A Child's Story.

When we were small, Sonia, Lily, Noel and I, we vacationed every year for a month in Puerto Esperanza,when school was out.  

I think it was between 1955 and 1961/62, before everything went up in smoke, when Papi "borrowed"a different house every year from his well to do friends to take his children on vacation.  My Father was a civil servant, an accountant with a millionaire walk and as humble a person as they come!  Everybody liked my Father.

He stayed in town working and will go over only on weekends. Mami, Papa and Mama will be with us. Except, for one year that I remember the both stayed in town for a week...together and showed up on the weekend. 

That weekend-it was a Saturday morning-I could still see Papi walking towards me on the pier. I had just caught, with a string and a "palito", two little fishes on that side  of the pier where you didn't swim because the fishes lived there, and I yelled "Papi, Papi! mira lo que cogi pa' ti!" -Mami, was already in the house, she seldom went in the water or out anywhere.-

 

During those days,I used to walk about all day long on that beach. Sonia, Lily and Noel too, with cans. Everybody had a can! We filled them up daily with tiny crabs and "macaos" that would be free at the end of the day. Those cans were good filled up with water to pour on the pier as I walked on it, to prevent my feet from burning. I had to have a can, that was the first thing I looked for when I went to Puerto Esperanza. Unstoppable at seven, I most have driven my mother crazy.

I remember, the fishermen bringing in nets full of sardines. I fished out "jaibas" bigger than my small hand from the water all by myself, always with that string hanging from the

"palito", while sitting with feet hanging over the water on the old dilapidated pier, full of holes and rotten wood, at the other end of the beach, where the Santa Barbara was in her urn with the "kilos prietos", remember?

I recall that house we stayed in one year where our neighbor for the summer, Margot, made "melcocha" from scratch. There were two small "almendros" up front. 

Papa took us out every morning at six, or when the sun came out, for a long morning swim, until about 9 or 10. He was in his sixties then, but he is the one that taught us how to swim all by himself, almost in the in the deep end.  Sonia, remember?

Then he would take us back home, but boy, I was out again in a minute and back home at 12 or 1 only to  eat the best "macarrones con jamon" anybody ever had, Mami's.

I would hear lots of crabs walking under the wooden floor, noisy, at dawn...and "el perro huevero" that came into the backyard-the one we never visited-looking for eggs to eat.

Icacos! Icacos! from the old couple's tree...I remember the music coming from a nightclub at one end. I think the "revolution" built that nightclub, along with that "big" hotel on the sand.

I would sit in front of the hotel at about 7 pm and watch the night swimmers in the warm sea water, while the mosquitoes ate me alive. That hotel is not that big... it is small. I just saw it when I went back...I think we were just little...

Noel and I were always everywhere, I don't know how Mami handled it. Sometimes Sonia would come- "Mami nos esta buscando!" The only time that I can remember Mami going into the water with us, I was six (I have a picture),I drifted away in my "salvavidas", until somebody said" "Oye, Cusa, Tere!!! That was a couple of years before Papa started taking us out for the morning swim.

She was not to be trusted, my mother, or was she? Absent minded beatiful Cusa always knew everything would be fine for her kids- She pulled the family through hard times with ingenuity, skill and a great sense of humor, back then when the revolution took away our food ration card and sent my Father to the work camps-  

I remember the night, when holding a frog in my hand and laughing (Just like Olivia does),virtually locked Mami inside the beach house, white as sheet, for a long time! I did it every time I had a chance, I'd be running after her with the frogs! I just caught one in my room, tiny. 

Today is that kind of a day in Huntington Beach. I wished you could have seen it!