Look Homeward, Angel...

"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away..."
- You Are My Sunshine

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - This is the weekend I go beat myself up. This is the weekend I head back home again, back to the Rio Grande Valley and the cradle of my existence - McAllen. It's late in the long year and I'm up for rewinding memories of my youth in the lovely City of Palms. Bring on the best.

It's a little different now that my dear mother is gone, but visiting with her at the cemetery on Taylor Road will be uplifting. I'll take fresh flowers and sit there alongside her gravestone and talk with her a bit. Tell her about what's happened with me lately. Tell her about my two girls and their doings. Tell her about my life in the Austin area with Margaret. Tell her about how much I miss her. Tell her it's straight-out agony to leave McAllen after my visits. Tell her I'm doing fine even as the world gasps for air. She'd not recognize the planet anymore. We've lost so much so fast lately.

My mother is the only person who's ever made me cry. I cried through most of the eulogy I gave at her funeral mass that Mid-April day now going on four years ago. That was breathing the hollowest, emptiest of air. I didn't sleep a wink that night, and the same happens when the anniversary of her death rolls around. I suppose it's that way for all sons grieving all moms. There is something clearly special in a mother, and it goes beyond hugs and kisses and remembrances and just being around them. I'm older now, but there was a time I couldn't think of my mother dying. She was a healthy, loving woman who did so much for our family, clothing and feeding us even when the money was low, pushing us to do our schoolwork, frowning, yet amiling when I told her I'd be joining the military. That face, a mother's face, defines life. You see all that can possibly be good in a mother's face, all that speaks of joy and family.

My days in the U.S. Navy were good days. I was spared combat in Vietnam, assigned to Hawaii for who knows what reason. But I'd come home on leave and there was my mother at the McAllen airport, there with my older sister, Carmen, and a few others, there looking for me in the crowd, waiting to give the warmest of hugs. I'd stay a few days and then, as the time grew short, I'd make sure I spent as much of my time with her as I could. She made morning coffee for us, laid out my beloved pan dulce, or rustle-up some huevo-con-chorizo tacos. You could almost hear music when my mother bopped-around her kitchen getting meals ready. She would ask, do you want this, do you want some more of that? And, always, she would walk the plates to the kitchen table, sit down and offer a brief prayer. Sometimes, I said the prayer, but hers always seemed the best. That's mothers for you, still the voices of God. Leaving her always proved the hardest thing to do. She would come outside and stand by the frontyard fence and watch me get into the car, wave easily and keep waving until I was too far to see her. That, to me, was the height of sadness. I couldn't shake it for miles and miles.

I miss my mother very much. My life for the most part was defined by the black & white, truth or lies chased by my career in journalism. That steeled me against many of my feelings. I get annoyed easily by politicians and cannot stand to see abuse, especially of children. Poverty in America baffles the Hell out of me, as does this growing income disparity that goes against the idea that, in the U.S., anyone can become a millionaire. I know that's just money, and who needs more than they can use? But that, too, is life. That's the time we live in.

So, when I cruise into the RGV at about noon tomorrow, I'll smile at seeing the palm trees lining the highway into Edinburg, then at the old courthouse, then at Texas Highway 107 that'll take me past UT-Pan American and then onto what is N. 10th Street in McAllen. There'll be a lump in my throat by then, knowing that there was a time when my mother moved along the same city streets I pass as I make way south past Trenton and Nolana, big H.E.B on the left, where she used to shop, where she would go to buy stuff for me ahead of my visits.

I enjoy going back to McAllen 'cause it is a big part of my past.

But it won't be the same, yet I know that my mother will be watching my every move. That is why I'll smile at the tops of the palm trees, at the ever-present clouds, at the beautiful South Texas sky, at the many friendly faces.

There is something in that Jewish proverb that says God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers...

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