Poor Thing

Summer vacations in our family followed a basic template: Rent a cabin in South Lake Tahoe and stay there for a week. There would be trips to the beach, visits to souvenir stands, and long stints at the video arcade while the adults gambled. The adults were my parents and, always, Vovó Flora. I cannot distinguish one trip from another except by the rental cabin. One year we rented a smaller cabin near the Tahoe Keys and the plan was for us kids to sleep in our sleeping bags. Vovó Flora would not have it. I was accustomed to seeing her mad - it seemed to be her default state - but this was different. She wasn’t so much angry as deeply upset. No one would be sleeping on the floor, she insisted. I was baffled. Our family never went camping so we were thrilled to finally use our Mickey Mouse sleeping bags. What was the big deal?

The little I know of Vovó’s early life is largely rumor and embellishment, stories retold and misremembered. Vovó Flora grew up poor. That much is certain. She was poor and deeply ashamed of it. When times were especially tough she was sent to beg off of relatives who gave charity along with an earful about the shameful and wretched state of their family. She started working at 15 as a housekeeper for a family at the church. I can imagine the bitterness of witnessing the inner lives of “better” people, seeing they are no different from anyone except in how they are treated and how badly they are allowed to treat the people beneath them. I see a resolve growing inside of Vovó Flora, that she would not remain poor, that she would rise above it and never look back. It’s exactly what she did. She moved to Lisbon, worked and married, came to America and continued working until the family had a house and a respectable middle class life.

A lifetime later, our little cartoon-print sleeping bags were enough to trigger her old fears. It didn’t matter that we were on vacation at a cabin in Tahoe, which in California in the 1980s was almost shorthand for being well-off. It didn’t matter that no one would see us or know that we were sleeping on the floor. She knew, and could not allow it. I didn’t understand. I was a sheltered kid with no notions of struggle and hardship. Only now do I see how her whole life was a fight against the shame of being poor. She could not have overcome her past without an intense vigilance against any association with poverty. And she remained on guard even in her comfortable modern American life. What I take for granted she feared could be lost at any moment. That her vigilance seemed so absurd to her grandchildren is a testament to how far she had come from her poor childhood. To me she just seemed like a fussy old killjoy. But from nothing, she built and protected the very foundation for our lives. Those trips to Lake Tahoe, the sleeping bags we owned but never used, our spoiled whining about being stuck in the stupid arcade while she sat trying her luck at the slot machines, all part of her legacy.

Under Fire

My car caught on fire last week. Everyone is fine, and I won't go into the details again here, but as I looked the smoldering wreck I was reminded of being inside Vovó Flora's house after the fire. People are familiar with smoke from a wood fire as we curl up in front of a fireplace or gather around a campfire. It is nothing like the particular acrid smell that comes from the burning of items we live with everyday. It's plastic, so much plastic, and paints, chemicals, glass and metal and fabric. It's distinctly toxic, strong and unpleasant. It gets into everything so that even what can be salvaged is ruined. It's not an odor you want on you or near you. As I peered into what used to be my car, I was back in Vovó's living room. The tragedy, the loss, of so much more than the contents of a home. I'm not ready to talk about the end of Vovó Flora's life. This blog is the discovery of a woman I never understood. I'm more interested in her life than her death. I want the burning smell to go away.

Galo de Barcelos

Part of not understanding Vovó is not being very aware of Portuguese culture. I was born in the U.S. to parents who had been here for decades. Were my family's behaviors a product of ethnic identity or just who they happened to be? Maybe that's why I've drawn to the more generalized icons of my heritage, like the Rooster of Barcelos. Every Portuguese person I know has this ceramic bird in their kitchen. It's usually black with a large red comb, its wings and tail dotted with intertwining hearts and flowers. The heart has always fascinated me, with its curled tail.  Like love, it's not perfect.

I knew the rooster was a national symbol but never thought about why until I read a postcard at a souvenir shop in Portugal. Like so many of the old tales our great aunt Tia Teresa had been telling us on that trip, the story didn't make a lot of sense. A criminal who was sentenced to death was brought before a judge. The criminal said that if a nearby rooster crowed it proved he was innocent. It crowed and he was set free. In addition to providing a very hazy picture of the Portuguese justice system, this tale seemed to indicate that crowing roosters were a rare and miraculous occurrence in Portugal. Of course the full story has a few more of the elements one would expect from a national legend. The accused man was in fact innocent, and the rooster he claimed would crow was the roasted bird on the judge's feast table. I'm not sure how the iconic figure came to be decorated with hearts and flowers, but the black color makes sense. A rooster can be burned and still rise to crow again.

It's a fitting symbol for Vovó Flora. So many times she faced tragedy, pain, setbacks, and never would she be counted out. She always came back crowing loudly as ever. She never backed down, not even from the fire that ended her life. That first day in the burn unit the doctor said that at her age she wasn't likely to survive the night. My mother looked at him and said, "You don't know my mother."  She survived ten more days, against all odds. In the end there was no hope, no chance of recovery. We knew she would not rise again. But in her typical fashion she did not go down without a fight. Now she's gone and I can only write about her life. Here, though, she still crows.

The small house on A Street.

Doctor Beware

When you live into your nineties you're going to rack up of plenty of visits to the hospital. Though Vovó Flora didn't need to go often she was infamous at Hayward Kaiser. She would not take pills. She howled at the sight of a needle. She slapped nurses. (Not surprisingly  nurses did not find this amusing.) When Vovó's pacemaker battery needed replacing she kept her purse clutched at her waist and refused to remove her pants before the surgery. Arguments were doing no good, so finally the nurse suggested that they just proceed with the anesthesia and finish undressing her after she was knocked out. Somehow that never happened, so Vovó won in the end. She kept her pants on during heart surgery.

Count her out at 86? Not when you see her at 90.

Because didn't speak much English and pretended to understand even less it put a burden on my uncle and mother stay near and serve as translator. When any hospital staff entered the room Vovó Flora complained in Portuguese that they were trying to steal her purse. She might throw in a few disparaging remarks about their ethnicity for good measure. Some people think that a language barrier allows freedom of conversation, but let me assure you that even if a person can't understand a single word it's pretty obvious when you're talking smack.

She learned this lesson well after making a stink about getting an IV. Flora's children could not always be around so there were times when the staff had to handle her on their own. When she saw the nurse planned to stick her with a needle she fought back, screaming in Portuguese and slapping at anyone who came near her.  My uncle Lourenço was called, and in the meantime they called up a Brazilian orderly from a different floor to translate. Lourenço arrived first and firmly explained that she needed the medicine, that the staff was here to help her and she needed to do what they told her. The Brazilian orderly walked in just as Vovó Flora snapped back, "So if they want to have sex with me, I should just let them?" He immediately busted up laughing and all the staff clamored to know what she'd said. Vovó cast an accusing eye around the room, demanding to know who else secretly spoke Portuguese.

It's precisely this type of irrational logic, this distrust of just about everyone, that lead to her continued survival. Had she seen herself as old or frail she would have to acknowledge her dim odds for recovery. In her mind she didn't need these doctors and their treatments. She was going to be fine. And she always was.  Just weeks before she died she had been admitted for pneumonia. At 92 it wasn't likely that she would survive but this was Vovó Flora. She was released and on her way to a full recovery at home when the fire struck. It was such a shocking tragedy, but I take an odd comfort that she defied all prognosis and continued living for ten more days when she wasn't expected to last a single night. To the end, she proved 'em all wrong.