Abe Observes

By Abe Villarreal

I live in a section of the country that doesn't experience too much of anything in the extremes. No tornadoes or floods. No hurricanes or snowstorms. Cold days feel cold only because we remember how hot the days were before them. Nothing gets ever too anything around here.

Time never moves too fast. People don't rush their words. Fast cars seem fast because everything around them is hardly moving at all. Still, time marches forward faster than we expect. Someone once told me that "time don't wait on no one."

What you don't know is what makes you happy
By Abe Villarreal

Someone, some time ago, wrote that ignorance is bliss. I think it was a seventeenth-century poet. It must have been. It sounds like something a poet would write. Today, we say things like "he doesn't know the half of it." I like the older version better.

There's a 12-year-old boy named Axel that has a brain tumor. He knows he has it and he knows he has to go to the doctor to get it "fixed." He's lost weight, and he looks younger than his age. He sells snacks at the plaza in the evening and likes to hang around the card table with the older guys to shoot the breeze.

By Abe Villarreal

In our new world of automation, I'm asking myself who will be changing my kitty litter each day. Doesn't my cat want me to do it? Doesn't it say something about our relationship?

Automation may be solving problems, but it's not replacing, or it shouldn't, what we mean to each other. Person to person. Person to cat.

I have to take my own trash bag, down from my second story apartment, to the corner trash bins for the weekly collection. Automation hasn't figured out how to do that for me. Maybe one day it will.

The older I get, the more I sound like an old, grumpy man fighting against the advancement of technology. Progress is supposed to be a good thing until it isn't. Until it changes the kind of society we all say we used to love to have when we were kids.

By Abe Villarreal

When I see a military photo of my grandfather, I wonder why he chose to enlist. I see him looking straight at the camera, head slightly tilted. Flag flying behind him, and the only words to be read say U.S. Navy.

Tata Abram enlisted in 1943 when he turned 18. Most young men at that time, and at that age enlisted. Maybe they thought it was the right thing to do in a time when the world was fighting for the survival of what was right and the extinction of what was wrong.

By Abe Villarreal

I'm writing this to you as a I sit at a funny-looking round red table constructed to promote the history of the Coca-Cola company. It's the only place I could plug in to charge my laptop in the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. I'm on my way to Salamanca, Spain, and it's my first time traveling overseas.

Someone told me once that the only way you can grow as a person is by traveling. You meet the kind of people you see on TV shows, and you visit cities and towns you only read about in books. Most places are at the same time somewhat like you imagined them to be and really different than you expected.

At the airport, all those people you want to get to know come together. Airports bring people together, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad, for a brief moment in time. I've learned a lot of life lessons during brief moments.

By Abe Villarreal

It's my birthday today, and on birthdays, we celebrate life. So, here's to life—all its good and bad, all its regularity and all its surprises, all its traditions and all the newness that is to come. In my life, it's the people and the places that are worth celebrating.

Like my friend Jordana, who sells sweets and piggy banks, and whatever else she was assigned for the day. She works at the "line" on the Douglas/Agua Prieta border. You can find her there on most days after school. She greets everyone with a big smile and makes you feel like you are always appreciated to be seen. I wish more of us were more like her.

By Abe Villarreal

It's graduation season and twenty-something-year-olds are getting ready to leave college and start something new. They've hit the books for years. They've eaten Ramen for breakfast and dinner. They've slept less than is humanly possible. They are about to graduate.

My grandparents didn't graduate college, and neither did their parents. They grew up, and before they finished growing up, they started working. Most people have done that for almost all of the history of time.

Little people became bigger people. What they learned was what they saw, what they were told, what they had to experience. People didn't have too many choices then. You did what you did because that's what your parents did or what you had to do at that moment in your life. Most people turned out okay.

By Abe Villarreal

We all know people who describe something in a way that means not to offend. Such as when a realtor says that the house is charming or an older person is defined as being in their advanced years. We all know what those things mean until we don't.

Sometimes, softening up language gets in the way of what we really mean to say or to understand. So, let's start a movement of saying what we mean, when we mean to say it, and how we mean for it to be heard.

Old waitresses with names like Flo and Sunny do this every day. The waitresses who still wear aprons and nametags. They serve up coffee in ceramic mugs that should have been retired years ago. They take your order in cafés with large windows, bar seats, and the sounds of the local AM radio. I like those kinds of waitresses. They don't mess around, and they know what they were created to do on this good earth.