Notes in December
Note: This originally appeared in the Medium publication 100 Naked Words and appears in my book of essays 100 Little Life Lessons along with versions of some of these blog entries.
In “Notes in November,” a blog that I once maintained and have since abandoned, I wrote about what I believed made me the person that I am today. I managed to go through the seminal moments of my first life — the one I lived in Pennsylvania — and planned to continue through the events in my second life in Puerto Rico: the experience of total immersion in a different language, of university life, how I met my wife, the experiences of raising children, the events and the people who were significant, how my different careers came about and how they affected me — that kind of stuff.
In “Notes in November,” a blog that I once maintained and have since abandoned, I wrote about what I believed made me the person that I am today. I managed to go through the seminal moments of my first life — the one I lived in Pennsylvania — and planned to continue through the events in my second life in Puerto Rico: the experience of total immersion in a different language, of university life, how I met my wife, the experiences of raising children, the events and the people who were significant, how my different careers came about and how they affected me — that kind of stuff.
What inspired me to write an autobiography of an ordinary life? Genealogy. My son asked me, “Why do we have a Spanish last name?” His fellow students must have noticed something strange when we attended an event at the school — his mother Puerto Rican and his father a clearly Teutonic English-speaking guy.
Why indeed! There were plenty of German Flores around in Pennsylvania, many of them my relatives and most descendents of an early 18th century immigrant from the Palatinate, one Johan Conrad Flores. Today there are at least 1000 descendents of this man in my database.
My son’s curiousity kindled my own, but after years of research, I still have no reliable answer to his question and haven’t found the European origin of the Pennylvania German Flores family. Someday I hope to take on the task again.
It was this search however that inspired my aborted attempt at autobiography. As I uncovered facts about these ancestors, I could not begin to imagine why they lived where they lived, how they felt, how they met and married the women that they did (every single one of them German-Americans — including my Gunkle mother). It was frustrating to me, a hyper-curious guy.
So that is why I started Notes in November. I wanted to save my own descendents from the fate my ancestors suffered — their lives lost in oblivion, only the bare facts of their existence known. Why Notes in November? At the time and at my age, I considered myself in the penultimate stage of life, November, the next to the last. December, which signifies impending death, is next. I am nothing if not a realist.
So I embarked on the blog, wrote about how I lived, how I felt, what things were important to me. I got up to that pivotal moment for my children and their children, and their children’s children of how I embraced Puerto Rico and, as a result, they (and all my progeny) became Puerto Rican. German Flores morphed into Puerto Rican Flores.
Nobody read it. I marketed it on my family’s Facebook pages. No hits. The last time I looked I had three followers: two friends and one brother. I didn’t despair (too much) but I stopped writing it . I left it at the pregnant moment I landed on the island.
I plan to print it out and leave it with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of my life to be found after December, unless some other technology arrives before then that will better preserve it.
I refuse to believe that there will not be a little Ronald someday who will ask the questions I have asked about his ancestors, and will be delighted to find one who has left behind some answers.
My books are available here:
https://www.amazon.com/Ronald-C.-Flores/e/B0044I3SF8
