Reconciliation with daddy’s family/2014

After daddy died, I began to make a DVD of daddy’s life in pictures using the movie maker on Windows as a memorial to him to play for the first anniversary of his death. I needed pictures of him as a child and teenager. The only ones who would have these pictures would be his family whom I hadn’t spoken to in years.

I saw them briefly at the hospital and at the funeral, my grandparents, and my two Tia’s, Rachel and Rosie and Ricky. I called my grandma to see if she had any pictures of my daddy, this was before she was diagnosed with full blown dementia.

I drove over to Sanger, the same familiar road that we used to take as children to see my grandparents. It seemed smaller now, I got lost once, as I used to sit in the back and wasn’t really aware of where daddy would turn to take the family to his parent’s house. We used to look forward to going to play with Ricky. Ricky, daddy’s baby brother was born the same year I was, he had better toys and games than we did.

Once we were playing with Ricky, he remarked, “My parents support your family.” He shouldn’t have said that, when he said that, he made our family seem too small, not realizing what he had said. But I was a child too, and I retaliated the only way I could.

“I don’t want to play with you.”

“Why not?” Ricky answered, unaware of what he had just said.

He was just a child, and had probably overheard his own parents talking about my parents. He apologized.

Ricky and I attended the 6th grade together we were even in the same class when we lived with my grandparents in the fall of 1976. It was after our summer in Los Angeles that we returned homeless. Mr. Buchanan was our teacher, and I did everything I could to get his attention. He took it in stride, he never sent me to the office, but whenever Ricky would talk out of turn, Mr. Buchanan would send him to the office.

“But you are so much worse, you are always interrupting Mr. Buchannan, and I barely talk and he sends me to the office.” Ricky said to me dumbfounded.

Ricky never understood why he was sent to the office when I wasn’t. Simple, Mr. Buchanan liked me.

Ricky and I both went to Sonora Summer Camp for three days. There are memories imprinted a life time, and you don’t know why. I had a friend named Lorna, she was very blonde. There was a track we used to walk up there, and I will always remember walking that track with Lorna, when everyone else would run, she and I would just walk talking about being alive in those days, the teen stars we liked, Tiger Beat, the movies, and our other classmates.

That was a crossroads, I felt myself entering puberty, or about too. We didn’t have our periods yet, but when it came we both knew it was going to be awful.

In the evenings we would gather around the campfire and the camp counselors would talk about Big Foot, who the Native Americans called Sasquatch. I made up some lyrics to the song “Black is Black” by Los Bravos.

“Camping Ground, I want my Sasquatch Back.”

Now I was driving back to Sanger, to my grandparent’s home. It was going to be awkward I hadn’t really known them at all, even when we used to go see them, I didn’t really know them. They were daddy’s parents, he used to call them “the folks” when he was alive.

When I arrived, the house looked the same, the landscaping daddy had done on the front lawn, the flower bed he had created near the sidewalk that was cemented, as a boundary from the rest of the lawn. I noticed daddy had also made them a mail box and a place for their newspaper. I knocked on the front door reluctantly my grandma said I could come over any time.

She looked the same, but smaller, she had lost weight since her bypass surgery years ago. The house was the same as I had remembered it the kitchen where we used to eat, Ricky’s room where we used to sleep when we lived with them, and Ricky’s outrageous Kiss posters that hung on his walls. The living room with the sliding door, it was the darkest room, mostly pictures, daddy’s senior picture, and all of the family pictures they had taken over the years.

(Taken 1979. back row, left to right Jimmy, Grandpa, Boi, Ricky, me and Moe. Front row cousins Jason, Jerry, Bobby, behind him John, and Misi.)

My grandmother had taken some photo albums out for me to look through. She spoke incessantly about Ricky, and all of his accomplishments, Ricky’s prom dates, old football newspaper clippings. They used to tell Ricky not to be like daddy. Ricky used to say, “What’s wrong with Ray?”

My grandfather was there, I greeted him, but I didn’t really talk to him. He was always friendly, the friendlier of the two. He looked smaller too. He was in his 90’s already, my grandma, in her late 80’s. They were my blood too, the same as Mama Tana. I just wasn’t close to them. I had forgiven them for all of the animosity over the years, for never liking momma. They didn’t want daddy to marry momma. Daddy was finishing high school when he married her, and she came to live in their house in daddy’s room.

I was their first granddaughter but I never felt like I was. Years later when Ricky had his own daughter Kailey, my grandmother told me in a conversation at Boi’s house she finally had a granddaughter she could do things for. Then she looked at me, not exactly sorry, but knowing that I was her first granddaughter, and that she shouldn’t have divulged her feelings to me. But it didn’t hurt me, I never felt like her granddaughter. I guess I tried to squeeze many years of not knowing her into one afternoon. I stayed there a few hours with her. We lost so much, a relationship that was destroyed by my parent’s constant arguing. Emma called me on my cell and I had to leave. I promised to return, but I never did.

My grandmother Paula Duran passed away on June 27, 2019 at the age of 94.

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I also saw Tia Rachel, daddy’s sister, she loaned me some pictures for daddy’s DVD. I have since kept in touch with her. This makes me feel closer to daddy.

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Reconciliation is God’s heart. Jesus reconciled us to the Father through the Cross. He desires that we forgive and be reconciled to our families.

“For when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.”

(Romans 5:10)