My family of five siblings, two parents and a bachelor uncle lived in a tiny house on Railroad Avenue: eight of us in a house with two bedrooms and one bathroom. Night-time required a degree in logistics, as the living room needed to remain pristine and was not for sleeping. Severino and I rolled out a foldaway bed at night and wheeled it into the kitchen-laundry room combo in which Tio Juan also slept.<\/p>\n
The living room was the first room visitors saw as they knocked on the front door. Remember, in those days, few people had a phone; a text message was decades away, so people just showed up unannounced, sometimes expecting dinner. Mom, who passed away in 2002, used to laugh about the time my classmate at Immaculate Conception School, Johnny Lopez, who lived exactly a block away but across the tracks, used our hallway as a shortcut to school.<\/p>\n
Tales like these, on retelling, have a way of being embellished, ballooned out of proportion. The truth is that Johnny absolutely would cut through our yard, but not always through our house. Once I happened to be in the back yard at the time and invited him to walk to school with me \u00e2\u20ac\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s take a shortcut through the house,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I said. He agreed, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But may I use your bathroom first?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Fortunately, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d tidied up the living room right after breakfast, so Johnny must have gotten the impression we were neat-freaks. And more fortunately, Mom didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to give us that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Que dira la gente?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d spiel. You see, Mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s concern \u00e2\u20ac\u201d made even more acute by the fact that in those days people often just \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dropped by\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153what will people say?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d if we left a comic book lying around, or if the corner of a blanket touched the floor.<\/p>\n
To save having to wash a water glass, I usually took a slurp from a hydrant we had by the front porch. Somehow water always tastes better through slurping directly from the hydrant; next-best taste is out of a metal can. Next to that hydrant was a growth of spearmint leaves that were particularly pungent and which doubled as a breath mint and which became an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153exotic drink,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a marketable commodity.<\/p>\n
The scent of the spearmint (we called it poleo) disappeared through my years of smoking more than a pack of Salems a day. When I gave up smoking 17 years later, almost immediately, the rich fragrance of the spearmint returned.<\/p>\n
Mom and Dad lived and died in that home in the Railroad Avenue barrio. My sister Bingy and I were born in that house, delivered by an across-the-street curandera we called Mrs. Kemm. While our parents were still alive, we children, with our children and grandchildren, made that house Grand Central Station. And every time I visited there, I could smell the pungent aroma of the poleo.<\/p>\n
Am I deluding myself when I mention that years after the hydrant was removed from the front yard, the scent remained? We enjoyed making our own brew out of the spearmint leaves. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d simply add sugar, stir vigorously and peddle it to neighbor kids who carried loose change.<\/p>\n
Over a summer, we Trujillos might have pocketed a couple of bucks from neighbor friends whose parents owned a corner grocery store. But one summer, perhaps, we went too far. During a time one of us was slurping water from the hydrant, one of us happened to be touching an electric wire that sent a jolt coursing through our bodies. It was a mild form of electrocution and something our parents never found out about.<\/p>\n
Is there a way to make that shocking thing earn us some money? Well, we called it the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Thrill Machine,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and for a dime, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d show our customers how to hold the loose wire while drinking out of the hydrant. It worked every time, and some of the neighborhood kids even came back for seconds.<\/p>\n
But eventually, when one of us happened to be standing in a puddle while drinking and holding the wire, the sensation went w-a-y beyond any thrill. Even kids our age realized there might be some danger involved.<\/p>\n
We stopped that in a hurry.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
The end of the year, the last column for 2015, has made me reminisce. Seeing our Danish grandkids mixing it up with their American cousins reminds me of our own childhood way back in the Dark Ages.<\/p>\n
A reader asked me how I think up so many things to write about (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m past 600 installments and have never missed a week). My only explanation is that (so far) my memory has been good.<\/p>\n
But yet, it seems that each of my siblings remembers the events somewhat differently, usually concocting a scenario that makes them out to be the hero (or shero). I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll let them continue to perform variations on their own distortions.<\/p>\n
But who knows? They could be right.<\/p>\n
Nah. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too far-fetched an idea.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
See you next year. Be well. And don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t forget to over-tip your breakfast server.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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