If you're in a place, #18: A Scattered Past

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#18: A Scattered Past

If you’re in a place, listen to SCATTERED, a podcast from comedian Chris Garcia and WNYC Studios. (iTunes // Spotify)

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my mom how she met my dad. I don’t know how I never thought to ask this, or how it never came up casually in conversation. Madre tends to be an over-sharer when it benefits her, when she needs to unload some feeling that weighs too much for her. Everything else, she’s mum. She went on to tell me that, although they didn’t meet there, my dad was at her quinceañera and was the cause of a fight that broke out during the party. After the religious ceremony. After the rehearsed dances. After the toasts of fizzy apple cider.

Sometime later, at a party put on by her East LA club, she officially met my father.

She also told me that she never graduated from high school, only made it to the 10th grade because she was tasked with caring for my uncle when he was born. She tried to get back to school a few times but never followed through fully. She’d eventually get an entry-level job at a local engineering company in Pasadena in the document control office, where she’d eventually move all the way up to management.

“How’d you get such a good job with no high school diploma?” I asked her.

“I lied and said I had one. They never checked.” she told me. “Your daddy graduated high school, though,” she went on. “He was so smart. He just didn’t like to actually use his brain.”

All of these simple details. Filling in the shades of my mother and father, who have been divorced for thirty years. Two people who I know so intimately and yet know so so little. I know so little about how they became themselves. About what’s just beneath their skin.

And even less still that I know about what came before them. How did my grandparents meet? Their grandparents? What part of Mexico did each come from? Would I be able to recognize, feel some warmth on the back of my neck, if I returned to that place? That place where the Gomez in me was first born. The Hernandez.

I’ve thought so much about how to darken those shades. Find those lost memories.

Chris Garcia attempts to do exactly this in Scattered, as we follow him on his journey to fill in the shades of his father’s experiences in Cuba to his father’s immigrating to the United States to his father’s battle with Alzheimer’s. It’s a beautiful piece of audio storytelling that I think anyone with immigrant parents (no matter the generation) can relate to.

I think constantly about how I might be able to better understand my family’s story, sometimes to selfishly serve my own creative life, but more often to reconnect with parts of myself I still don’t know. Parts I still hope to more fully color.