OK.
Also, I want to--
also, one thing I noticed that I was
doing as I was organizing what I wanted to read this evening,
I noticed that my father figured very strongly
in the things I chose.
And in a lot of the various pieces, my family is important.
And they show up in different ways.
A lot of times, it's my sisters or my mother, certainly
my father.
When other times, it's just memories of people
that I grew up around who passed on very early on.
But I have very strong memories of them.
So this one is not in the collection
that the students are reading for their class.
But this is an excerpt from an essay
that I did this fall as part of the Tucson Libraries Series
that I was invited to do.
And the section I pulled is the one about--
is the section, again, on my father.
And I pulled it because it's light and fun, in a way.
But it also ties back to this notion,
like I said, of helping us to have those papers that
says you're O'odham or you're from this particular place.
Anyway, so this piece speaks to that experience.
So, like I said, it's just an excerpt from the longer essay.
And the essay covers a range of things.
And one of the things it does cover is reading and writing,
and how we, as young people within our family, how
we sort of discovered, in our own way,
things that we chose to read as we grew up, even though we grew
up in a family, as I just read the list of things
that-- what our language is for, it's not for writing.
It's not for reading.
It's for these other things.
But once we started schooling and got exposed
to written print and books and stories,
we just sort of gravitated very easily to that.
So part of the essay kind of talks about that.
And so I chose this segment about my father and his writing
experience.
And my father, he believes he went to school.
He really can't remember if he went to school though.
But he believes he went to school
because he remembers vaguely playing softball or baseball.
And he says that's the only thing that you
do in school is play games.
So that's his memory.
But he could spell his name or write his name.
And that's what this section is about.
And since they didn't write a whole lot--
my mother didn't write at all, or read,
and my father could sign his name--
my sister signed a lot of things for them.
And I remember that very, very well.
And so that's how this one begins.
"As young elementary school children,
our big sisters always signed our report cards
for us, our parents never having to look at them.
One of my sisters used a signature
she created for our father which looked nothing like the one he
actually had for himself.
Yes, he could sign his name.
However, if you needed something signed by him,
you had to give him, advanced warning
and be willing to wait at least 10 or 15 minutes for him
to complete it.
He was slow and deliberate in his penmanship.
He set down each symbol carefully,
a combination of block print and cursive form.
His writing was almost as careful and deliberate as his
method for sautéeing onions.
The onion was chopped in uniform pieces and sautéed in a pan
at very low heat with gentle stirring,
until every piece was translucent.
He actually, I'm sure, would put many cooking channel folks
to shame with this ability.
We always knew he had been cooking
with onions when we entered the house since the whole place was
saturated with the aroma of slow-cooked onions.
It wasn't just the onions he cooked.
He cooked everything this way, slowly and carefully.
He chided us if we rushed through our preparation
of meals, and especially when we were cleaning dried beans.
He claimed he bit into more stones
when so-and-so cleaned the beans because they just rushed.
In his later years, my sister simply
handed the task over to him, perhaps tired of his critiquing
of bean-cleaning by others.
He was the dry bean cleaner.
But again, you had to let him know
in advance of the request for clean beans
so they could be put on the stove to cook.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be done in time for dinner.
For those of you who've never cleaned dried beans,
it requires good eyesight.
My father cleaned beans into his 80s and never used his glasses.
I, on the other hand, always needed
to put on my reading glasses in order to clean beans.
And I always remembered to try and do it slowly so
as not to miss those little stones that
are always part of dried beans.
My father's signature, even though I find humor in it,
played a significant role for our whole immediate family
and a large part of our extended family.
In 1984, when the O'odham tribe opened enrollment
for the first time in modern history,
many O'odham who were not officially enrolled members
had their opportunity.
Our entire family was eligible.
Initially, we were not enrolled simply because of our parents
migratory status of having two residences, one in Mexico
and the other in Arizona, and never living
on the reservation.
A criterion of our enrollment was a signed affidavit
by someone who knew us when we were born.
For our entire extended and immediate family,
that person was our father, being the oldest and certainly
the one who knew all of us as babies, as children.
The tribal enrollment office didn't
realize what they were getting themselves
into when they found my father would be
the one signing the affidavits.
One asked my oldest sister, can he sign his name?
My sister replied, yes, without any further elaboration.
We just looked at each other and smiled.
And so it began, the entire Zepeda clan sitting or standing
in a large conference room filling out paperwork
and piling them in front of my father.
My sister explains to him that he needs to sign each one
and why.
He smiles and acknowledges.
[SPEAKING O'ODHAM]
Yes, I know them all.
I know their mothers.
And I've seen all these people when they were little, when
they would all come around.
There were all his adult children, eight of us, all
our children and any grandchildren.
There were all his adult nephews,
nieces, their spouses, and their children and grandchildren.
There were probably about 30 or 40 adults he had to sign for.
[LAUGHTER]
He began signing in his slow, deliberate, and careful way.
We all gathered there for this process early in the morning,
not knowing how long it would take.
After a while, some adults went to pick up lunch for the rest.
Babies nursed and toddlers napped on the floor.
Things could and should not be rushed,
like the sautéeing of onions.
It must be done slowly to achieve perfect translucence.
It didn't dawn on me then, but my poor father's signature
played the most important role in our being officially
recognized as having tribal status, not only by the O'odham
Nation but also by the US government.
If it weren't for his signature, we
would be O'odham in all other manners except officially."
So that's about his contribution,
again, to our family.
So like I said, the essay does go on
about other elements of literature,
talking about literature.