Why I Wear Purple

One whole year.  My Mom has been gone one whole year.

She passed away late on a Friday so we had plenty of time to plan her memorial and burial for the next weekend. She had a lot of family and she was among the last three of her generation, so we knew folks would need time to plan their travel if they were to say their goodbyes.

The following morning after she passed away, I rifled through my closet for all and anything that I owned in purple.  My mother loved bright colors and among her favorites was purple. She had been a great fan of the actress Elizabeth Taylor, the beauty with the violet eyes, so my brothers, sisters, and I decided we would wear purple to her celebration.

We met the following Monday to plan her funeral and afterwards I went shopping for more purple or violet to wear.  It was near the Easter season and I figured it would be easy to find nice things in that color, but it wasn’t, so when I wasn’t planning details for her memorial, I went shopping.  I only needed a few items to get us through the next week.

I cannot describe how it felt each morning when I donned a purple or violet t-shirt to go with my jeans or leggings. I made sure to wear amethyst earrings or a bracelet. When I found something in a shade of purple, I’d jump on it and bought several to share with my children and with my siblings. Purple became a constant reminder for me that Mom was still with us. 

We had the visitation and rosary on the Friday, a week later.  We had her funeral Mass and burial the next morning.  Everywhere we looked, her family wore bits of purple, and we spent the day celebrating my mother’s long life.

The day ended and we all headed home. I took off my purple and changed back into my usual gray tee and blue jeans. It was time to let Mom go. She was with her heavenly Father, but HoneyBunch called me to come see the evening sky. It had been a beautiful, clear day, and as the sun set, the clouds looked like the skirts of a grand lady as she leaves the ballroom. They were a rich purple and violet.   

Mom was signaling her good bye.

A Choice is Not a Regret

My grandmother and I had a very special relationship. She’s been gone thirty years, yet there isn’t one day that I don’t remember her in some way. Sometimes, it’s a recipe, or how to do a chore, or a saying, but she is right there, next to me.

She lived with us since before my birth until she passed away in her eighties. As a child I resented having a third parent, but somewhere in my late teens, we became friends, almost like comadres. She would share details of her life to me and I would learn from the many sacrifices she endured.

Her father died when she was twelve and almost overnight, she, her mother, and siblings went from being well off to being dirt poor. My grandmother ended up working for the woman who used to be their laundress.  She married young but my grandfather was no better off than she was, so my grandmother worked as a live-in maid and my grandfather worked as a laborer, doing odd jobs and going off for months to do migrant work in the northern states.

He rarely sent home money to help house and feed their children, so the burden landed on my grandmother. Sadly, he was an alcoholic, so even when he made good money, it never made it home to my grandmother and their family.

My grandmother told me that my mother and her other children learned to hide what little money they had in the house because my grandfather would spend all the money he earned on alcohol, then he would come home to steal whatever money they might have. My mother, her older sister, and their three younger brothers often went hungry, so as soon as they could work, they did odd jobs to earn some.  They would hide most of it in a tin can that they buried in the ground while they kept some out where my grandfather could find it.

My mother’s siblings grew up.  The three brothers joined the service and moved away.  My mother married and soon after her sister did too. My mother invited my grandmother to come live with us when I was a baby, and my grandfather would come visit us occasionally.  He would stay for a while, only long enough to squeeze money off my grandmother and my mother. My mother would refuse him but my grandmother would give him some. Having learned from her children, my grandmother knew to hide her money and only show him the amount she could afford to lose to him.  

Toward the end of her life, I asked my grandmother if she regretted anything.  I thought I knew what she would say, but instead she said, no.

She said that at any time, we have a choice to change our lives.  If we don’t, then we cannot “regret” our choices. We accept our lives for what they are and move on. She advised me to live my life with no regrets. She said if I didn’t like my life (at the time, I was struggling with my first marriage), and I had given it my all but it still wasn’t what I wanted, then I needed to change my life.

At the end, I should look back and have no regrets. I miss that old lady every single day of my life.

How to Respond on Social Media

Being on social media nowadays reminds me of the school yard playground when I was a kid. Pretty much everything went unnoticed by the monitors unless a fight broke out or someone ended up taking a spill off the jungle gym.

To survive, you had to learn to look out for yourself. Dust yourself off and keep walking.

Why are we so attracted to this medium?  Is it for entertainment and news, to keep up with friends and family, to build a brand and sell a product, or has it become so much a part of our culture we cannot look away?

Whatever the reason, you have several options in order to survive the social media playground. You can play it safe; you can read and not post or respond. You can choose what you read, deleting posts you find offensive.  You can unfriend and block “friends,” especially those who continually criticize and taunt you, thereby keeping only those who agree with you.  

Or you could jump into the fray. You can post or respond, but remember once you do, you make yourself visible to the schoolyard bullies. You might have to defend yourself, especially if the topic is controversial. 

Before you do, let me suggest a few things.

1.     Read the whole post, not just what shows on the feed, but click on the link and read the whole post, all the way to the end. Follow it to its origin, even if it takes you to the Internet. Double and trip check its sources. Sometimes the thumbnail that was posted on social media is incorrect and intentionally malicious.

2.    Learn which news sources and “fact checkers” are reliable and trustworthy.  Examine their facts and sources.  Be skeptical of those who rush to be first to report and post “news” before sources and facts have been double checked.  News on social media nowadays is a mix between scandal rag and propaganda, so don’t trust it without checking it for yourself first.

3.    Know yourself. You don’t have to confess it on social media but know what will trigger you into a response before tempering your words. Admit your biases and prejudices. Admit that your religious, political, and personal experiences affect how you “see” and feel things. Take a breather before responding.

4.    Weigh your words. Attack the policy or the statement and NOT the person. Keep to the high road, though they probably won’t. In that case, do not get into an argument with them. Ignore them or delete them. Everyone has an opinion on social media and they are not here to listen to someone else’s.

5.    Learn to distinguish fact from opinion, emotionally charged words, politically incorrect and hurtful words, and NEVER resort to name calling.

6.    Remember that facts can easily become gossip, gossip becomes rumor, and rumor leads to slander and libel. Repeated enough times, lies morph into “facts,” so don’t fall for the trap of spreading gossip or rumors because it feeds into your narrative.

Remember, in the famous words of Pat Benatar (ending with levity here), “Love is a Battlefield;” so is social media.  It can get really ugly out there if you chose to take a chance in its playground, so defend yourself with the truth.

The Two Plants

When my father passed away, the funeral director asked us to take home the potted plants people had sent to adorn the chapel.  The cemetery only wanted fresh-cut flowers at his grave site. We each chose a plant and for the last thirteen years I have struggled to keep mine alive. Every plant in the pot died except for one. It’s a tall woody thing with green leaves striated with yellow stripes.

There have been years when it was near death and I could only get it to keep two or three leaves.  I have tried to recreate what the arrangement looked like and bought new plants to fill the empty spaces, but they never last. This past year, it took on new life.  It filled out with leaves though I had done nothing different.

When my mother passed away last year, the funeral director asked my brothers, sisters, and me to take home the potted plants people had sent to adorn the chapel where we held her visitation and rosary. I let everyone choose first and took home the one that remained. I put it on the same shelf where I keep dad’s plant.  In the last ten months, some of her plants have died, and I have struggled to water and feed it to keep it going.

I don’t think these arrangements are meant to last, either they are potted right before delivery and haven’t taken root, or they are matched only for aesthetics and the plants are not compatible. Some need water; some don’t. Some need sunlight; some don’t.  Mother’s plant has hard soil. Water rolls off it, so I have to set it in the sink and soak it in order to reach the plants’ roots. Neither arrangement looks like it did when I brought it home.  

Why do I bother?

Every morning when I sit at the kitchen table and drink my morning coffee, I look across at the shelf where I placed the plants. I think about how my dad’s plant held on all this time until my mom’s plant could join him. They are together again and it amuses me.

Raquel Martina Martinez: Facing My Fear of Guns

Raquel Martina Martinez: Facing My Fear of Guns: With the ownership of firearms comes responsibility, so I had asked HoneyBunch several times to teach me how to shoot and to help me ge...