The life and times of Oscar Marcos Perez-Cytron. Born Thanksgiving Day 11/22/01.   Archives << current   If you want to add something to Oscar's baby-blog, send an email to megan@alpha60.com and we can set it up so you can post...

oscar's life   Monday, July 26, 2004 1:01 AM posted by Oscar   We are firmly ensconced in our new apartment on Calle de Toledo. Oscar loves to say the name of our new neighborhood "La Latina." It just rolls off his tongue. Today we went to the Retiro in the afternoon and met up with some Americans and Spaniards who get together on Sundays to play volleyball. They were a very interesting group. The Retiro is a huge park right in the middle of Madrid that was once a royal retreat. The way it is situated feels a bit like Central Park, but it's bigger and better designed with lots of gardens, trees, shady lanes and different spaces. Lots of families go there on Sunday afternoons to retreat from the oppressive summer heat. Young kids go there to hang out play drums and drink. Older couples stroll around with their friends on their paseo. Afterwards we went to Titerilandia--a puppet theater in a different part of the park that they have every weekend during the summer. It was Thumbelina. Oscar loved it. There was total audience participation with the kids shouting and heckling the puppets. Kids are quite a bit freer here--none of that "seen and not heard" mentality that we puritans have. We saw a woman who looked like a 30 year old Aunt Kathy seated next to a 7 year old Shea. It's funny how much we see people who look like Christian's Perez family. After the puppets we stopped for an horchata and then walked around the "estanque"--a big pond with rowboats and an impressive monument to Alfonso XII. Oscar fed the baby ducks and goldfish. We watched some drummers and he saw the panhandling furry storybook animal impersonators again. I think I was able to convince him that they weren't the real thing, because Tigger was just sitting, sprawled out on a folding chair with his tin can out. I reminded Oscar that a Tigger is a "wonderful thing" not some slacker shaking kids down for money. And everyone knows that real Tiggers never sit down. Later while we were walking home, he took a huge nosedive into the ground, cried a little and then told me that he was just being bouncy like Tigger. He's had a strange fever the past four days. No other symptoms, just a fever. On Saturday we got kind of worried, so we called the health plan that we had here to see what they thought we should do. They said they would send someone right over. We were dumbfounded...did we understand wrong? Less than an hour later, a doctor was at our front door. He checked Oscar out, didn't find anything major wrong, and advised us to keep doing what we were doing. A house call--the first one in our lives! It's been hot, really hot. Not DC hot, or St. Louis hot, or even Florida hot. It's dry heat. No sweat, it just dries right up. In the past 3+ weeks, it has rained less than an hour. The sun is so intense here. The difference between being in the sun and the shade can easily be 10 degrees. This week, it got up to 40 degrees Celcius. That's over 104 degrees. Did I mention that we don't have air conditioning. Very few people do here. So we keep our blinds and awnings down during the hottest part of the day and take a good afternoon siesta in front of a fan to miss the worst of the heat. They have blinds here called "persianas" that shut out 100% of the light. It makes a huge difference. At around 7:00 we venture out for an evening paseo. If you stay out during the siesta or go out in the sun too soon after it on a hot day, it feels like you are a bug under a magnifying glass the sun and heat are so intense that spontaneous combustion seems very, very plausible. I read in the paper that it reached 50 degrees in Seville. That's almost 120 degrees. I can't even imagine what that must feel like. If it gets that bad here, we may have to do like everyone else and vacate Madrid in August... Oscar adjusted with absolutely no problems to speaking Spanish all of the time. We speak English with him now at home and I think keeping the languages more separate has really helped him to communicate better in both. Attitude-wise, it's been a little rough. He has been embodying a lot of the 2-year-old negative traits. Much more back sassing, negativity and general rebellion. Still he has his very sweet moments. This heat makes everyone a little cranky, so we're just trying to take it easy, get out of our DC/overachiever mindset, and keep our ambitions in check. Oscar is a Don Quixote. He has such an active imagination that it almost frightens me at times. If he sees a movie or we read him a book that he likes, he literally inhabits this world for weeks. He saw Shrek a few weeks ago with Christian and he's been acting out parts of it ever since. He is most fixated on being Princess Fiona. He wants a donkey. Before that, it was Spirited Away. This movie has so many deep undertones to it, that I regret letting him see it, because he picked up on much more than I thought he would. It's not a violent movie, just a deep, beautiful one that operates on many levels. He has been very preoccupied with sickness and death. Sometimes out of nowhere he'll just say "Lolo is dead, like the cicadas." I don't even realize that he's thinking about this, but then I realize that I was thinking about it, too, somewhere deep down in my subconscious. There was one, very minor character--No Face--in Spirited Away who has an emptyness about him. He can't talk or communicate in any way other than saying "ah, ah" and holding his hands out. He tries to fill the void by giving other characters gold. Finally he gets the attention he craves. The other characters bring him feast after feast and he becomes huge and distended. In some cases, he gets carried away and eats a few of the characters and takes on aspects of their personalities. In the end, he gets very mean and sick. The main character heals him by giving him medicine and No Face vomits up all of the bad stuff he ate--including all of the eaten, but undigested characters. The reason I am recounting this is that for about a week, Oscar re-enacted this scenario. He would fill his mouth with lots and lots of food and then gag himself and make himself throw up "like a no-face," he said. He walked around saying "ah, ah" to people and just generally acted kooky a lot of the time. Christian and I were some consumed with finding an apartment that it took us a while to realize how serious he was about all of this. So we had to sit him down and really explain to him what the story was about. We told him that in the story No Face was sick because he didn't love anyone or have people who loved him. He didn't have any kind of work to do in his life. Or any place to go. But once he found a place where he fit in with people who liked him, he got better (he ended up staying in a swamp with an old lady, learning to spin yarn and knit). After that, we didn't have anymore problems with the bulimia. Thursday, July 01, 2004 1:53 PM posted by Oscar   I´m sitting in an internet cafe in Madrid... The past weeks have been a mix of melancholy, excitement, back-breaking work, sweat, dirt, goodbyes, and mourning. The day we left Washington, June 29th, Lolo died. I had a strange premonition months ago that this would happen. So we felt very conflicted as we left, but knew that he would want us to go. Actually, he was very clear about this before he died. He called me and told me with more emotion than I had ever heard in his voice that he would kick Christian´s butt if we didn´t go. Of course he didn´t really use the words "kick butt" he had a much more poetic and powerful way of saying it that escapes me at the moment. We will miss him so much. He was such a special person. He shared so much of his thinking, culture, dignity--but always in a way that was "suave." I know he´ll always be a part of the family, even if he can´t physically be here with us. I had been telling Oscar that Lolo was sick and that this made us sad (he said "I sad too"). We talked about the cicadas and how short their lives are. After Lolo died, I sat him down and told him that Lolo had died and that he wasn't in this world anymore (no esta en este mundo). He got quiet for a minute and then said with a sigh "I know" and without missing a beat "I'm hungry". And that's just how life is, I suppose. Here are two articles written about Lolo. It's nice to know how much he touched other people's lives... Good Life Bounded By Work, Respect By JOSH POLTILOVE and SHEENA FOSTER The Tampa Tribune Published: Jun 30, 2004 TAMPA - Louis H. Perez, former maitre d' and manager for one of Ybor City's top restaurants, died Tuesday of complications from cancer. He was 81. The son of immigrant cigarmakers from Spain, Perez spent about 20 years working for Las Novedades on Seventh Avenue. Charlie Miranda, a former city councilman, worked alongside Perez as a teenager. He said Perez was a hardworking part of the city's fabric, ``one of the individuals that really put Tampa on the map.'' Rudy Mendoza worked with Perez for three years as a busboy. ``He was a real professional man. He had a lot of respect for everyone, and everybody respected him,'' Mendoza said. Perez was born in Tampa in 1922. His childhood friends in Ybor teasingly called him ``Bicicleta,'' or ``Bicycle,'' after a woman named Louisa who biked through the neighborhood. The nickname stuck. Many of Perez's longtime friends didn't know his real name, his son Louis ``Skip'' Perez said. The elder Perez was an optimist. As a teen, he was hit in the right eye by a baseball and was blind in that eye within a year. About two weeks ago, Perez told his son he had lived ``a good life.'' When his son asked why, Perez said, ``I lived for 66 years with one eye, and I never went blind.'' Perez never held a grudge, friends say. ``I was the one who threw the baseball ... and it hit Louis in the eye. He got up blaming nobody,'' Joe Benito said. ``I never saw him angry at any time. Always smiling.'' Perez left Las Novedades shortly before the business was sold in 1970, becoming manager for Banana Trading Co. at the old city docks. When that business was sold to Del Monte Fruit, he became office manager in Port Manatee. He retired in 1989. The Hillsborough High graduate, who helped build bombers during World War II, enjoyed smoking cigars and playing dominoes with friends at Centro Asturiano. ``He was an extremely hardworking man with an amazing personality,'' Skip Perez said. Supporting locals; a notable life Tampa columnist HOOPER -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-mail: Click here -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive By ERNEST HOOPER, Times Columnist Published June 30, 2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REMEMBERING LOUIS PEREZ The businesses and restaurants that define Tampa are important, but so are its people. For decades, Louis Perez helped define Ybor City. Old-time Ybor City. Former City Council member Charlie Miranda knew him as "Bicicleta," Spanish for bicycle. Perez was one of the few kids with a bicycle when they were kids, and that's how it was in Ybor. People knew you by defining characteristics instead of names. Miranda's father was known as El Cubano, so he was El Hijo del Cubano (son of the Cuban). But Miranda said what really made Louis Perez special was the way he worked to better the lives of his children. This is the legacy of all the people who came to this city to labor in cigar factories and restaurants. "Like everyone, he worked very hard for his kids and daughters and relatives to get an education," Miranda said. "With education, you could work yourself out of any hole. There was no TV during that era, no air conditioning during that era. All they knew how to do was one thing, work." The lifelong Tampa resident had two careers: first as manager and maitre d' of the popular Ybor restaurant Las Novedades, and second as a bookkeeper and city docks terminal manager for the Banana Trading Co. A veteran of World War II, Perez counted Miranda and Judge E.J. Salcines among his acquaintances and knew Monsignor Laurence Higgins when he was just "Father." When the friends he would meet for dominoes every Saturday learned he was battling cancer, they staged a tournament for him. Of course, Louis won. Yet if his four children (Skip, Pat, Kathy and Anthony) are his legacy, then I owe Louis Perez a personal debt of gratitude. Eighteen years ago, his son Anthony gave me my first job out of college, offering firm but fair guidance through those infant days at a small paper in Leesburg. Now Anthony and I are both working at the Times, hoping to do what his father did, make a better life for our kids. Said Miranda: "Individuals like Louis Perez, and there are very few left, were a part of the foundation of the city of Tampa." Louis Perez died Tuesday morning at his home. Visitation will be 10 a.m. Friday at Our Lady of Perpetual Help (1711 E 11th Ave.) followed by a funeral Mass at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Lifepath Hospice of Tampa.