Memories by Freddie A. Mejia

I remember San Francisco when I was a child. The flashing lights of the Fillmore hotel sign. Off and on, off and on. Watching those blink from a rolled up rug. I believe we had just moved from Los Angeles. I think the Fillmore hotel was on top of a bank or across the street from it. 

I remember having donuts and coffee with my dad. I think I was 5 years old.

I remember the blackouts with the lights from huge spot lights lighting up the sky crisscrossing the night sky, the city dark other than those searching lights.

After the war I remember airplanes filling the sky in victory celebrations.

I remember the convoy of ships heading out to sea as we watched from the Golden Gate Bridge. We threw shredded newspaper strips down onto the ships below, the crew shouting and waving at us. My sister Dorothy remembers them as flowers. I told my mom that we would never see Dad again. My father was eaten by a shark in Manila Bay. 

So I was put in Foster Care (the Garcia family) and my sister into an orphanage.

I remember being in a crib. My sister Dorothy tells me I was used as an antenna for a family radio, and that my mom found me in a crib with a wet diaper that hadn’t been changed all day. A social worker told my mother that in order to support us she should/would have to get a job and put us into some kind of childcare. 

I remember Mom throwing a rock through the window bam, bam, bam, breaking it and taking me out of the crib and leaving the Foster care family with me in hand!

I remember the Sunnydale Projects which was where we lived together after my Mom took me out of Foster Care. 

I remember when we lived at Aliso Village in Los Angeles, when I was about three or four years old. Dorothy and I set our neighbors’ clothes on fire one day. We had taken a branch, lit it from a fire pit that was already there, and circled the clothesline, lighting the clothes on fire. When the neighbors came yelling and shouting to my Mom about what her children had done, she told them she would punish us. She led us into the bathroom, put her finger to her mouth with a shoo, a twinkle in her ever playful eyes, told us to cry and shout every time she hit the bathroom sink with her hair brush, and the she proceeded to hit the sink amidst our cries and shouts. 

I remember one!

Mom wanted to be picked up to visit us in Soquel. She was living in Monterey.  So Johnny and Celeste got in the car and drove to pick her up at the Santa Cruz/Salinas bus depot an hour away. When they arrived, they couldn’t find her. They called and told us that she could not be located. They returned back to Soquel. She called after a while asking why no one was here to pick her up, that she had been waiting. Back Johnny and Celeste went to the bus station. She had been asleep on the bench and they hadn’t thought of that, nor had they looked for her in that location.

I remember in Spain at night the cars drove without street lights, just headlights. 80 miles an hour in the city.

A drawing:

sun/moon pizza shape  – I am a gami (gemini) 6/10/39