August 12, 2004
BlogCuba - Aaron's Rantblog
This BlogCuba entry from Aaron of Aaron's Rantblog recalls his grandfather and his Cuban wife Rita. Now, Aaron's granddad must have been a smart smart man cause, as I often say, a Cuban woman is as close to heaven as some of us are going to get. Mil gracias Aaron, I'm sure your abuelo was glad to have Rita with him all those years.
And Tough Ole Broads
"Yun pung an ol far. Boy, I tellin' you... only two kine o people in this worl." I was 10 and that's how I heard it and remember it, fondly.
Rita escaped Castro's Cuba sometime in the 1950's, before I wasborn. She became a fashion model in New York City and before the Cuban Missile Crisis and my birth in October of 1962, she had already caught the attention of my grandfather.
My grandfather, who was a Navy captain in WWII and in Korea had long been divorced from my grandmother, who died while my mother was pregnant with me. He had also already been married and divorced a second time to a woman I never met who later became the adoptive mother of a Los Angeles Rams punter. At the time he met Rita, my grandfather was the athletic director of a well known, very well known, northeast university, in the final third of a 14-year tenure in that position... before the angry alumni got him ousted for having the temerity to suggest that the athletes meet academic standards.
I met Rita when I was 3, visiting her and my grandfather in their home in the suburbs outside the university's city. Indelible stamps were made on my psyche. First, I was fascinated by a fountain in the back yard which had a sculpted head, almost a gargoyle, but vaguely familiar. After a few double takes, I figured out it was Rita. Later,during the same visit, I have my first baseball memories. My grandfather, who was a scholarship football and baseball athlete in his day, gave me a Whiffle Ball and Bat set and proceded to teach me. I guess he taught me well... through4 all-star years of little league and an all-star year of Babe Ruth league, I struck out a total of 5 times. In my later years, playing softball, I went from the age of 15 to 38 only striking out once. But back to Rita, though as a Cuban was a baseball lover, my other memory of that visit was hitting the Whiffle Ball hard enough to have it land in the fountain where my grandfather, impressed, had to wade in to retrieve it.
After he was fired, my grandfather and Rita tired of going to restaurants to hear alumni raise their voices to discuss how he had ruined a once nationally-ranked football program. (The children of these alumni now have degrees that probably earn more than $30k/year more than they would have as a result of my grandfather's decision.) He and Rita moved to the midwest where he became the CEO of a data processing firm. In 1970, they retired to a mountainside home with a pool in the Ozarks in northwest Arkansas. I remember there was a "Cuban corner" in their bedroom. My grandfather was not a religious man, but Rita apparently still kept many of herCatholic traditions, which fascinated me, but she respected that I was Jewish.
My grandfather was a coarse gifted athlete and yet also earned a master's degree in English as a scholar of old English poetry. He personally knew J. R. R. Tolkien and the runners from Chariots of Fire. But you couldn't really shake him from his hard Pittsburgh childhood. In his 70's, when I was in my early 20's, I honestly still think he could have thrashed me.
A decade ago, the onset of alzheimer's couldn't tame my talented and tormented grandfather who threatened, physically and verbally, all the hospital staff who tried to care of them. Yet for 40 years, Rita tamed him in a way that only she could, in her special way.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever met a Cuban without a healthy quotient of self esteem.
Someday, may it be decades from now, I would like to inherit the fountain head from my uncle.
Rita passed away in June. She returned to Miami to be among Cubans after my grandfather passed away in 1997. She had a difficult life. Never had children. Left siblings behind in Cuba. Never was a stepmother to either my mother or uncle... just their father's last wife.
My grandfather added "and tough old broads" to Rita's quote at the top of this essay. And I recall her smiling widely when he said this, her high cheekbones protruding like golf balls... just like the fountainhead. "Thas right, honey."
Posted by Val Prieto at August 12, 2004 06:25 AM
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