Abuelitos and Gen Xers

“Park any where over there,” he gestures with a jut of his chin to the left as he writes something on my ticket.

He places it under the windshield wiper and takes my four dollars  smiling as he hands me the stub through my open window.

Nodding my thanks, I drive toward the marked spaces where the cars look like piglets all lined up to nurse on the pink cement wall. 

By his accent, I determine he is from Cuba. He looks about seventy.

I walk toward the gate.

“Excuse me, sir, which way on Wilshire is 1127?”

His hands are busy with writing on someone else’s stub, as he again points with his chin and says, “Right there. You gonna turn right at the corner.”

“Thank you, so much.” 

I note the looming white building just south and west.

The wind must think Bixel Street is a tunnel. It whistles wildly as I walk down hill toward Wilshire. If I were wearing a skirt, it would be up around my ears.

While squinting into the gale, I think about the industriousness of three entrepreneurial Cuban grandfathers whom I know. I wonder about this abuelito who seems cheerful and very organized about his task. He has fashioned a table out of one of those huge cable spools used by the phone company when they’re threading the lines. He has set it in the shade of the small building near the back of the lot.  He has covered the top with a circular piece of oilcloth and used upholstery tacks on the edge to keep it in place. The resulting smooth surface is just right for cards, coffee or reading the newspaper. Next to it is a folding chair. I wonder which periodicals he might read. Maybe La Opinión? There's quite a stack of them ready to read.

I think about the general sense of agency I see in elders whom I know who are from Cuba.  They seem to know how to do much - often, with very little. I think of a question I've never asked my sister-in-law’s father. 

Emilio came from Cuba after Castro’s revolución in the 1960’s. He and his wife and daughters left with only the clothes on their backs - moving first to Spain, and then to the United States. What I want to ask him is what kind of work he was doing in Havana. As long as I’ve known him, which is over twenty years, he has been a driver for Porto’s - a thriving Cuban bakery in Glendale and Burbank. I wonder what other passions lit up his eyes when he was younger. I wonder what opportunities he left behind on his beloved island nation. I wonder how he kept alive his striving for the family, when life seemed so oppressively difficult every day. He is a hard worker and has supported both daughters to go to college and now, helps support his five grandsons.

When I was barely twenty, and a student at Los Angeles City College, there was another abuelito de Cuba.  Oscar watched and waited for me to pass his apartment building each morning and walked me to the gates of the school on Vermont. My roommate and I also lived near LACC and this painfully thin, lonely, gentle and talkative man had noted the regularity of my weekly schedule. Language was my major at that point.  At least three days a week, we would converse in Spanish the entire duration of the walk to campus, and continue our talk in the afternoon. His children and grandchildren worked all day. He said he welcomed the respite from solitude which our walk-talks offered.

I love that Cuban Spanish drops the beginnings of many words when the conversation becomes emphatic or speeds-up. It keeps me on my toes to practice with native speakers of any language, but particularly one that flows faster than water over stones - clipping the sounds and making them staccato.

Oscar saw an opportunity to engage with life by learning from me, a young English speaker who was quite comfortable speaking his language and who abided his many questions about the crazy lingo of his newly chosen City of the Angels.

Perhaps, the displaced Cuban cultural imprint may include being and doing everything you can in a hurry - because you never can tell when you might have to leave. There is an intensity, a sense of agency, direction, and decisive action which I observe in these three gentlemen and it deeply impresses me and simultaneously makes me wonder why I don’t see that sense of agency so readily visible in younger people who have grown up in this culture. I wonder if we may be cheating gen xers  by indulging them with so much push-button-instantly-gratifying technology and offering so little kinesthetic, artistic and basic common sense education. 

Driving away, I see the old man in my rear-veiw mirror. He is sitting with the paper open on the table. I imagine the cup at his elbow holds Cuban coffee, and know that he is not asleep.