Comparing the Realness of Problems by Digging into My Trauma Memory Bank
"We have a real problem," My wife tells me with a serious face.
I know real problems. I don't like real problems. And just like that, I have a flashback to when my mom was raising us in Barranquilla, Colombia.
As a single mom, she struggled to make ends meet. She had to toss a coin to decide which utility service would get paid, and none of them were ever current, so the decision was more which one would be less behind.
It is tough to decide whether to pay the water or the electricity. That would never be a board game. If anything, it would be a sick "Would you rather" question: "Would you rather be cold or stinky?"
When the electricity fell behind, the utility company would send a technician to our house to cut some hardware inside the power room so that we would have no power, and we couldn't easily reconnect it.
After that, my mom would go to a part of the city known as "Miami Caño."
Miami evokes images of tall palm trees, attractive men and women skating while holding cocktails with tiny umbrellas.
But the word caño means sewage. " Miami Caño," or "Sewage Miami," is a creative way to describe a sketchy area of town where my mom could find shady characters who could reconnect all the pulled hardware so we could have electricity.
Their qualifications were that they were willing to do it.
And that was it.
We were part of a community with 22 families, and they couldn't care less if we plugged the power back in illegally, but whenever we interrupted their service, they would get really upset! Which we often did because these electricians weren't great.
These illegal reconnections were happening throughout the city, and one time we were reinstalling the power, the local news station sent a crew to produce a segment on what we were doing. Even if our neighbors were mad at us, we were still part of the group, and the TV crew wasn't.
Our neighbor from across the hall, Cesar, was there. All the boys in our neighborhood liked Cesar, but we were afraid of him because he had terrible mood swings, a side effect of what can be medically described as smoking a-tons of pot!
That day, I looked at him from our apartment window, chasing the cameraman with a broom. When he finally caught up to the man, he gave him a whack so hard he broke the broom in two.
The cameraman took it like a champ.
Don't get me wrong, he cried like a baby.
But he never let go of the camera. How professional.
Even in my early teens, I looked at all that and thought, "This is not in that guy's job description."
I returned to the present and asked my wife, "What is this real problem?"
She told me, "Amélie (our youngest) is in our backyard mixing our 1/2" river pebbles with our 1" shadow bark, and it is going to be really hard to separate them again."
Let me repeat: I have a backyard in Sonoma County.
My life is good!
I have this annoying habit. When she tells me hyperbolic catastrophes, I'll dig into my past and bring out a memory I have never shared with her about my upbringing.
Like this.
