GONE, BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

In a way it seems impossible, yet in another way it would seem to be something that happened a long, long, time ago- - - in a little over a month from now Eduardo will have been gone one year. The initial pain has eased somewhat but lies just beneath the surface, and will probably never really go away.

I’ve been remembering random scenes and situations of his growing-up and adult years lately without any special chronological order to the memories, some of which follow:

Mimi

Our trips home when he was very little, especially the one when he learned to walk while we were visiting my mother in Chicago. Teaching him to speak what now seems to me a trial I put him through (and for that matter later on, also, his poor sister ) by using a dual language vocabulary system - - -e.g. mira/look, coche/car, luz/light. I have to justify my madness by saying that the motive was to avoid my mother-in-law’s disapproval should his first words be solely in English.

Chayo and Lalo

Then there was the time the D.F was plastered with “Gringo go home” placards. He and I were in a cab and he began speaking to me in English. Needless to say, I thought it best to forego our usual mode of communication, whispering to him that just for the moment it would be fun to speak only in Spanish.

His disapproval of the egg white facial mask I was applying one day- - -“Mommy, egg is for eat, not for face!”

Hours and hours listening to music together, beginning with my singing him to sleep every night and the daily wake-up renditions from his crib of what I had sung to him the night before. Then came the first records I played for him,“Tubby the Tuba” and all of “Cri-Cri’s” songs, learned and sung year in and year out. We were travel companions throughout every other conceivable genre (not all of which I necessarily enjoyed), up to and finally including his own compositions which, of course, I not only enjoyed but which also made me very proud, although he nearly drove his sister and me crazy repeating one particular phrase on the piano in a piece he was composing over and over again into the wee hours of the morning until he felt it was just right; however, the end result was the presentation of the composition at the Pinacoteca Virreinal. The endless hours of practicing classical guitar which, to me, was the instrument through which he best expressed himself but which he later abandoned in favor of the violin.

Throughout his childhood he came to me for solace and/or advice since his relationship with his father was not all that one might wish, and as an adolescent and adult I became his confidant although some of the things we dealt with I would probably have preferred not knowing - - -not because they shocked or insulted me, but rather due to the fact that as his mother, anything that hurt or offended him broke my heart. Well, I guess he saved the worst for less maternal reaction because Susana has reported several hair-raising experiences he confided to her that he must have felt I simply wasn’t up to.

Returning to childhood; when Suzy came along there was a good deal of obligatory teasing of the big brother and the pleas for help from the baby sister- - - “Mami, mira Lalo!!!” (“Mommy, look at Lalo!!!”) And oh!, my horror at finding out that he and his little friends were rolling her up in a throw-rug and then proceeding to roll same down a flight of stairs with her inside. She was deliriously happy about the whole thing, I was not.

He lived, worked and studied in Cuernavaca for a while and formed a group of musicians who played blues, jazz and bossa standards at a very nice bistro there on week-ends. He convinced me to become their vocalist and for a time I travelled to the city of eternal spring every Friday to Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Later, when he became a producer and was composing client’s jingles for media exposure, if my voice was right for the product and/or the lyric had to be sung in English, he would book me and so we shared those musical moments, too.

The last time I sang for him was a very few days before he died. To cheer him up I sang him an old “ditty”about accentuating the positive, and eliminating the negative that had been sung to me as a child. He was enthralled with the message, asked me to repeat it over and over and, at the last, sang along. He asked me to write down the words. Suzy did me that favor and we gave them to him.

When he was about five or six he was constantly reprimanded by his father for, I must admit, pretty sloppy table manners. His father would say “you must learn to eat like a prince”, and so, as I close these remembrances I’ll borrow Horatio’s words to Hamlet:

Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Patricia Bari Frew