Lost in translation

For one of my birthdays when I was teen, I asked my dad to tell me 'I love you'. 

I wrote it in a note in my simple Spanish (at the time, I was nowhere near the level of fluent I am now), I wrote: "Papá, para este cumpleaños yo no quiero nada, ningún regalo ni ropa ni nada, sólo quiero que me diga 'Te amo'" (Dad, for my birthday I don't want anything else, no gifts or clothing, nothing, I just want you to tell me you love me). 

You might wonder, why would I ask him that? Growing up, my dad wasn't an affectionate man. Not really, at least. He used to hit me, just like he hit all my other siblings, and so there was a degree of fear involved. There were his constant admonitions to 'be a man' and 'los machos no lloran' (men don't cry), which in hindsight is a pretty ludicrous thing to say to someone when you're hitting them for the slightest offense. I also got the sense growing up that I wasn't enough, enough of a boy, not manly enough, I wasn't a jock constantly playing sports, I liked them but not to the same extent as my dad. I got the feeling that he thought I was gay because I spent so much time with my best friend Jason. How did I know? At around the age of 15, I renounced my Catholicism in front of my assembled family on the grounds that I felt it couldn't be the only correct religion thus not being right for me, so how could I devote myself to it? My dad's first question was, "Are you gay?!". I was furious at him in that moment, I couldn't understand his logic, I couldn't understand how he couldn't listen to what I was truly saying. I went back to school the next day and told Jason all about it, Jason was mortified and exclaimed, "oh man, you're dad thinks I'm gay", to which I soothingly replied, "don't worry, he thinks I'm gay too". 

There was the drinking, the frustration, my dad was a walking powder keg, one second he could be smiling and laughing and the next he could fly into a rage, yelling at the top of his lungs. It was this mixture of love and rage that I think confused me, how can you love a person that you strike? Now, I've come to terms with that in the sense that it's something from the past and I won't hold it against my parents, especially my dad (since he was the enforcer and I can count on my hand the number of times my mom hit me). I can reconcile that as an adult but how do you make sense of it as a child? You can't, I couldn't, I had all these question marks and no straight answers and so I decided to ask something small of my dad, a gesture. 

When my birthday rolled around, he said that he'd read my note, looked in my eyes and said, "te quiero". I knew this meant something affectionate but it doesn't literally mean 'I love you' in Spanish, it literally means 'I want you' but to a teen who learned Spanish speaking with his family and not having had a formal education in the language it sounded like a cop out. It sounded like another disappointment. It sounded like, "I'm not capable of saying 'I love you', here, take this instead". 

It wasn't until years later that I learned that 'te quiero' is just as good as saying 'te amo', it's more common in fact. And it wasn't until then that I realized that my dad loved me all along, it was just lost in translation. 

The Yankees and my pops

As long as I can remember, I've been a Yankee fan. My dad's pinstripe passion infected me from a young age. He would take me (sometimes drag me) to Yankee Stadium to watch games, riding shotgun to the Bronx, the cool nights up in the nosebleed section.

My dad was a diehard fan back in El Salvador. He would tell me how he used to listen to the games on the radio, imagining the great feats of Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio. My dad LOVED the Yankees and it was fitting, even though I grew up in Queens, that I'd one day love the Bronx Bombers too. 

My early childhood memories revolved around baseball. I didn't play, apart from playing catch with my dad outside my mom's job, but we watched countless games. There are more than a hundred games in one season of baseball, multiply that by years and you can get a sense of how much baseball we watched. And every game was important, every game was life or death, every game had my dad yelling at the screen, "¡Estupido! Baboso!". My hero growing up was Don Mattingly and he was the embodiment of masculinity of that era; he had dark brown hair and eyes and a moustache, he had a stoic look to him, rarely smiling, like a somber general. He was our captain and my favorite player but there were others: Paul O'Neill, Danny Tartabull, the list goes on. I also knew all the statistics, how many pennants the Yanks had won (a pennant is when you win one division, Major League Baseball is divided into two divisions: the American League and National League, the Yanks are in the former). It was the 80's and the Yankees, despite their pedigree, were a mid-level club, almost always in the playoffs but never champions. My dad and I suffered through this era, each time they reached the playoffs only to lose a series. My dad and I suffered a lot with our teams, it wasn't only in baseball, we're Knicks fans ('94 and '99 were particularly disappointing), the Giants and Jets (the Giants wouldn't be champions until Eli Manning came into the picture in the 2000's) and in soccer, El Salvador is the perennial punching bag for the rest of CONCACAF. My dad never wavered in his loyalty, though, he never doubted, each new match was an opportunity to silence the doubters in his eyes. I'm like that, the teams I've chosen to support will remain my teams, through thick and thin, because that's what he taught me it means to be a fan. 

My dad wasn't just a baseball fan, he was a sports fan. I remember a few years back I scolded him for watching golf even though I was pretty sure he didn't have a clue what was going on (and the broadcast was in English, so he def didn't understand the commentary). That's all he ever wanted to watch, sports, I couldn't understand why. My dad played sports growing up, he loved playing soccer and even coached a team consisting primarily of my cousins and family at one point. Maybe it was because it's a distraction, something (arguably) clean and pure in a world rife with corruption and violence. Maybe it was because he loved the narrative, David versus Goliath, pulling for the underdog to pull off the improbable victory. Whatever the reason, the man loved sports!

I, in true Larry fashion, rejected this at some point. In my teen years I started to hate sports, in part because I was physically smaller and weaker than my counterparts and so it was frustrating to keep playing, and in part (subconsciously) because he loved them so much. If you learn one thing about me it's this, I'm a contrarian by nature. It's the reason why I never played soccer growing up even though the majority of my cousins played at some point. It's the reason why I gravitated towards martial arts and shunned team sports. My dad was still there though, he used to take me to my martial arts classes, my Wushu class, he'd drive me to and from Ditmars Boulevard to the Tiger Kim studio that you could see from the subway platform. I remember the first class, my dad had to help carry me down the stairs because I was barely able to walk down them by myself. That was every Saturday and Sunday, I never thought about it until now... but he took me to all those classes before I was able to go on my own. 

And so I continued on this trajectory, studying martial arts, ignoring sports, loathing them, until one day it all came full circle. I love them now, I watch football as often as possible. I support FC Barcelona, Atleti, all my NY teams. I go to watch games live if I can, I've been to the new Yankee Stadium a few times. I play catch, kick the ball around at picnics, yell and shout when my team scores and really feel the game. I got that from my dad.