Your grandpa was awesome! Week #31
Dear Luki,
Whenever I talk to others about your grandpa, one of the first things they mention is how optimistic he was. He could spin anything unto its positive side and brush away what, to others, seemed like the most difficult of problems.
“Oh that’s not a big deal,” he’d say about everything — form a huge scratch on his brand new car to a lost job opportunity. “More was lost in the war.”
Upon meeting him and seeing his eternally cheerful disposition, you would think that he’d never had a worry in his life, but that wasn’t the case. Your grandpa overcame many obstacles and faced tons of difficulties while he was here on earth. He was born to a family of incredibly limited means in a country ruled by a dictator. He tried to flee Cuba several times unsuccessfully before finally being able to immigrate to the U.S. One time, he and your grandma lost their house and were literally living on the streets when an escape plan fell through.
After moving to America, he worked day jobs and lived paycheck to paycheck, sometimes not knowing if he’d be able to make the rent that month. He went into debt. He did business with shady characters. And he was let down by friends and family members.
I am not saying his life was more burdensome than anyone else’s, just that, like the rest of us, he too faced challenges. However, he chose to laugh through them most of the time. It’s not that he ignored his problems, that’s not it at all. Whenever he encountered a bump in the road, he worked hard to overcome it. But he simply didn’t see the point of moaning and groaning about it first. After all, sitting around feeling sorry for one’s self doesn’t make road bumps disappear.
This is something I need to remind myself of everyday. For me, sometimes it’s much easier to sit at my desk and list out everything I don’t like about my life. To be sad and worried about the things that didn’t quite turn out the way I’d hoped, instead of rolling up my sleeves and trudging through the difficult times. With a smile.
I hope you always smile as you work through your life’s challenges, Luki.
Love,
Mom
Hard to follow
So, I’ve been kind of quiet on this here blog for the past couple of weeks. The following is a list of excuses:
First I was in NOLA for a work conference where the Internet access was limited and the good times kept rolling me away from my laptop and toward Bourbon street. And then I came home, after spending a WHOLE! FIVE! DAYS! away from Luki, so I chose cuddling over blogging. And then, you know, this little thing called my Actual Job That Pays The Bills got in the way. And then I took some time to write this article for Charlotte Viewpoint magazine. And then, well, I tried to blog, but nothing really interesting was happening.
Oh, we did go see Inception. I loved it, Ton Ton hated it. He said it had “too much going on” and the plot was hard to follow.
The main reason I wanted to go see it was that everyone on Facebook kept talking about how good it was. So after the movie, Ton Ton said that if people on Facebook liked a movie called “FECES: The Biggest Piece of Crap You’ll Ever See” I’d probably go see it too, and love it.
Whatever Ton Ton, Inception was awesome and you know it.
Anyway, I guess I should mention that my kid is thirteen months old today (how’s that for a smooth segue?).
I’m not really doing monthiversaries anymore. Now that Luki is one, there’s no need to celebrate every single month of his life. That’s for babies, and he’s a full blown toddler. Maybe I’ll dedicate an entire post to his half birthday.
Actually, the real reason is that I can no longer keep track of everything he does and learns in a month to put into a single post. It’s too much. He is on all. the. time. Asking for water and waving goodbye and picking out books for us to read to him and brushing his hair and licking discarded applesauce containers he pulled out of the garbage pail and eating pounds of blueberries in one sitting and pulling wrestling moves every time we try to change his diaper and getting a top tooth and working on an escape route out of his crib and climbing up stairs and this list can go on and on, but like I said, I can’t keep track anymore.
How Ton Ton could possibly think that Inception had “too much going on” after living in the same house with this kid baffles me.
Here he is at the park pointing at a plane, or at a bird, or letting us know that he’s one year old. I don’t know, his plot is too hard for me to follow.
I do know, however, that I don’t need Facebook to tell me that this is the greatest “movie” I’ve ever seen.
