Month: February 2021

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My Godmother ~ Margaret Jones Maher

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a godmother like my Aunt Margaret. The oldest of my father’s three sisters, she was the picture of love and patience. She was thirteen years older than my Dad and she doted on him. When I came along, the oldest of her nineteen nieces and nephews, she doted on me, too.

Like all four children in my father’s family, Margaret was programmed to go to college. She studied to be a teacher, but her career came to an abrupt halt because she couldn’t discipline even one child, let alone a whole classroom. So she left teaching and went to work as a secretary for the Northern Pacific railroad, the same railroad where my grandfather worked. From all accounts, she was a good secretary because she didn’t have to discipline anyone but herself.

Margaret was a great cook and an exceptional knitter. I have pictures of clothes that she knit for me and my brother ~ skirts and shorts with matching sweaters. Margaret’s knitted afghans sold for the most money at the church bazaar. To my knowledge, she never dropped a stitch.

Margaret, like my Dad, didn’t say much. She was content to sit quietly, smile and murmur her approval of whatever was being said. I loved sitting next to her on the couch, holding her hand, and resting my head on her arm. I know she liked that, too.

Margaret didn’t marry until she was in her late-forties. (More about that later.) She never had children of her own. Given her inability to discipline anyone, that might have been a good thing. 

As I was going through old family photos last summer, however, I stumbled on a batch of pictures showing Margaret with a man, labeled only as “Margaret with her Gentleman Friend.” The pictures show a young, very happy Margaret, with a very handsome man, on vacation somewhere in Arizona. I will never know who he was, where he came from, or what happened to him. I believe he gave her many happy moments. I wish there could have been more.

As I mentioned, when Margaret was in her forties she met Patrick Maher. They were both members of the St. Paul Hiking Club. They shared a love of the outdoors and both could walk for miles. They fell in love and wanted to be married. 

Grandma and Grandpa never approved of Uncle Pat. They were genteel. He was uncouth. They were intelligent and valued education. Pat never fit in. He was a savant. A man who knew the statistics for every sports star and sporting event ever held. My brother would ask him questions that no one knew the answers to, like:

“Uncle Pat, who won the World Series of 1938?”

Pat would answer (trust me, I looked this up!) “The Yankees beat the Cubs in four games in the 1938 World Series.” Then he would go on to recite the statistics for every player in the game. He was a walking encyclopedia of sports. My brother loved it. Pat put the rest of us to sleep.

Margaret and Pat were married in 1952, without the approval of my grandparents. I was at the wedding. Margaret and Pat were beaming. My grandparents were not.

Margaret and Pat rented their own small house after they married. They lived there for only a few years, however. When Grandpa died in 1954, they moved into my grandparents house to take care of Grandma. Grandma died two years later and Margaret and Pat were the new owners of the house at 731 Delaware Avenue.

I stayed in touch with Aunt Margaret when I was in college. She sent me letters and money. Every holiday she sent me boxes of Fanny Farmer candy. 

Margaret’s life took a turn for the worse when she retired from her job with the railroad in 1967, at the age of sixty-two. By this time Aunt Ruthie, had moved into the house with Margaret and Pat. She, too, had little tolerance for Uncle Pat, but she appreciated having a place to live and learned to tolerate him.

I moved to Denver, was married and had my first child when I got a call from my mother.

“Margaret isn’t doing well.”

“Oh, no. what’s the matter?”

“She’s in the mental hospital.”

“For what?”

“For being scrupulous.”

Who ever heard of such a thing? I looked it up. It’s called scrupulosity and Margaret had it. She was convinced she was an evil person, when in fact she was a saint. She was convinced she would go to Hell and there was no way for her to repent. The treatment for scrupulosity, at that time, was electric shock. 

I came home from Denver as soon as I could. I went to see Margaret in the hospital. My sweet, smiling godmother was not smiling. She was in tears. Constant, copious tears. She grabbed my hand and pleaded with me.

“Please, you’ve got to get me out of here. They’re going to give me more shocks. They are going to kill me. And then I’m going to Hell.” There was nothing I could do. There was nothing anyone could do.  

Margaret died when I was back in Denver. My Dad got a phone call from the hospital. He turned to my mother and said “Margaret is dead. I need to go to the hospital. You stay here.” 

Margaret was buried in the Catholic cemetery. I wasn’t able to come home for the funeral to say goodbye to the sweetest, most loving, tender-hearted godmother anyone could wish for.

Rest in Peace, Dear Aunt Margaret. Rest in Peace!

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Zelmira Returns With A Broken Heart

In December, 1993, Neto and his brother, Cachi, took a train from Nogales to Mazatlan to see their father. Three days later Jesús was dead from a sudden heart attack. Neto and Cachi were despondent.

“When my father saw how messed-up and raggedy we were from drugs and alcohol, my father decided to take the ride to the other-world in our place.”

Neto has told me the story so many times over the years, I know he’s still haunted by the memory.

Zelmira was living in Los Angeles at the time. No longer working full time as a housekeeper in Echo Park, she was cleaning houses throughout her neighborhood in Inglewood when she got the news.

No one could believe that Jesús was gone. He was seventy-five years old, working full time as a security guard and fixing cars in his spare time. The family waited for Zelmira to return to Mazatlán before they held the funeral and buried Jesús in the Panteon Renacimiento Para Nacer a la Vida Eterna (The cemetery where people are reborn into eternal life.)

“I loved that old man,” Zelmira told people at the funeral. “I always thought he’d still be here when I came back home.” 

Zelmira was a widow at sixty-six years old. She had been married for forty-three years. She put on the black clothes of a Mexican widow and has never taken them off.

After the funeral, Neto stayed behind in Mazatlán for three months to take care of  his mother until she was ready to return to California.

“I wanted to make sure she was all right before I went back to the U.S. I didn’t want to leave her alone. The responsibility I had on my shoulders as a kid, earning money to help her provide for us, came back to me.”

Zelmra appreciated Neto in a different way after the funeral. “Your father always told me you would be the one to take care of me when I was old. I should have listened to him.”

“It’s ok, Mamí. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. If I can redeem myself, even a little, by taking care of you now, that makes me happy.”

But an even bigger blow to Zelmira’s heart was still to come. On May 2, 2002, Cachi was killed instantly in a car accident, driving on the road from Hermosillo to Caborca in his Dodge Caravan. Cachi was her second youngest child. Charming and sweet, he often traveled from Tucson to California to visit her. Neto believes that Cachi was his mother’s favorite. “Mamí may have loved him the most and she was crushed.”

 Zelmira immediately came back to Mazatlan for the funeral services. She never went back to California again. “I’m going to let my visa expire,” she told everyone. “I can’t care for other people any more. My heart is too broken.” 

Zelmira’s mother died when she was seven years old. From that moment, she learned to take care of herself. But losing her husband and, nine years later, her son was too much. She wanted to come home to live in her own house, near her friends from long ago. She renewed her friendship with Padre Lalo, and went to daily Mass at the simple Church of the Sacred Heart, down the street.

She took charge once again of her house on Papagayo Street, sweeping the sidewalk and the street in front of her house early every morning so people knew she was awake. 

Now, at age 92, Zelmira is an old woman with hardly any teeth left in her mouth and blind in one eye. She has discarded her armor and become an easier, more compassionate person. She lives with Neto’s sister, in the mountains outside Guadalajara, most of the year. She weeps openly every time Cachi’s name is mentioned. Tears spring from her eyes so readily, people are warned never to talk about him.

There are times that Zelmira is visited by ghosts. She sees her Aunt Petra, who raised her, and her brothers who have died. Some days she talks to Cachi as if he is still in the room with her. Once in a while she thinks Neto is her husband, Jesús. When he walks through the door, she calls out, “Hola, Papí. You are home from work early today.”

But in many ways Zelmira is still a warrior woman  ~ tiny, weighing less than 100 pounds, with fierce black eyes and a head full of wild curly hair. Her voice, low and growly like an angry dog, still commands attention. She will always be the matriarch. The most important hen in the hen-house. The glue that holds the family together.

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Zelmira Moves to California and Sees the Pope

Traveling back and forth, from Mazatlán to California, Zelmira got an itch to move to the U.S. full-time. She still wanted to collect clothing to sell in Mazatlán, but she decided that her main home would be California. At least for a while. 

In 1981, Zelmira left her husband, Jesús, in charge of their two youngest sons with strict orders that they needed to finish high school. Zelmira’s daughter Alma, age twenty, was already married and having babies. Zelmira didn’t want Norma to get in the same trouble at age eighteen, so she got her a visa and dragged her along.

Zelmira moved to Los Angeles, a city she already knew. There was a well-worn trail from Mazatlán to California, established long ago by her brothers and other braceros looking for work. Her brothers, Gero, Chendo, and Ramon all worked as braceros, picking grapes in California in the 1950’s.

Three of Gero’s children, Delia, Mercedes and Jesús, moved to Calfornia in the 1970’s. and Zelmira often stayed with them when she went on her clothes-buying missions. She knew almost enough English to get by. 

Zelmira quickly adapted to life in California. She liked working and sending money home to her family. She and Norma lived with her niece, Delia, in Inglewood near the L.A. airport. Norma went to work right away, working in the same airplane parts factory that Delia did, and later working in a ceramics factory.

According to Neto, “California felt like Mazatlán to Mamí and the other immigrants. People spoke Spanish on streets lined with palm trees. Smells of chiles, cooking in oil, and meat roasted on backyard grills, greeted people as they came home from work. Her neighbors stopped at local tortillarias or frutarias before walking up their sidewalks and opening their doors.”

Zelmira quickly found work, as a full-time maid and nanny in a big home in Echo Park, where she had her own live-in apartment. She moved to Echo Park and left Norma in Inglewood under Delia’s supervision.

Zelmira continued to come back to Mazatlan three or four times a year to sell clothes and check on Jesús and the two boys left at home.  Somehow she managed to get visas for the two youngest sons but not for Ernesto.

“I was always the black sheep. I think that’s why I was left behind,” Neto told me. By this time he, too, had discovered California and was able to jump the border easily, even without legal papers.

In 1984, Zelmira called Ernesto to tell him she was going to Italy to see the Pope. Padre Alvarez, pastor of  the Catholic church in Inglewood, sponsored the trip and Zelmira was the first person to sign on. She was fifty-seven years. She came back with stories of everything she had seen and done. For a working woman from tiny Hacienda del Tamarindo to go to Rome and see the Pope was a huge adventure.

“Neto, that airplane was more than a block long,” she reported. She slowly shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe it herself. “We walked all day. Some people got tired but not me. I could have walked all day and still walked home at night.”

Two years later, Zelmira signed on for another trip to Europe with Padre Alvarez. This time to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, in Portugal. She also traveled to Mexico City, to the Basilica of  Our Lady of Guadalupe, when Pope John Paul II appeared there in 1999.

When the Pope visited Los Angeles in 1987, Zelmira was there in Dodger’s Stadium, cheering along with 6000 people as the Pope rounded the bases in his Popemobile.  Zelmira was ecstatic as she told Neto, “You should have come, M’hijo. He spoke in Spanish and English. He told the priests and the bishops they should work to help illegal immigrants become citizens.” 

A picture of Pope John Paul II hangs in Zelmira’s house to this day, along with pictures of John F. Kennedy and Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Pope is a reminder of all she has done in her lifetime. She considers him one of her good friends.

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When Zelmira Ran The Store

Neto’s mother, Zelmira Esther Aguillar Rodriguez, grew up forty miles south of Mazatlan, in La Hacienda del Tamarindo, a small land-grant village new Rosario. She was the only girl in a family of all boys. 

Zelmira’s mother, Maria Aguillar, died in childbirth when Zelmira was seven years old. According to family legend, the doctor told her father, Ignacio Rodriguez, “I can save your wife or your son. I can’t save both. What should I do?”

“Save the boy,” Ignacio answered. Zelmira’s youngest brother, Antonio, lived but all six of the children were left without a mother. Ignacio remarried soon after his wife died, which infuriated his older sons. 

Soon after his wife died, Ignacio showed up with his new wife who was already pregnant. Gerardo, his oldest son, was fuming. He hated his father and refused to let him in the door.

“This house isn’t yours any more. It is our house and it belongs to our mother. You stepped on her when she was alive. You’ll never step on her again.” From that day forward, Ignacio was never allowed inside the house. 

Zelmira was raised by Ignacio’s sister, her Aunt Petra. She grew up to be fiercely independent. With blazing black eyes and a wild head of black curly hair, she was known as “the commander.” It was a role that suited Zelmira when she was young and later, when she married sweet Jesús Flores, who grew up the only boy in a family of three sisters.

Once they were married, Jesús allowed Zelmira be in charge. She was a shrewd businesswoman with high expectations for her children, most of which spiraled downward into disappointment.

Neto was twelve years old, working nights cleaning a downtown bakery, when Zelmira began selling groceries out of their house to earn extra money. It started when Neto’s boss, a good-hearted man named Memo, asked him,  “How would you like to take some bread home for your mother to sell? I can give it to you for half price.” 

Zelmira liked the idea right away. Nothing was better then a piece of bread from the bakery to go with her morning coffee. Pretty soon she was happily selling delicious, day-old bread to her neighbors along with tomatoes, avocados, bananas and fresh mangoes from the neighborhood market.

Soon there was no stopping her. Zelmira greeted Neto at 5:00 a.m each morning, as he walked in the door after work. She was in a hurry, on her way to the big Pino Suaréz market downtown. The market opened early to accommodate retailers and restaurants. She rode the bus to the Pino Suarez market and came home in a taxi loaded with pineapples, apples and guavas, celery and carrots, onions and garlic and chiles, rice, potatoes, beans, milk, cheese, and eggs. Dozens and dozens of eggs.

Zelmira continued to buy day-old bread from Memo and enlarged the store in what was once the family’s living room. She started taking orders from her neighbors, adding meat and poultry delivery to them for an extra charge. 

Soon she was also cooking, making tortas, molletes and juices to sell for breakfast. The house became a neighborhood grocery store and small restaurant. Zelmira was the store-keeper and the cook. Jesús didn’t like what Zelmira was doing but she was a woman with a mission and she was the boss.

Not content with running the store, in 1975 Zelmira started crossing the border into the United States to buy boxes of clothes to sell out of her house. Four times a year Zelmira transported two huge boxes home on the bus. Neto remembers that “some of the boxes were as big as a baby’s crib.” Boxes full of footwear and clothing. Zelmira sold half the clothes and saved the other half for Neto and his six brothers and sisters to wear. 

Zelmira’s biggest trip to the U.S. was always the trip before Christmas. She obtained a valid visa and bribed officials when she needed to, in order to meet the demand for American-made goods. 

“I put something for your little girl in the pocket of the red coat on top,” she would tell the guard at the border. He checked the pocket of the red coat, pulled out a $20 bill, and let her pass.