Hello and good afternoon. Yep, it’s been a long while since I last wrote in my blog. My apologies to the awesome people who are so kind to read my musings.
So, if I remember well, the last time I wrote was of how I met my husband through a family friend while holding an unloaded 32 Beretta in my hands, right? Well, here goes more. Looking back at the events that followed, I’m in awe of how God guides our lives and re arranges everything we had planned for our future, don’t you agree?
At that time, I had been going out with a young man with whom I had grown up and gone to sixth grade with (our elementary schools were segregated by gender; girls schools, boys schools; however, the girls elementary only went to the 5th grade so we girls had to go to the boys school for the last year of elementary. The boys school was located on a cliff overlooking the sea and because of the location, there was always a breeze blowing that kept the school at a nice, comfortable temperature. On Saturdays (yes we went to school for half a day on Saturdays) At the girls school, we would go to learn how to sew, embroidery, gardening and crafts, but sometimes the teachers would organize what we called “dia de campo” which literally means a day in the country. At the boys school the teaching on Saturdays was carpentry and other things suitable for boys, remember this was the 50s! Ok, now that you know the years of my teens, you may, or may not, know that during those years young girls were not allowed to go to functions (even the movies) by themselves; so when there were dances in town, my sisters, cousins and I were always accompanied by an aunt who sat there with a look that told the guys “yes, you can dance with her but when the music ends, her seat is here besides me” Can you imagine the lengths us girls would go to spend more time with our “boyfriends” Sometimes, one of the girls would stop by my aunt, greet and talk to her, take my seat so there was no place for me to park my bones, (we would do that for each other). However, in my case, I had a double whammy in the chaperone department because not only was my aunt keeping an eye on me, but my father was the director of the marimba/orchestra that was playing for the dance, and my dad had the advantage of being on the raised dais!!! Some of you may find those attitudes somewhat archaic, but remember that my country of origin was “colonized” by Spain and some of those old Spanish customs were ingrained in the culture. With the way the young people acts today, I sometimes wish that parents would still adhere to some of those customs!
Alright then, back to the narrative involving the boyfriend saga. Where was I on the tale? Got it! At that time, because we could only attend school to the sixth grade, our parents sent us off to different places to continue our education. I had gone to secretarial school in the City and upon graduation, went back to my hometown and got a job with a company that had been in existence for a very long time; this company had a shipyard, a mail/passenger boat to the next port (water is the only access into my hometown) and had tug boats that hauled huge steel barges loaded with 100 pound burlap sacks of coffee grains (is called cafe oro) which came from coffee plantations located hundreds of miles away. Those tug boats would take the barges to the deep water port for the coffee to be loaded into the big, ocean going vessels sailing to European countries and the United States. I’m not sure that I already shared that information with you. I enjoyed my job with this company where so many of my friends’ fathers, brothers or husbands also worked, (I forgot to tell you that I was the only female working in that office) One of the men working for the company was my “boyfriend’s” dad who worked in the shipyard; he was a very uppity man, needless to say, no girl was good enough for his son, but the “boyfriend” and I continued dancing, going to the movies, taking walks (remember, my younger sister always in tow) and he would go to my house every evening at 7 p.m. One night a kid came over to my house and handed him a note, he read it and after a while told me that he had to go, we said goodbye and he left. The next day, a girlfriend told me that another girl who liked this guy had sent him a note and he had gone to that girls house, and you guessed it, I was not amused!!