The River

The strange thing about me as a child (well, there were a few at least, to be honest) was that while I was always fully engaged in what I was doing, I remembered so much in such great detail because it was like I was watching myself from above and slightly behind. Maybe it had something to do with the fevers incurred during my frequent childhood illnesses.

Inside the house, my mother, the teacher, programmed my mind using flash cards for spelling and basic math. I loved it like Neo in the Matrix. I would tell her to go faster and faster. Back outside it was hot and humid, and flat farmland on what used to be an old Spanish/Mexican cattle ranch on the border of the Rio Grande.

The adventures of childhood were many, as were the lessons to be learned about life, death, family and culture. Some lessons were more traumatic than others. Looking back through the table of contents, I hope the darkness doesn’t completely overtake the light. For as much as there were difficult experiences and lessons, there was absolute bliss in the openness that was the landscape and all it offered to a growing child.

The development of human identity is complex for each of us, for all of us, for everyone. As a child I thought it was just me, but by early adulthood I’d sussed that it was indeed everyone. But it wasn’t spoken about back then and back there, as were our socio-ethnographic differences not spoken. Perhaps it is easier for those who know they will never leave their childhood hometown. But for others who, at a young age, feel apart, feel different, as if they’re not welcome because by their very nature they don’t “fit in” or “belong,” it is difficult to endure twenty or more years of scrutiny and discomfort or pain.

And yet the lesson of love for family and cherishing the history and culture of that beloved family requires the writer to tell their stories with his own. Those stories are woven into the fabric of the very same landscapes. They are part of the regional history, whether published or not. And because identity is universal, family histories are universal and unique, and if they exist, they do so because of storytelling. That is the broader point of this book. To encourage the human art of storytelling, which we all possess and which is the strength of our human culture from a time before spoken language. These stories are only mine and my family’s version, and only a fraction of the whole.