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Día de los Muertos holds a beautiful, complex sentiment. These are strange days around Hallows Eve and celebrating ghoulishness through fun, rose-colored glasses, instead of our usual tendency for bright and happy things like flowers and puppies. Following Halloween, we turn our attentions to altars and offerings – rituals that will make peace for us here, by honoring our loved ones departed. Día de los Muertos respectfully brightens our relationship with loss, through colors and artistry and community. These days make me ponder on the things we must let go and the things that we owe ourselves to hang on to forever.
Throughout our path, there will be insupportable letting go’s for our identity. At one extreme, I look back at my Chinese grandfather. In one ethnic, migratory vivisection, his name was forcibly changed at the port of entry in Perú. You are no longer Liu Chung; your legal name is now José Leo. It will be easier to pronounce (Wk 3). There is such terrifying bravado in feeling that you can change someone’s identity. I have seen it in ESL classes, when I first came to the EEUU in junior high. Teachers fumbling with pronunciations: “Chong Jin? How about we call you 'Annie?'” That day, Chong Jin would hold on resolute to her Korean roots and name, but years later I would see her at the local community college and she would introduce herself, somewhat nervously preempting me from doing so, to the friend I was walking with as “Susy.” She had reinvented herself, but hopefully, somewhere along the line, it had been her choice this time.
Marriage is a hard one to maneuver. You are enveloped in your happy cloud of golden, glittery love, and then you slam against the identity wall. The DMV, The Social Security Administration want to know. And they don’t care about cutesy or head-over-heels. The forms only have a certain amount of linear, consecutive spaces for the letters of a name that only you hold precious, so this better be good. So for days before a decision, you start the drafts and rough drafts and final drafts of what your new, married name will be. This is one of the biggest sexist mine fields you will ever have to scamper and hop across. Where do you stow your last name? That your proud last name is now sadly described as your Maiden name makes every feminist cell in you shudder. Maiden. You picture some medieval courtyard scene with young women in white flowy dresses dancing amidst their fresh laundry on endless lines under the sun.
And it is not your man's fault. There is no hard rule nowadays. And the woman folding the man's last name into her own is grandfathered into our culture. Grandfathered. Even that is male-centric. I want to grandmother society's ass one of these days.
Thinking of what to do with my name would have been a break-sweat, hyperventilating moment had it not been for the aforementioned glittery cloud. And it is because of that cloud of love that you want to include his name. Why not? You are family now. Hyphenated last names? Seemed too pretentious for me. So I went for the name shuffle. I could not live without Morilla, and I really wanted to be a Lyons. I would joke to Jimmy that I was just doing it to climb up the alphabet ladder from the M’s to the L’s: big advantage. And quietly, one day in June of 1990, my unmarried name became my middle name, making ample, clear way for Lyons to become my legal last name. Maybe some far away sounds of trumpets playing taps where heard in the distance. Maybe the relinquishing was not that smooth or silent.
And then what happened to that beautiful, always-there-with-you middle name? Men don't have to go through this. I don't think they could withstand it. But we do, with our just-tough-it-out and keep things moving along attitude. Everything's going to be all right. Keep it moving; there's nothing to see here.
Haydée became my "secret name."
I was named after my aunt from Buenos Aires, Haydée Morilla, my father’s sister.
For starters, Haydée is pronounced ay-DEH. It will make so much more sense to you in Spanish because if you don’t resist the urge to read it as English, without the silent H, you will end up with Hay and Dee, both syllables conjuring up some barnyard hoedown and not at all the Latin American name that softly rolls off the tongue.
My aunt Haydée Morilla was fabulous and mysterious. Mysterious in that she didn’t come to Lima to visit very often and on the few occasions that she did, she would leave a whirlwind of memories of cosmopolitan fashions and über-fancy (to me) ways. I was in awe and a little afraid of her.
She and my dad had a way of relating to each other than no one else in our household could understand. They missed each other madly, but once reunited, argued often, and even their friendly conversations would over-boil to an Argentine loudness that I always found thrilling. They didn’t talk; they sparred with words. It was so many worlds removed from the calm, Andean ways of my mother’s mother and sisters.
I remember the sunny afternoon in my bedroom in Lima. Haydée, or Tía Nené, as we had been taught to call her, had laid out her assortment of pretty cosmetic vials and bottles on my glass-topped dresser. She was sitting on a chair beside them, applying her makeup. I think that I must have been hovering. She was shiny and different and unexpected all the time. She was the flame to my young 5-year-old mothiness. I know that I was hovering because within seconds my clumsy kid hand had toppled a delicate, tapered, royal blue container of mascara, which she had open while using. I think today how mascara is dense and gummy, but that afternoon, this particular mascara flowed a rich, ebony oil spill. I froze and she screamed, “¡Me tiraste el Rímel!” (Rimmel, by the way, was the stock name for mascara, much like all refrigerators were Frigidaires and all tissues were Kleenex.) Her reprimand was so loud and intense that it caused a secondary shockwave. So there I stood, twice frozen by my misstep and by the alarm of having a grown-up-not-my-parent scream at me. When my awareness resurfaced, I broke into tears and realized she had a tight squeeze on my wrist. Quickly, she let go, recovered composure and tried to assure me that it wasn’t that bad. That is the magical reset button of the “kid crying” scenario.
I never forgot that afternoon with the Rimmel. I think I might still be able to reenact the surface temperature of my burning red cheeks.
But with the good and the bad, Life happens. That silly afternoon – her temporary frustration and my lingering embarrassment – connected us, just like our name connects us still. I wish I knew more about her before she passed away, but somehow I still feel her in me.
It had been so long since I truly pondered on my middle name – mi segundo nombre – that I had a freak attack moment of thinking I might have forgotten on which "E" the accent mark fell. My own name! But like most freak attacks, like that fraction of a second when you think you won’t remember the equation for the area of a circle, it is just nerves. Breathe. Haydée, accent on the first "E." That is what 25 years of marriage has done to my identity. It is like fretting that you will forget the nuances of the face of a long lost beloved one, an integral part of your Life. The first few years after their death, you are fine, but then you start to question your memory of them. This is mostly unnecessary anxiety. You remember; you are just afraid that you are forgetting.
I hear it in movies, "I have started to forget her face."
So quickly grab the photo album. Look them up. They are with you more than you know. It is OK to worry that you have forgotten, because that means you never will.
Para mi Tía Haydée
Milonga del Angel - by Astor Piazzolla
https://youtu.be/Pe0lA-ZHIY8?list=PLzNKLBCmM8dDaX5eYNqi58RNXfQgO6IEA
Throughout our path, there will be insupportable letting go’s for our identity. At one extreme, I look back at my Chinese grandfather. In one ethnic, migratory vivisection, his name was forcibly changed at the port of entry in Perú. You are no longer Liu Chung; your legal name is now José Leo. It will be easier to pronounce (Wk 3). There is such terrifying bravado in feeling that you can change someone’s identity. I have seen it in ESL classes, when I first came to the EEUU in junior high. Teachers fumbling with pronunciations: “Chong Jin? How about we call you 'Annie?'” That day, Chong Jin would hold on resolute to her Korean roots and name, but years later I would see her at the local community college and she would introduce herself, somewhat nervously preempting me from doing so, to the friend I was walking with as “Susy.” She had reinvented herself, but hopefully, somewhere along the line, it had been her choice this time.
Marriage is a hard one to maneuver. You are enveloped in your happy cloud of golden, glittery love, and then you slam against the identity wall. The DMV, The Social Security Administration want to know. And they don’t care about cutesy or head-over-heels. The forms only have a certain amount of linear, consecutive spaces for the letters of a name that only you hold precious, so this better be good. So for days before a decision, you start the drafts and rough drafts and final drafts of what your new, married name will be. This is one of the biggest sexist mine fields you will ever have to scamper and hop across. Where do you stow your last name? That your proud last name is now sadly described as your Maiden name makes every feminist cell in you shudder. Maiden. You picture some medieval courtyard scene with young women in white flowy dresses dancing amidst their fresh laundry on endless lines under the sun.
And it is not your man's fault. There is no hard rule nowadays. And the woman folding the man's last name into her own is grandfathered into our culture. Grandfathered. Even that is male-centric. I want to grandmother society's ass one of these days.
Thinking of what to do with my name would have been a break-sweat, hyperventilating moment had it not been for the aforementioned glittery cloud. And it is because of that cloud of love that you want to include his name. Why not? You are family now. Hyphenated last names? Seemed too pretentious for me. So I went for the name shuffle. I could not live without Morilla, and I really wanted to be a Lyons. I would joke to Jimmy that I was just doing it to climb up the alphabet ladder from the M’s to the L’s: big advantage. And quietly, one day in June of 1990, my unmarried name became my middle name, making ample, clear way for Lyons to become my legal last name. Maybe some far away sounds of trumpets playing taps where heard in the distance. Maybe the relinquishing was not that smooth or silent.
And then what happened to that beautiful, always-there-with-you middle name? Men don't have to go through this. I don't think they could withstand it. But we do, with our just-tough-it-out and keep things moving along attitude. Everything's going to be all right. Keep it moving; there's nothing to see here.
Haydée became my "secret name."
I was named after my aunt from Buenos Aires, Haydée Morilla, my father’s sister.
For starters, Haydée is pronounced ay-DEH. It will make so much more sense to you in Spanish because if you don’t resist the urge to read it as English, without the silent H, you will end up with Hay and Dee, both syllables conjuring up some barnyard hoedown and not at all the Latin American name that softly rolls off the tongue.
My aunt Haydée Morilla was fabulous and mysterious. Mysterious in that she didn’t come to Lima to visit very often and on the few occasions that she did, she would leave a whirlwind of memories of cosmopolitan fashions and über-fancy (to me) ways. I was in awe and a little afraid of her.
She and my dad had a way of relating to each other than no one else in our household could understand. They missed each other madly, but once reunited, argued often, and even their friendly conversations would over-boil to an Argentine loudness that I always found thrilling. They didn’t talk; they sparred with words. It was so many worlds removed from the calm, Andean ways of my mother’s mother and sisters.
I remember the sunny afternoon in my bedroom in Lima. Haydée, or Tía Nené, as we had been taught to call her, had laid out her assortment of pretty cosmetic vials and bottles on my glass-topped dresser. She was sitting on a chair beside them, applying her makeup. I think that I must have been hovering. She was shiny and different and unexpected all the time. She was the flame to my young 5-year-old mothiness. I know that I was hovering because within seconds my clumsy kid hand had toppled a delicate, tapered, royal blue container of mascara, which she had open while using. I think today how mascara is dense and gummy, but that afternoon, this particular mascara flowed a rich, ebony oil spill. I froze and she screamed, “¡Me tiraste el Rímel!” (Rimmel, by the way, was the stock name for mascara, much like all refrigerators were Frigidaires and all tissues were Kleenex.) Her reprimand was so loud and intense that it caused a secondary shockwave. So there I stood, twice frozen by my misstep and by the alarm of having a grown-up-not-my-parent scream at me. When my awareness resurfaced, I broke into tears and realized she had a tight squeeze on my wrist. Quickly, she let go, recovered composure and tried to assure me that it wasn’t that bad. That is the magical reset button of the “kid crying” scenario.
I never forgot that afternoon with the Rimmel. I think I might still be able to reenact the surface temperature of my burning red cheeks.
But with the good and the bad, Life happens. That silly afternoon – her temporary frustration and my lingering embarrassment – connected us, just like our name connects us still. I wish I knew more about her before she passed away, but somehow I still feel her in me.
It had been so long since I truly pondered on my middle name – mi segundo nombre – that I had a freak attack moment of thinking I might have forgotten on which "E" the accent mark fell. My own name! But like most freak attacks, like that fraction of a second when you think you won’t remember the equation for the area of a circle, it is just nerves. Breathe. Haydée, accent on the first "E." That is what 25 years of marriage has done to my identity. It is like fretting that you will forget the nuances of the face of a long lost beloved one, an integral part of your Life. The first few years after their death, you are fine, but then you start to question your memory of them. This is mostly unnecessary anxiety. You remember; you are just afraid that you are forgetting.
I hear it in movies, "I have started to forget her face."
So quickly grab the photo album. Look them up. They are with you more than you know. It is OK to worry that you have forgotten, because that means you never will.
Para mi Tía Haydée
Milonga del Angel - by Astor Piazzolla
https://youtu.be/Pe0lA-ZHIY8?list=PLzNKLBCmM8dDaX5eYNqi58RNXfQgO6IEA