My mother texted me the other night and told me my Tío Lorenzo died. He's my grandmother's last brother that lived in the "valley", a southern part of Texas near the border that is known to me as such a regional landscape as long as I can remember. We would take yearly trips to the valley to see my abuelita, our second cousins, weddings and the occasional funeral.
I haven't been down since my great-grandmother passed almost 15 years ago. I miss the Spanish conversations between my grandma and her sisters (they always seem like they are arguing, and only for their facial expressions and tone, for all I know they are talking about dress sizes). I miss the outpouring of love from my cousins and the general feel that I'm in some alternate universe where the still-standing house my grandma grew up in is somehow too short for words. I sat in that house smelling the smells of a Mexican kitchen and looking at pictures of my great-grandfather in his military uniform.
Back to my Tío. His name was always pronounced "Lee-un-zo" or "L'onzo". He made trips up here to Houston many times and you always knew he was in the room. He was a strong presence (I can't imagine him and my now deceased grandfather in the same room. I wonder who was loudest?). He owned his own business (a funeral home that he passed on to his daughter) at a time that I never quite grasped that Mexicano men could be more than just city workers and laborers. He was the kind of guy that was always in dress pants, dressed nice. He was corporate Dos Equis. And even though I'm marginalizing what he meant to his family, there is no doubt he was a loved figure. He would get after my mom and I for my lack of Spanish speaking skills and told us both about it. When he called to talk to his sister on the phone and I answered, I better knew what he was saying! He never compromised. And if I spelled his name the way I thought it sounded it would look as if he was born from the grandest of all animals--Lion-zo!
After calling my grandma about her plans for the funeral, I was watching "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." As a kid, it was one of those movies that was close to me because it was one of my grandfather's favorites (along with Foghorn Leghorn cartoons) and my dad distilled this sense of movie wonderment as a kid and I knew a lot of the comedians in the movie. So, it went that all I could think about was my Houston family. My grandma's side in the valley, my grandfather's in Ohio. Me somewhere in between.
Now I watch it and wonder what my grandfather was probably laughing about all those many years ago. Was it Spencer Tracy's dreams of Mexico? Was it the foolishness of Sid Ceaser trying to blast through a locked door with a sledgehammer and getting nowhere? Was it the nagging mother-in-law that was attacking him with a purse? Or did he sometimes feel like Jonathan Winters when he destroyed the entire gas station, tearing through walls like they were paper mache? I vaguely knew the two men, my uncle and my grandfather. One from language barrier and the other from age. Death has them both, but they are released now, one in memory and one we mourn. We are much better in our life for having known them.
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