Good times

I'm 78 years old and I'm sitting here thinking about this thing called life, I was the fifth of five boys, actually I was the seventh, two of my adopted brothers passed away at a very young age before I was born, I had eight sisters, three sisters and three brothers have passed on, I've also lost my Mom and Dad. I can honestly say that if I had a choice to pick any family, I would still pick this family, our life wasn't easy, but it was fun. I can remember as a young man, I had all these Tio's,Tia's and cousins in my life, this gave me a lot of people to look up to, my folks taught us the difference between right and wrong, but so did everyone else, kinda along the lines of "it takes a village to raise a child" when our elders spoke we listened. The river, bicycles, trees, orchards, railroad tracks, old barns, rice silos, Indian reservation, old dirt roads, our baseball diamond on the cement out in front of the rice silos, were our play grounds. None of us kids were over weight, cause we were always doing something that involved physical activity, and we were always hungry, back in them days you got three meals a day and if you were late, oh well you missed out, there was no McDonalds or In n Out, you usually only had sodas and if you were lucky, a hamburger on the weekend, in the winter you could just forget it. Back in them days we just dealt with things as they showed up, when something broke, you would fix it just good enough to get you through the week and on weekends if it was the car, it would be a priority to fix it right, to get you through the week, at my age now, I appreciate things that are old and dinged up a bit, cause it gives em character, don't really care for new things, give me an old car, old Harley, old Levi's, tennis shoes, t shirt and my old lady and my little family and I'm happy. Money's not a big priority for me, it's nice to have, but I don't think being rich and Buddy Gomez were ever meant to be and I'm cool with that, if you want to be rich and have a lot of nice things, that's cool too, I believe we weren't put here to think alike, we're all different and that's a good thing.
 Us kids usually walked home together, but there were times when I walked home alone. I remember going to the show when I was just a kid and walking home late at night by myself and I was certain La Llorona was going to jump out and get me, certain areas like the cattle corral where a lot of Hobos used to sleep, I would run as fast as I could, there wasn't any street lights and in them days people were usually asleep before 10:00. A child walking alone at night would not be seen by anyone other than the Hobos and La Llorona. Things didn't get much better once I was home, cause the house was supposedly haunted, this all made for some interesting walks home at night. Our neighborhood was dark and mysterious at night, but early in the morning it would come alive with roosters crowing, dogs barking, kids running around like kids do when they've been cooped up all night and the smell of a good down home style Mexican breakfast being cooked by my Mom and my Abuelita who lived across the street, I'd eat at home then go to my Abuelitas  and eat again, I was always hungry and the food was always delicious. I can still picture my Mom making tortillas for breakfast and my Dad sitting at the table drinking coffee, if my Dad was sitting down he would usually be fixing something. My folks didn't like to see us just sitting there doing nothing, they'd either put us to work doing house chores or make us go outside, for me as soon as I ate, I was out the door looking for something to do, I didn't want to do no stinking house chores. Our neighborhood consisted of Mexican, White and Indian people and we always got along fine till I got older and got a car and the lady next door started calling the cops on me all the time for burning rubber and the lady at the corner would throw rocks at my car. by that time my Grandma had passed away and my cousin had moved away and my brother had joined the Army, so I found a new group of friends to hang out with, they enjoyed hanging out at our house and a lot of times some would spend the night. Mom n Pop were cool that way and of course they loved Moms cooking. Back in them days you had to be creative to maintain your car, gas, oil, tires, etc. wasn’t easy to come by and jobs were very scarce, I could go on, but I think you get the picture. My friends would chip in for gas and beer and we’d head out to a new adventure on the weekend, we’d usually go to Marysville, Yuba City or Woodland. I can’t think of any time we didn’t enjoy ourselves. Just a buncha kids doing what kids do.