September 12, 2005 - The Homecoming

September 12, 2005 - The Homecoming

Just after the September 11 disaster, I was let go by the company I was working for and found myself with some idle time on my hands. My wife IM and I decided to invite our daughters ME and RD, their husbands and our first grandbaby, ME’s daughter EM to accompany us to El Paso to visit the family matriarch and patriarch. They were in the mid-80s now but back then were just entering that age group. Dad had just added a second story to the house my sisters and I grew up in and he wanted to show it off to his grandkids and the rest of us. The second floor added four bedrooms and two baths, just enough so everyone would have a bedroom with one to spare, which was taken by my youngest sister DD who was coming down from Boston.

My other two sisters still live in El Paso, though both did their bit of traveling before concluding that El Paso was where they wanted to be. There is a great passage from the Carlos Castenada series of books about the Yaqui Indian medicine man, where he tells the author that ever man has a place on earth and each of us knows where it is—it’s a badly constructed paraphrase but I think I captured the essence of what the old man was trying to say. Despite the fact that Castenada has been found out to be a fraud, creating the Yaqui Indian from his imagination, I think he hit the mark about each of us having a place we want to live and die. My dad and mom and two sisters know where it is as do my wife IM and I.

My father has a classic square face, a chin that does not come to a point but spreads at the bottom; his straight nose from its tip rising at a 30-degree angle to his forehead splitting two sockets housing his blue eyes. His ears are close to his head but are a just a bit larger than normal—you would think it would allow him to hear better, but truth be told, he’s hard of hearing and resists wearing a hearing aid. His forehead forms a cliff to this skull rather than a ski slope. And his hairline of slightly wavy thinning blond Aryan hair has receded from the cliff face. He has a gentle smile that displays most of his original teeth. The intense edge of the younger man I grew up with has been replaced with the gentle, sentimental and wise man I now know as my father.

The top of my petite mother’s head barely reaches above my father’s heart—he stands just under six foot tall. Mother has an oval fare with wide cheekbones, a nose that flares slightly, the full lips characteristic of Filipinos, a more pointed chin, and almond-shaped brown eyes. As a young woman, she had long thick black hair. Now grey, she wears it short and resists the persistent appeal from friends to have it dyed. My two parents have grown to resemble one another over time. I brought my new video camera along to document them telling us about their early life before meeting one another.

Our daughters and their families chose to fly down: ME, her husband GS, and daughter EM from Oakland and RD and her husband TF from Orange County. Still upset about the Twin Towers crash, IM was reluctant to fly so we decided to drive down. It was a drive I enjoyed making. And we could leave on Friday, a day ahead of the girls who had to leave on Saturday to avoid taking off work on Friday. They had taken Monday off instead. We had all chosen to go the weekend before Halloween, which fell on the following Tuesday. RD and TF flying America West were arriving first at around 3:30 PM on Saturday. ME, GS and EM were arriving an hour or two later on Southwest. Both flights were stopping in Phoenix.

IM and I set out on Friday October 27th heading south on Interstate 5, circumventing Los Angeles by taking Interstate 210 east meandering south of Highway 57 to join up with Interstate 10. We made good time down I-5 but hit Los Angeles right at rush hour and though we took, I-210, we caught plenty of pockets of slow and go traffic even in the car pool lane. We turned south on Highway 57 to pick up I-10 East. We thought we would clear the congestion once we reach I-10 but the rush hour extended along I-10 through San Bernardino, finally giving way to open road at Banning. We zoomed through Indio about 7:00 PM Friday evening arriving in Blythe 90 miles or so east on I-10 just before 9:00 PM. We had reservations at the Hampton Inn, 900 Hobsonway.

We had driven non-stop since leaving San Jose at 9:00 AM and IM and I slept the sleep of travelers who had journeyed long. The great benefit of a good nights’ sleep is waking refreshed the next day ready for the road ahead. Waking at 6:00 we grabbed a quick bite to eat at the Courtesy Coffee Shop near the Hampton Inn, then headed east. From Blythe to Phoenix four-lane Interstate 10 stretches 150 or so miles straight as a crow flies. That morning the road bore light traffic and I eased the accelerator down to the floor getting our four-door European touring sedan up over 90 MPH and kept it there in between clumps of traffic where I would slow to get around the bunch of cars then resume speed.

We made Phoenix in just over two hours, but lost an hour due to the time change. It was about 10:00 when we got through Phoenix and began the run to Tucson, Arizona Highway Patrol more prevalent along this stretch of I-10 so I kept the speedometer between 80 and 85 MPH which got us through Tucson just around 11:30. From Tucson we were headed east toward Lordsburg, New Mexico 160 miles east. Through eastern Arizona and western New Mexico I-10 is a fast, lightly patrolled stretch of highway and I was able to get back up over 90 MPH for long stretches of road. Two hours later we had put Lordsburg in our rearview mirror and were on our way to Las Cruces.

We made the curve in I-10 south at Las Cruces just before 3:00 and were heading south along the Rio Grande toward the New Mexico-Texas border. At about 3:30 we saw the familiar landmark for of the ASARCO smelter smoke stack and were curving around past the University of Texas at El Paso on the left side of Interstate. We exited I-10 at the North Piedras Street exit and head north to my parents home in Morningside Heights. Just as we neared the house we get a phone call from RD asking us when we might arrive. IM said any second now and we honked the horn at the gate of my parents’ home.

The homecoming ritual at our El Paso home is to eat and my mom and her long time companion Ava had prepared a lunch-dinner meal of adobo chicken—a Filipino delicacy, rice, gravy, broccoli, and potato salad. We sat about the table catching up on our travels realizing that we would repeat this ritual once ME and her gang arrived, but looking forward to being together yet again.

I’ll continue in the next installment of the blog describing the events of this visit with the parents, and the game we played well into the night on Saturday and the conversation we had the following day about Tom Lea, the El Paso born novelist and artist who had passed away earlier.