

I watched from the shadows every year until the Fifth of July. That was the day when my cousin Reggie would come over and my mom, and my sister, and my Tía Rosalba, and my other cousins, and I would go to the local park. Salt Lake Park was the one where the big neighborhood fireworks were set off, and the official, city-sanctioned Fourth of July safe zone for amateur fireworks displays.

We never went to the show on the Fourth of July. My mom was scared that going to the park after dark would make us victims of violent crime, and my Tía Rosalba was a Jehovah’s Witness. Her family didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July.

But, on the Fifth of July, Reggie, Virginia, and I made sure to take a magnifying glass to the park. Our families would stake out a spot next to a tree, drag over a picnic bench, pull out aluminum foil-wrapped burritos, and play dominoes.

Virginia, Reggie, and I headed straight for the previous night’s launching pad.

We crawled around every inch of that soccer-field sized patch of grass, looking for unused fireworks. Although not plentiful, and not colorful, little by little, we’d find some fireworks.

At first, we’d find little black charcoal disks. While we weren’t allowed to buy fireworks, and we weren’t allowed to play with matches, we did know what unused fireworks looked like, and how to start a fire without matches, so out came the magnifying glass.

We figured out the sun’s angle, and the length of time needed to create a flame, and voilà, black plumes of ash came up from the earth and “snakes” came to life.

My sister, Virginia, tore holes in the knees of her jeans and Reggie got dirt in his eyes, before we found another unused firecracker.

Lighting our fireworks became easier with each successive find. We’d get sound, and some smoke, and then we’d laugh hysterically and roll around in laughter on the charred firecracker paper and ashes left from the night before.

Although there were never more than about ten unused fireworks for us to light every year, we had gotten the chance to shoot off some fireworks after all. On the Fifth of July we had not been denied the simple pleasure of creating marvels of sound and sight.

We all knew that our scavenging hadn’t made us children of homeowners this year, but it was understood that ingenuity would get us there some year, maybe next year.

© Laura Genao 2007

Sounds Like . . .

3 May

If you grew up bilingual, you know the amusement that comes from words and concepts that get mangled in the language divide. 

Among my favorites:

  • Upon being told a child was gifted–”Your teacher said you were gifted, I wonder when she’ll send the gift.”
  • On explaining to his children that the Mormon temple on Santa Monica Blvd. has a geneological center affiliated with it–”That building there, that’s where they keep the bird records.”
  • On asking to be taken to Bed Bath and Beyond–”Come on, let’s go to the Body de John.”
  • On being told that some buses in Boston run on electricity via wires–”But how do the wires hold up the buses?”
  • On seeing a published legal case list each of the Supreme Court justices by title and name alone (i.e., Justice Rehnquist, Justice O’Connor), a relatively new law student asked–”Why is their first name all Justice?”

© Laura Genao 2007

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