Tia Lala And Mama Tito

Tia Lala 

On my Mother's side of the family, I have memories of a lady I called Tia Lala. She always wore black and rolled her own cigarettes! She lived across the street from us in a two-story, wooden, yellow house. One room had a window that looked across the street to our house. Many times, I remember, my Mother would cross the street to visit her aunt. They traded food during Lent and I loved her tomato macaroni and cheese dish.

Her hair was black with lots of grey, pulled tightly back into a small bun. A cousin remembers that Tia Lala walked everywhere and when she would walk to their house, she would take off her black, Cuban heel shoes, lean back in a chair and say in Spanish that her legs and feet hurt. After resting and visiting she would walk back to her house where she lived with her son, Gregorio.

I remember she always wore an apron and spent most of her time in the kitchen. Anyway, that is where she would be when I happened to accompany my mother for a visit. My mother was close to her aunt because she was like a mother to her. My mother lost her mother to the Spanish flu around 1917, leaving my two-year-old Mother in the care of two sisters and a brother. Tia Lala's sister, Valentina, was married to my mother's father and when he was left a widower with a two-year-old, he had to depend on the older children to help raise my mother!  Tia Lala would help whenever she could in New Mexico, but when everyone moved to Colorado that is when my mother got closer to her aunt. 

Mama Tito

Monserate was my father's mother and I knew her as Mama Tito. She and my Aunt Kika (Francisca) would babysit my brother and me when my parents went out. I loved sleeping over because I got to sleep with my grandmother and she would rub my head until I would fall asleep. She told me stories and had a silky blue blanket that made me think I was sleeping on a cloud.

After she had a stroke, I did not see her that often because she had told me that she loved me so much that when she died she was going to take me with her. Out of sight/out of mind, I thought.  The stroke left her mouth twisted to one side and she was difficult to understand when she spoke. For twenty years she was bedridden, and my aunt Kika took care of her. I try to remember her and all that comes to mind are her eggnog toddies that she added a bit of whiskey, my aunts sitting around the kitchen table playing cards and smoking; canasta or rummy, I think. Seeing a pig's head on the table when they were going to make tamales. My brother and I tried to poke its eye, but the blue eye wiggled like jello. She and my aunt lived across the alley from us. They prayed to a slew of saints and if I happened to visit around five p.m. she made me join them. It hurt my knees because they prayed a long time.

When she passed away at ninety-four years of age, I do not remember attending her funeral. Most of my memories of my grandmother are seeing her in bed attempting to talk and that her memory was intact because she remembered everyone in my family, even the name of our dog!

"Beautiful young people are acts of nature,

but beautiful old people are works of art!"

Eleanor Roosevelt