Pops.

Brawley, California is an eight hour drive from Sacramento, at least according to Google. We all know that with most cars, that’s about three tanks full of gasoline, maybe a splash into a fourth tank at 582 miles.

Pops’ parents.

No one up here has really heard of Brawley or know that it’s a 45 minute drive to Mexicali, Mexico, or that it’s right next to the Salton Sea. See for yourself . All I knew of Brawley as a boy was that my gravel-voiced Great Uncle of Falstaffian Aspect, Faustino and his always impeccable wife, my Tìa Connie, lived there.

I’d forgotten that Pops, as we kids called him, was also born in Brawley.  1938 was the year that the birth certificate listed. Maybe I asked him once in the middle of a hot summer afternoon in Delano, standing on the driveway of my grandmother’s house, pretty close to the fields that he worked in as a young man, those fields that gave rise to a farmworker’s movement in the early sixties, fields that were by then over a couple of decades behind him. I must have forgotten, because I thought he was born in Earlimart, eight miles North of Delano. I blame the Delano heat.

He went by Jack, because it was easier for Anglophones to say than his given name, Joaquin. He was the eldest of four siblings. The other three, in order: Edward, Robert, and Olivia. My Grandfather, Joaquin Sr, was a still operator at the Perelli-Minetti winery in Delano, while my Grandmother Raquel worked at the Woolworths in Delano.

Pops was fortunate enough to have come of age during a rare period of peace, doing a short stint in the Marine Corps Reserve, where he wheeled around in quite possibly the oddest bit of mobile artillery ever devised, the Ontos tank destroyer. After the reserve duty, he took an associates degree in Criminal Justice from the College of the Sequoias. The Central Valley that he grew up in didn’t have much in the way of opportunity for him, so he moved up to Sacramento.

He worked at the then California Intelligence & Investigations, which became something else, but it wasn’t important because he’d hired on with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, whose academy was held in a park. William Land, maybe? He was also working part-time in the hardware department at Sears and amassed a tool collection that set abnormally high standards for cleanliness and organization.

Growing up on a farm as pop had, you learn to and do a lot with little and to repurpose things. He kept a stash of things under his workbench in old grape lugs, each lug marked on the end as to contents. Electric motors, wires, pipe fittings, the lugs numbered about twenty. Many cool things were constructed from the contents of those lugs.

His pleasures were simple and sentimental, Baseball, Football, listening to KNBR while watching the game; these were all things he did as a boy. A perfect evening in his later years was going to the stadium in Elk Grove to watch his grandsons play football, followed by a trip to a pizza joint or to home. Sports was always on at his house, and I could never understand how someone could get so excited for a team with all of the shouting and carrying on.  

As with so many other lives, pops’ history could fill a book. Not the life I observed and was a part of but those spaces where I wasn’t present, where he could simply be Jack Jr., fond of good looking cars and prettier women.

He died Tuesday. It was the fifteenth of September, 2020. His body simply gave up after a knee replacement surgery. He wanted so badly to be even a decade younger, to be able to move without thought and to prune the citrus, to mow his lawn, to fuss over things in the garage, to play with his grandkids and great grandchildren. Sis tried to wake him.

His body, even under the shroud of the blanket, wasn’t there. It was a husk of a human, a container for a spirit that had left in the night, passing out through eyes wide open and a final breath that was heard only by all of the Gods of Creation. We four stood witness as the attendants from the funeral home took him away, contours of limbs that lived well and long, a glimpse of his nose, angular feet covered with socks against the cold in the dead of a scorching summer. Smaller, frail, gone.

If anything, he was constant in appearance.