Goal!
In working out my new games area it became clear that Handy Brad would need help. Mostly he needed help with the heavy lifting involved in moving artificial turf around. The 15×60 main piece, prior to installation weighed about 350 pounds, which is 300 more than I prefer to lift. There is also the old turf that has about 750 pounds of sand on it, so that weighed perhaps 1200 pounds and was in three pieces, which I figure were each 350-400 pounds. That was barely manageable with 4 guys (the fourth bring the delivery guy, NOT me). But the primary job of getting the old turf off the main surface (we are using it to carpet both sides of the main surface) got done yesterday and when the new turf arrived earlier than expected, it was a matter of figuring out how to get a 350-pound, tightly rolled carpet of putting green turf from the flat-bed truck through the agaves about 100 feet to the prepped and waiting surface with its wooden border. It turned out that there was no way to do it other than muscle it with all four guys straining with their neck veins bulging. Handy Brad was odd man out since the boss of this preliminary move (given his experience at moving large turf rolls) was the turf delivery guy, and his native tongue was Spanish, like that of Pedro and Hilgardo. The day laborers we had met at Home Depot and were working with us this week.
Pedro is a short, sturdy Salvadoran of fifty years who isn’t much of a conversationalist, but knows his landscaping. Hilgardo is Mexican from Chiapas and he is a grandfather at forty-five and is tall and slender. Both men work exceptionally hard and are quite knowledgeable in a broad range of outdoor work. They know all about preparing a base for turf and about mixing concrete for post holes that they dig (something they did for the fences we are placing at either end of the mini-golf course).
The other reasons for hiring added help is that we have a schedule to keep that Brad knows is too much for him to maintain. And this next part Handy Brad does not like to admit, but there is work to be done that he doesn’t like doing that is just fine for day laborers (work is work to them). Those tasks seem to be the heavy wheelbarrow and shovel work like putting down DG (decomposed granite) for walkways and hauling dirt and stone from one spot to another. Handy Brad is the crew foreman who picked the pair from the Home Depot parking lot, and drives them back and forth to and from there every day. But Handy Brad’s complete lack of language ability makes me the de-facto interpreter and communicator. And what that has reminded me is that he who communicates best is in charge. So, I have spent the days this week supervising and sharpening up my Spanish vocabulary with the help of Google Translate.
That makes me want to explain that half the trick of speaking a foreign language is not being afraid to stumble your way through it. I learned that years ago from a Spanish teacher named Nora who was Venezuelan, had a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard and became my girlfriend for six months after my first marriage. She explained to me that what most people didn’t realize is that it is far easier to speak a language and be understood than it is to listen to the language and understand it. That makes lots of sense when you think about it. If you control the speech, you get to pick the words you know. If you are on the receiving end, others can throw whatever they know at you regardless of your ability to understand them. The other thing is that the act of trying to communicate breaks all sorts of ice with the others. Other than the hauty French, most everyone is disarmed by another’s attempt, no matter how halting or stumbling, to speak to them in their language. It is the ultimate sign of respect and gains you lots of patience from the other side. Luckily for me, I have spoken Spanish fluently several times in my life and it tends to come back to me easily when I am forced to use it.
Speaking Spanish to workmen and women is something I enjoy a great deal. To begin with, I have great respect and sympathy for the working men and women who go out there to make a living every day, trying their best to improve their lot in life against all odds and against the express anti-immigration efforts of the Trump Administration and the minions of ICE known locally as La Migra. I also feel like I am one of them. My father was a Venezuelan immigrant who was Italian by birth, Venezuelan by necessity and, eventually, American by ambition and thanks to The War Brides Act of 1945. That father, who spoke with a thick Hispanic accent his entire 70 years, left behind a brother and my cousins in Venezuela. He also fathered another son, twenty years my junior, in Mexico City with wife number five. So, I feel a connection to my compadres from the south.
The story I like to tell is the story I was told by my Mexican half-brother thirty years ago. He called me one night out of the blue just after I had fallen asleep (so I was groggy). He told me he was my brother, in a thick, eerie, Hispanic accent reminiscent of my recently deceased father. When I told him I didn’t have a brother he corrected me and explained who he was. I was aware that my father had fathered a son in Mexico City, but that was not a top-of-mind fact for me in my own personal self-awareness. When he explained that he wanted to meet to discuss how a man (our father) could die and never want to meet his son (him), I had to explain that he shouldn’t take that personally and that he was better off than other offspring like me whom he had bothered to meet and then promised things that he did not fulfill. I asked how he got my number and he said he had gotten it from our respective half-sisters. When I asked if he had spoken to them, he said yes, but that they were “only women.” I then knew he was my father’s son.
We agreed to meet for dinner when he came to New York City that summer to cover the World Cup for his employer, Televisa Azteca. He explained that as a boy he would get punished by being locked in his room with only a radio and a phone. That caused him to pursue his passion for football by calling into the local radio station with his comments. One thing led to another and he went from call-in guest to announcer and made a career of his passion and his punishment avocation. It seems that he has become an accomplished Mexican football announcer and he has become quite renowned.
Before I would let him hang up, I had the presence of mind to ask him his name. He was surprised by the question and quite unabashedly said, “Andre Marin”, which should not have surprised me since that was my father’s name. Today, if you look up Andre Marin you will find him as the second-most popular football announcer in Mexico. The most popular is Andres Cantor, who is the guy who yells, “Goal!” in a long, loud pronounced way that has become famous. When I mention Andre Marin, these local Mexican workmen all think he is the Goal! guy, an understandable mistake given the similar first names. But it all works to make a connection and that is, after all, my only goal.