{"id":5901,"date":"2023-11-02T19:07:36","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T00:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=5901"},"modified":"2023-11-02T19:07:36","modified_gmt":"2023-11-03T00:07:36","slug":"reconnecting-with-my-compadre-jaime-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/reconnecting-with-my-compadre-jaime-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Reconnecting With My Compadre, Jaime"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The \u201cfriend\u201d request came on Facebook. For a moment, the name didn\u2019t look familiar: Jaime Le\u00f2n V\u00e0squez<\/em>. I get a lot of random requests from people I have no connection, which I decline. Then it hit me. Jaime! He worked for me for nearly a decade, toiling nearly every weekend at whatever house I owned at the time, in Nacogdoches, Lufkin and Longview. He was a skilled painter and handyman, familiar with cattle and fence mending, and basically did whatever needed to be done \u2014 cheerfully and efficiently. As he said, \u201cLo que<\/em>.\u201d Whatever.<\/p>\n

I first met Jaime\u00a0in the spring of 2000, when I went looking for someone to do yard work. In Nacogdoches, the day laborers \u2014 nearly all Hispanics with a scattering of Blacks in the crowd \u2014 gather at a park just south of downtown, lining up along a bridge that crosses Banita Creek. When a vehicle approaches and slows, the race belongs to the swift. Up to a dozen men rush to the driver\u2019s side of the vehicle. Usually the driver, if experienced, will hold up one finger, meaning only one worker needed, and so forth.<\/p>\n

Jaime\u00a0was the first to get to my Jeep that day, jogging over in a pace that became as familiar to me as the purring of my cat. He generally jogged to whatever task was next at hand. He climbed in and immediately began talking, admiring my Jeep in rapid Spanish interspersed with occasional English phrases. He and I worked together many weekends for the next nine years \u2014 painting rent houses, fixing fences and working cattle during my brief foray into gentleman farming, once building a bridge across a creek, planing rough-hewn red oak and black walnut for furniture projects.\u00a0Lo que<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Jaime\u2019s home is an unmapped village in the interior of the state of Veracruz, below the pyramids of El Taj\u00ecn, a pre-Columbian archaeological site that\u2019s 2,000 years old. The closest large city is Poza Rica, known now mainly for its oil refineries and misfortune for getting hammered by hurricanes. He returned there for good in 2009, after earning enough money in East Texas to finance remodeling his house, which is lovely from the photos he showed me, and help\"\"<\/a>ing his son and daughter become educated adults. His son, also named Jaime, is working on his master\u2019s degree at the University of Chapingo in Mexico. His daughter is an engineer specializing in renewable resources. He has one grandchild. Jaime is clearly, and rightfully so, proud of all of them.<\/p>\n

My compadre<\/em> is quite a talker. He apparently still believes that if he speaks Spanish long enough the person to whom he is talking will learn it by osmosis. Once, I hosted two junior-high Japanese exchange students for two weeks. I introduced the students to Jaime, who began speaking rapidly to them in Spanish.<\/p>\n

\u201cJaime,\u201d I protested. \u201cThese girls are from Japan. They don\u2019t know Spanish.\u201d<\/p>\n

He looked at me and replied rather haughtily, \u201cWell, I can\u2019t speak Japanese.\u201d Jaime\u00a0continued talking away\u00a0en Espa\u00f1ol<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Com<\/em>It is<\/em> true my Spanish improved considerably by spending much of one day each week in conversation with Jaime, as we often worked side by side, ate lunch together, and enjoyed each other\u2019s company. He was unfailingly cheerful and intensely curious about the world. That has not seemed to have changed in the ensuing years.<\/p>\n

Almost daily, he sends me Facebook Reels, a video format popular for sending snippets of stuff. The other day he sent one via Messenger of people in Veracruz wearing masks and group dancing to mark Dia De Los Muertos. <\/em>Colorful banners hung above from light poles, as they line-danced on a plywood stage set in the middle of a street. Another video showed a clever farmer standing astride a homemade platform above his harrow discs, while two mules pulled him along to break up the soil.<\/p>\n

Since he left, 14 years ago, my Spanish has become quite rusty, not that it was all that great anyway. More Spanglish than Spanish. So, if I want to write something relatively complex to Jaime, I lean on Google Translate to get the job done and use the same when needed to figure out what he is saying.<\/p>\n

I have a standing invitation to come visit him in his little village, check out his orange grove, his wife\u2019s chickens, and ducks. Who knows! I might just take him up on that invitation. He is one of the finest humans I have had the honor to know.<\/p>\n

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Print this entryThe \u201cfriend\u201d request came on Facebook. For a moment, the name didn\u2019t look familiar: Jaime Le\u00f2n V\u00e0squez. I get a lot of random requests from people I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[76,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-76","category-columns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5901"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5905,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5901\/revisions\/5905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}