Happy Birthday

It is now exactly the time when my first daughter, Marisa, came into this world. I had committed to a prepared child-birth, learned the breathing patterns that the father/coaches had to master and did very well, thanks to the fact that in spite of being the first labor for Patty the process took very little time. The one and only surprise was that instead of the boy our doctor had predicted we found ourselves welcoming a daughter with no name in our heads or hearts for her. It helped that the grandaughter of a parishioner in the Long Beach Latin American church was named Marissa. I was working at UCLA at the time and the woman who connected me to that institution was Jane Ann Pullen. So a quick decision was made that our "boy" was going to have the initials MAC and that our daughter's name would be Marisa Ann Castuera. I left mother and baby in the able hands of doctors and nurses, made the calls to relatives and friends who were waiting with the proverbial baited breath, and proceeded to leave for a meeting in New York trusting a long time friend, Aureo Oviedo and Marisa's grandma, Yeiko, to bring the proud mom and needy baby home.

Marisa changed everything in our lives for the best. We concentrated on her care, moved to Long Beach because the house where we lived had been broken into several times and brought her into a network of helpful friends and parishioners, some of whom only spoke Spanish. It was not surprising that the first word Marisa would say was in Spanish, "agua," when she saw the first raindrops in her life. Only a few months later, shortly after she turned three she read her first word, "exit," at an Orange Julius burger place that her aunt and godmother, Hilda, had taken her.

The years went by very fast, the little girl that said "agua" at the sight of her first rain, would dance under the first snow flakes she ever saw on the last Sunday in October, 1992. We had just left Ako, her sister, at the White Plains Airport after seeing a retrospective on Mattisse, the Fauvist painter, at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art where we also saw Van Gogh's Starry Night.

This is the first birthday Marisa observes without her paternal grandparents. My mother died on April 4 last year and that closed a page for her and for me. Sad as that is, it is the future where she belongs, a future made more interesting thanks to the birth of a son two years one month and three weeks ago. Kaleo is to Marisa what she was to me, a piece of future interjecting itself with incredible demands, wonderful promises and energizing mysteries. Khalil Gibran said that our children dwell in the house of the future, one we will never enter even in our wildest imaginings. Let it be so, in the meantime, Happy birthday!!