Twenty two years ago I drove Elfida to the Santa Rosa hospital just after sunrise. A couple of hours later we had our second son. We let Maiko pick the name. He chose, Luis Carlos, adding a third Luis to our family. And like his brother, at home he would go by his middle name but at school they both chose to go by their first name. Very confusing for teacher when ever we went to the schools.
He had a very healthy set of lungs. Your could hear him crying all the way to my parents house. When he cried at night, my mom would come over and take him to their house next door. After he fell asleep, she would bring him back. He learned to speak Spanish first. For the first three years of his life that is all he spoke. We started refering to Carlos as, "el chiquillo", the little one and Maiko still refers to his as "el chiquillo" even now.
He was quickly spoiled by Juanita, his babysitter, Wilma, his godmother, and by both grandparents, Lupe and Juana. Oh yeah, and by his mom. He loved eating beans and tortillas at his babysitters home. She had a daughter and a son a couple of years older than Carlos. Her husband and her little boy wore western attire, so Carlos dressed like a cowboy too.
When Elfida started taking him to a day care center, Carlos was into the Pee-wee Herman show. He wore the sportcoats all the time. His grandfather always had a stash of M&M's for Carlos at their house. He loved eating candy as a baby, but quit doing it as a grown up. Both Carlos and Maiko loved going over and eating breakfast at grandma's cause she always had homemade tortillas and because "guelita and guelito" spoiled them.
We moved to Waco and Carlos started playing soccer at the age of four. Okay, he was in a soccer team and spent his time daydreaming inside the goal or chasing butterflies on the field. His legs were so short that we couldn't find shin guards short enough for his legs. The shortest ones we found went all the way up to his knees. His jersey was also to big and went down below his knees and Elfida had to take in the shorts around the waist so they wouldn't fall off. He did good and we enjoyed going to his games and watching his first soccer coach throw himself on the ground when ever they were scored on. He was never mean with the kids but he would throw himself on the ground and kick and scream.
Carlos was also good a throwing himself on the ground once in a while. I was always ready with the camera too. Oh yeah, we still rag him about it, every chance we get.
Right before starting school he went into his Terminator/Michael Jackson look. He was Mr. Cool. We were living at the Four Seasons apartments in Hewitt. There were tons of kids there and he was the coolest. He already would spend an hour getting his hair combed in the morning. His best friend was Roger, our neighbor. Roger would get out of work at 0700 am, and go sit outside with two cups of coffee. One for him and one for Carlos. Carlos would get up early so he could have his cup of coffee with Roger every morning.
He had alot of hair when he was born, but most of it fell off with in a few months. So we didn't cut his hair for the first five years of his life. He had long hair except on top. He would spike the top of his hair. Eventually country singers would catch on and start wearing the same style in the 90's and call it a mullet. By then Carlos had cut it off. Actually when he enrolled in pre-K, he had to cut it off to comply with the Midway dress code. He could read and write by the time he went to pre-k, knew all his colors and could add and subtract. Elfida was a stay at home mom, she and Carlos made daily trips to the Hewitt library for books.
We got a computer and within a year he was loading programs and figuring out Dos and widnows. I would come home and he had made changes on the computer. I would have him show me how it was done. The big advantage he had was that he never worried if what he was doing was going to work or not. He just tried it and if it worked, good, and if it didn't, well he just tried something else.
And then he hit those years where everything is boring. He was getting better at soccer, okay, he was real good at soccer but was still the smallest player on the team. Still his main interest were computers, books, soccer, and trying to be as good as his brother at what ever his brother was doing. There was a big age difference, seven years, Maiko was getting ready to leave home.
When Maiko left for Boot Camp, Carlos really missed his brother. We put Maiko's picture in his room. His brother became a Marine. We should have figured out then that Carlos would have to become a Marine too, cause his brother was one. When Maiko got married, he asked Carlos to be his best man. They both looked great, Maiko in his Dress Blues and Carlos in his Tux.
We groomed Carlos for College. He was smart, dedicated, studious and a good son. Then came his senior year. He told us he would not be playing soccer. It was no longer fun and he wanted to get a job. We didn't know what to do on weekends. For almost twenty years, ever since Maiko started playing at the age of 6, we had soccer games on weekends.
Carlos went to work at H.E.B. He was working 32 hours and going to school. He was sent to train to work the front desk where they handled large amounts of money and his schedule started to conflict with his school hours. He finally told the manager that he couldn't work those hours. He also told them that he was still in High School. They quickly moved him back to cashier, since their policy did not allow for high school kids to work the front desk. They had assumed he was a college student because he was so mature. In January of that year he told us he wanted to join the Marine Corps!! Elfida and I spent rest of the school year trying to convince him to go to college. When that didn't work we tried convincing him to join the Air Force, then the Navy, then the Coast Guard... eventually we figured that he wasn't going to change his mind, and we told him we weren't happy but would support him. In October of that year he signed up with the Marine Corps, and thank God Gunny Sunday was sent to Waco's Marine Corps Recruiting Station. That is another story about Carlos and his Boot Camp injury.
Well, he has been in the Corps for almost three years. Two more and he will be out. He has changed from that skinny kid to a tall muscular man. We are as proud of him as we are of Maiko. Both are good sons.
A special thanks goes to Dr. Cooney and Dr. Sharp for putting him back together and sewing him up every time he injured himself playing soccer or just running outside the house.
Oh yeah, his mom still spoils him. And we both love him, even though both our grand daughters act just like he did when he was little. We tell Maiko that it is his payback for the gray hairs he gave us.
After we got home with the groceries, our parents would put them away and we would paste the stamps on the books and count the books, again and again. The books were kept in a plain cardboard box in the kitchen, such a valuable treasure and it was just in a box. Yeah, we’d licked the stamps, and then with a loud slap we would place the stamps on the pages of the books. Out came the catalog again, page-by-page, we would thumb through it again picking a different toy this time.
I don’t know when mom and dad made it to the S & H store or if I ever got the toy I picked on the last thumbing through the catalog. I probably picked every toy in that catalog at least once, no I didn’t get every toy, I just picked it as the one I wanted. I never did find the secret place where the toys were hid once they were brought home. Some how the toys made it to Eagle Pass, TX. Where we usually spend Christmas, the part of the year when there are no crops to pick, when money was scarce, and we had the best family times.
