Matamoros

When i began my life i was destined to be a coastal kid.

Matamoros, Tamaulipas in Mexico is the sister city of Brownsville, Texas,
across the Rio Grand, and it's where i was born and growing up in 1967 when i was 6 yrs old; the year my father was working in a New Orleans shoe repair shop in a Schwegmann's store, and had plans to move us (mom, and 2 delightful sisters) there, another coastal city. Before N.O. he had been in Los Angeles, CA working in a shop there, again a coast.

Things didn't work out in New Orleans and he decided to strike out on his own, and about the time he was making his way to Texas so was a tropical storm named Beulah who became a killer hurricane in September of that year.

I don't know what is the age one normally has the good, clear memories,
but mine don't start to come in like video with sound and color until we moved to Texas exactly a year after that hurricane, at the age of seven; before that they are mostly snapshots, in black and white.

Even though i don't have many memories to share from that time, i can give you some facts about life in Matamoros because after moving here we did go back a few times to where i lived as a child there. We lived in what was known as las casas de don Santos, don Santos was a fat, old, hairy man who always wore kahkis and a white tank; your typical landlord. He had two houses that faced the street, one was a duplex that he lived in with his daughter. You walked between the two long concrete houses and on to a courtyard about 35 feet square; in the back of this property, facing the back of the street facing houses, were another two houses. We lived in the house on the left and between it and don Santos' unit was a small concrete building with green, wood plank doors that contained the toilet and shower; there was a faucet in our kitchen, but you had to go outside to use the bathroom. The house had a concrete porch across the front held up by concrete pillars and tiled like the rest of the house and like every house i ever been inside in Mexico. Just in front of our porch, there was a square concrete laundry tub with a faucet; there were clotheslines that crisscrossed the courtyard, when everyone hung up their sheets, it became a maze for the grown-ups. We just went right through them with our grubby little faces and hands.

This was a great place to live for me because there were a lot of children in the neighborhood, but lets not romanticize the place; they were rental apartments that were a bit slummy, which is odd because it was not really a squalid area, there were some nice homes nearby with their fenced in small green lawns. What i was used to was a concrete world, and where there was no concrete, there was just dirt like someone stole the grass that would dare to grow there.

I always thought my father never lived with us in that house because i have only two memories of him coming to visit before he came to take us back with him to Burkburnett, but i've been told he did live with us a short time before he went north, apparently to make a life for us in the U.S.