Raquel Martina Martinez

It has taken me a lifetime to learn the definition of love. I love my husband, chocolate ice cream cones, and warm socks. I use the same word to describe all three though they do not carry equal weight in my heart.  When asked which of my children or grandchildren I love the most, I cannot answer that without sounding trite.  I love them all equally, yet I love them each differently. I could say I love my husband, I crave chocolate ice cream cones, and I hanker for warm socks, but love is the word I really want to use. The problem with using the word love to describe the object of our affection is that we are assigning a word to emotions, two separate and unlike entities. We want to make sense of sensations. We want to rule our heads when it is being run by our hearts.  We give it a commonplace name in hopes of controlling a concept. We seek to keep order in our lives when our hormones are running red hot. We forget that passion is erratic and capricious.  We can try to tame it. We can…

The two-year-old bombs through the house, headed for the back bedroom where Grandma keeps a box of toys – balls, Hot Wheels, assorted action figures; memories from childhoods the others have outgrown. He comes out with a toy microphone, one of those cheap, plastic things that echo when you speak into it and it sounds like it is “live.” “Birthday to you,” he sings.  “Birthday to you.” We all smile at him and he does a little, sideways dance, shifting from one hip to the other to a melody only he hears. He gives a hearty laugh and goes back to his singing. Our little charmer is growing fast.  He is healthy and robust.  He is loved by everyone. *   *   * One other little charmer never reached his second birthday here on earth.  His little hands never got to play with Grandma’s box of rescued toys. We never got to sing a second “Happy birthday to you,” because a freak, horrible accident took him from us two years ago this month.  He would have been four. All we have are memories of his smil…

Sometime this week, eight years ago, destiny brought HoneyBunch and me together. Back then I wrote a single woman’s column for a neighborhood newspaper, and to create material for it I subscribed to online dating sites, joined several singles groups, and even went speed dating once. After I quit writing LadyBoomer, I also quit all my memberships.A few months later eHarmony offered me a three month free subscription in an effort to lure me back into the fold. There are supposedly all these fish in the sea, right? I figured it couldn’t hurt to cast my line one more time. If I was going to do it, it was now or never.  I wasn’t getting any younger. In three month’s time, very few nibbled, and I cast most of them back into the deep. Only three seemed “safe” – less likely to be perverts, serial killers, or gigolos, so I chatted with them on the eHarmony safe line.   As the free deadline approached, I decided not to continue the subscription. I was in a good place in my life and it was full.  …

My dad loved to tell us about our antepasados, our ancestors, and how our family settled in and around Zapata, Texas before it was a part of the United States.His family passed down stories via oral tradition and he did the same to us, repeating them over and over until they became part of our memory. We teased Dad about his obsession with family history and made fun of his tales from “the good old days,” but it only encouraged him to share them with us one more time. His stories still rumble in my brain.  They still make me smile.  They still amaze me. My favorite:  Agapito Ramírez, an old great uncle.  He never married, but that didn’t stop him from leaving behind several descendants.  He fought in the Mexican Revolution alongside Emiliano Zapata which made Tío Agapito very old when I first met him. I don’t recall being in school yet so I must have been four, maybe five. I had heard so many stories about him from my dad that when he rode up on a horse at my grandmother’s house, I wan…