The Re-Con
The Inheritance
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Dad died last September. We weren’t close. Never had been. States and ages and resentments separated us. In the last twenty years we spoke twice.
Mystery Customer
Hungry? Head over to Katsumi Goya at the Food Truck Park
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Hungry? Get thee to the Food Truck Park at the Pan American Courts at 3301 San Bernardo and enjoy the delicious Asian street food from Katsumi Goya. The brussel sprouts/jicama salad was a homerun as was the fried avocado bun. Still hungry? Try the taquitos and the Lenten fare at El Puesto, the other truck in the park.
Day Tripper
Lunch at Lala’s and a quiet afternoon at the Los Ojuelos cemetery and Mirando City
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About 30 miles from Laredo, just off U.S. Hwy. 359, you can turn onto Ranch Road 649 and find two tranquil places that belie their once teeming historic pasts. One is Los Ojuelos and the other is Mirando City. Because I have old, longstanding paternal ties to Los Ojuelos, I find that daytrips there always evoke deep wells of thought for who we have been and who we are now. My grandfather Pedro Armengol Guerra was born at Los Ojuelos in 1880 to Adela Aguirre Guerra (from Candela) and José María Guerra.
Millennial Manifesto
Why do we leave Laredo?
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Two of my best friends from high school live in Boston and Washington D.C. We graduated from St. Augustine High School in 2009, and since then, they never came back to live in Laredo. At 25, I am lumped into the “millennial” generation. I realize it would be irresponsible to speak for my entire generation, but what I can say, is that almost my entire graduating class of 126 students lives outside Laredo. I hope that my insight can shed a sliver of light on this phenomenon.
The rest of the way
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When I turned fifty I understood how cars feel when their warranties expire. If cars feel anything when their warranties expire. On December 9, 2015, two months after my fiftieth birthday, I ended up in the hospital with a kidney infarction. I felt slightly upset — and also slightly betrayed — that the odometer had barely rolled over and a major system went on the blink. But it did, and there I was, for four days, mostly reading and watching TV between nurses’ visits to draw blood, take my blood pressure, and check the heart monitor hanging around my neck.
Border Frequencies
Tales of border survival are best told by artists
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This post was originally published in Trace of Echoes. The Greek philosopher and teacher Aristotle once said, “The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation, rather than upon mere survival.”
Laredo is a rich environment for that sentiment, because issues of survival explode in front of us every single day. Harsh geographic and political circumstances along with the demoralizing violence of poverty confront large numbers of our neighbors. The river swallows the dreams of those seeking a new world, while the appetites of drug users way beyond the border checkpoint fuel a dependence on drugs and the violence they breed. Amid this constant border reminder of how important it is to survive, there is a beckoning to the awareness and contemplation encouraged by Aristotle.