Padre Cisco: Conversations with a Desert Father

Copyright © 2018 Michael McCabe.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-5359-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5360-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5358-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018910220

iUniverse rev. date: 09/07/2018

CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue

Winter

1. The Secrets of Selling Insurance

2. One Hundred Miles of Alaskan Tundra

3. Pygmies to Bicycles

4. The Parable of the Worm

5. Retired or Retread?

Interlude … Coffee

Spring

6. The Empty Cup

7. Two Monks, Two Wolves

8. The Three Rs

9. The Kitchen-Picnic Table

Interlude … Tea

Summer

10. The Sweeper

11. Groundhog Day

12. Koan the Librarian

Interlude … Beer

Autumn

13. Dance Partners

14. The Seven Wise Men

15. Follow the Water

Interlude … Wine

Winter

16. The Case of the Queen Anne Chocolates

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Who and What Is Real?

For

Becky

Jane

You make me want to be a better man.

Abba, give me a word.

What is your intention, my son?

To live out that word, Abba.

So be it, my son.

PREFACE

If it is not your story to tell, you don’t tell it.

~ Iyanla Vanzant

I talked to Padre Cisco many times. To casual scrutiny, his stories at times can be obscure in meaning or roundabout in delivery. I am a cartoonist, and I hold my memory in images rather than words. While I cannot always attest to the specifics of the padre’s stories, I can attest to their truth. Wisdom is wisdom regardless of its container; we recognize it when it appears.

The stories in books like the Torah and similar ancient collections tell not only of what happened long ago but also of what happens in each generation. The stories occur over and again in the life of each person. They are true, not because they happened but because they happen.

Often Padre Cisco would state some variation of I don’t know if the story happened this way or not, but I know it to be true.

This was an understanding of classical storytelling in ancient times in the Near East and the pre-colonial Americas. Storytellers would begin with a similar phrase. They knew their responsibility was to get the substance of the story correct if not all the details. If they varied too far, their audience would demand a correction. If you have read the same story or fable to your children or grandchildren and gone off script, you may have heard, No, Papa or No, Mama, read it right. Such is my retelling of the padre’s stories.

In my intent to tell the stories of Padre Cisco, what I did not anticipate was my discovery of the unfolding story of Rocky Stellar.

~ Peter Paul Stellar

PROLOGUE

The Man

"If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me.

I want to hear it again."

~ Groucho Marx

I met Juan Francisco Angel O’Shaughnessy thirty years ago when he was teaching at Arizona State University. People knew him then as Dr. Frank O’Shaughnessy. We’ve kept occasional contact since. I am on his email list, but the connection has been more mine. I would get a message when he had a storytelling booking in the area. I attended when I could, as much to stay connected with him as to hear his latest stories. My wife, Gen, went sometimes, and Morgan and Alex would accompany us when they were young.

Padre Cisco, as he is known today, has a Gandhi-like quality about him in a rather Ben Kingsley sort of way. He is short, bespectacled, shaved bald, tan, and bandy-legged. He typically wears khaki cargo shorts, long-sleeved shirts, and Hoka hiking sandals. He wears a plain wooden cross on a leather thong around his neck. I asked him about it one time, and he said, I wear it to hold myself accountable to my faith. I want people to know what they can expect of me. Sadly, because of people’s experiences with Christians, some do not expect much of me.

He is seldom outside beyond mid-morning without a broad-brimmed hat. He’s lived in the desert most of his life and is aware of its consequences. The sandals are a self-proclaimed extravagance, a consciousness if not obsession about taking care of his feet. Padre Cisco said to me, What is the use of standing on your own two feet if they are crumbling beneath you? He, also, says, I am a vegetarian unless there is meat around. I have learned to take his maxims with a grain of salt.

From what I know of his career, the padre is likely in his late seventies but of indeterminable age from appearance. He is the descendent of Irish immigrants and a Yaqui shaman. His great grandfather on his father’s side was a peasant farmer, who emigrated from Galway County, Ireland, in 1879 during the mini-famine. His grandfather was four at the time. The family traveled from Baltimore to Pennsylvania and eventually found their way to Laredo, Texas, where they farmed.

After graduating from high school, his father worked his way to Arizona and met Toloko Taa’am, Turquoise Water in English. Her name came from the deep, blue water near her birthplace. They married, and Francisco was born soon afterward. When America entered World War II, his father enlisted in the army. He served in Europe, surviving to live out his days in Eloy, Arizona, working on a cotton farm where he eventually became the irrigation manager. Francisco grew up roaming the farms and desert around that rural Arizona community.

Padre Cisco told me Toloko was the granddaughter, many generations back, of a Yaqui shaman, who traveled in the early 1500s across Mexico with the conquistador Juan Francisco de Coronado. The padre’s parents named him for Juan Francisco.

Padre Cisco is the oldest of four children, two brothers and a sister. He is the first of his family to go to college. All four attained their parents’ dream for them to finish college, and all work in professional positions. He attended the University of Arizona, studying history and anthropology, got a Master’s in Education from Northern Arizona University, and took a job teaching in Phoenix. He fell ill and went to the hospital where he met Andrea, his nurse, who became his wife. He earned a PhD at Stanford art history and political science. He once told me the one advantage he experienced as a Yaqui, a minority within a minority, was that it got him into Stanford. He thought about working for the State Department or the Peace Corps, but events altered his vision. He and Andrea conceived their first child, and he continued teaching.

Padre Cisco came from a heritage of readers. Even his grandfather was literate though he had limited access to books. The padre told me his father was fond of quoting Mark Twain’s aphorism, The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. Padre Cisco loves playing with words, keeping lists of homophones, inserting puns in conversation, creating new words, and writing what he calls his fictionary. He grew up speaking English and passable Gaelic, and learned Spanish with a Tex-Mex influence. At times there is the lilt of brogue in his voice, though I believe he plays on it a bit when he wants to make a point. He lost his wife years ago, never remarried, and has three children living out of state.

Padre Cisco lives alone in a small house in the desert, harkening back to ancient times when thousands of Christians fled to the Middle Eastern deserts to live the lives of hermits and aesthetics. They were the desert fathers and mothers, the Abbas and Ammas, of the third through fifth centuries. Padre Cisco is ostensibly a modern-day desert father. While not an ascetic, he lives simply. Everything for Padre Cisco is multi-use; he chooses function over appearance.

This, however, is not the man, but simply the shape of the man. The man himself is an enigma. If I ask him for his point of view, he gives me information. If I ask for information, he tells me a story. If I ask for a story, he replies with a question. He answers questions with questions and my comments with lengthy gazes. There seems to be no end to his obliqueness. He laughs a lot and loves to laugh at himself.

He is a storyteller and wisdom teacher, though he says all he knows he learned from movies, novels, and the occasional song. He describes himself as an unteacher, claiming that the term teacher is an elaborate subterfuge for preacher, which to the padre means one who engages in the vice of proselytizing. Un seems to be a favorite prefix: unteaching, unlearning, unknowing, unreaching, or ungrasping. He speaks of engaging in unthinking; now that is unthinkable (pardon me for that). His favorite prefix may be un, but without doubt, his favorite word is perhaps. Padre Cisco and the men around him seem to think and converse in a continual state of perhaps. He seldom speaks in absolutes. Whatever it is that he knows or how he chooses to share it, he has an uncanny ability to vex me. It can be unnerving, but I keep returning. I like him.

Winter

One

The Secrets of Selling Insurance

Abba, you were invited to a conference.

Yes, my son.

Did you go?

No, my son.

Why not, Abba?

So I would be present for you.

But I didn’t tell you I was coming.

Yet, you are here as am I.

From the first time, I went to visit Padre Cisco, I’ve had a sense that he was expecting me. Typically, I call though I am still apt to drop in on him. During the early days, he didn’t have a phone, but his kids pressed him to get a cell phone. Cajoled him into it would be more accurate. He spends time walking the desert alone. Given his age they worry about him. For a long time he only carried a flip phone. They wanted him to upgrade to a smart phone, but he said, Mine works; what do I need beyond that? It rings and I answer it.

Sometimes, they claimed. He relented when he learned he could use the phone as a hot spot for his computer.

The aroma of chorizo wafted from the house as I approached. I called out my presence, and he emerged from the kitchen wearing a benign smile I remembered from my time at the university with him. Hello, Peter, he greeted me and opened the screen door, inviting me in. He reached out to take my hand, and we stood in the cordial embrace of shaking hands as he asked after my welfare and that of Gen and the kids. He offered me one of the two chairs in the great room, though I soon learned it was more than a chair. It was made of oak and had squared-off arms and legs with a solid flat back. It seemed large for the space. When I sat on the thin cushion, I found myself looking over Padre Cisco’s head. He sat in a wicker chair festooned with a flowery round cushion as decorously inappropriate as most of his furnishings. I felt as though I were sitting on a throne. Padre Cisco asked if I wanted coffee. At my assent, Black, he got up to get it from the kitchen.

Padre Cisco’s house is near Three Points on Highway 86, southwest of Tucson. If you asked him, he would say he lives in the Rio Sonoita Basin between the Boboquivari Mountains and the Tumacacori Highlands, as though that would help. I wouldn’t call his home remote, but it is certainly rural even by Arizona standards. It’s about a half mile off the nearest road.

His house is made of adobe with red terra cotta tile roof except for the back, which faces southeast. Solar panels cover that side. The house is about six hundred square feet plus the basement. He contracted the foundation and three-foot-thick, ram-packed adobe walls. The contractor built the walls from the adobe dug out to make the basement. He completed the rest of the work himself. Padre Cisco describes it as his sweat equity project.

He is connected to the grid but powers his house and well mostly by windmill and the solar cells. He paid to have the power line from the highway buried so he would not interrupt the landscape. He has a radio but no TV, much less cable. He has a computer and Internet, but few of what we would call necessities in urban living. He cooks on a propane-fueled stove with a wood-burning backup outside, does laundry by hand, hanging it on a steel cable clothesline, and cleans the light brown polished cement floor with a broom and a mop.

I surveyed the room; it was simply furnished. A beehive fireplace with a niche holding a figurine of the Madonna filled one side. The walls are a latte color. A framed star chart hung on one wall along with a photo of the Milky Way taken from the Hubble Telescope. Well I’ll be… Across from it hung an original of an early SoCal and Knuckles comic strip, Nuke the Whales. That was their hippie and protest era. They raged against anything that didn’t move freely, from caged minks to Republicans. I gave it to Padre Cisco just after he left the university. I would have never thought I’d see that here…and framed. A small writing desk sat below it with a lamp, a stack of books, and a laptop computer. A bookcase stood sentinel next to it with neatly arranged rows of books like soldiers waiting their call. There was a wrought iron pole lamp next to his chair. An overturned galvanized steel bucket sat between the two chairs. While sparsely furnished without a touch of style, the house was trim bordering on Spartan. There was no clutter, computer cords were bundled behind the desk, and the room was spotless.

What brought you out here? he said, offering me a hand-fashioned mug of coffee.

Oh, I don’t know. Gen suggested I talk with you. You know Gen. She’s worried about me. She says I don’t seem to be myself lately.

Did you have waffles for breakfast? he asked with a hint of amusement.

No, I don’t usually eat breakfast/ I’d missed the allusion.

I have not eaten either; we should eat first. It is better to talk on a full stomach.

He set about fixing breakfast. He chopped and sautéed onions and small potatoes from his winter garden; and folded them along with the chorizo into scrambled eggs. He wrapped all of it in warmed, hand-made tortillas. Padre Cisco offered no small talk, working wordlessly as I stood to the side in the small kitchen. It was compact but efficient like the house itself and bore signs of how he lived. Iron skillets and pots hung from a rack. Drying herbs dangled among them like bats from a ceiling. More herbs and spices in small jars with hand-lettered labels sat alphabetically on a shelf over the stove. A timbered beam from floor to ceiling standing next to the stove had hooks and eyebolts screwed into it and held implements usually stored in drawers. Fruit, onions, and potatoes hung in baskets. He had nearly doubled the usable space.

He asked me to carry the glasses and table service to the living room. The plates and glasses were ceramic in the same handmade style as the mugs. When I asked about them, he said his mother had been a potter, and he still dabbled in it. I think he more than dabbled. He set the bucket to the side and moved the chair I had sat in to the center of the room. He flipped the back over onto the arms, turning the chair into a table. He called it a tablechair. His great grandfather bought it from a Pennsylvania Dutch family and carried it to Texas. It served the small space well as a chair and when needed as a table. He retrieved two folding chairs from a closet. I set the table, he brought in the food, and we sat down.

He said a quick grace, Holy One, thank you for the blessing of Peter’s visit and for the opportunity to share a meal. He silently paused, said, Amen," and we ate. We made small talk, catching up on the previous year. I wasn’t ready to talk about my reason for the visit. We talked about the Sun Devils’ football season, the possibility of coaching changes in Tempe and Tucson, the upcoming Duel in the Desert, and how acrimonious the fans had become in that rivalry.

I remarked about the ingenuity of the tablechair, and asked him about the wicker chair. It was the one item in the room decidedly feminine. He said the chair had been his wife’s, and he sensed her presence when he sat it in. It was one of only a few times, I heard him mention her, but it was clear that in all the years since her death he had not let her go completely. I knew he adored her. In grad school, he would end our night classes by saying, We must quit now; I want to get home to my bride.

Is astronomy your hobby, Padre? pointing over my shoulder at the Hubble photo.

Yes and no, Peter. I pay daily attention to the sky, watching it move and change. I love to gaze at it just before the sun rises. I like to keep track of the seasons, the moon and such, but I am hardly an astronomer. I am not sure I would know which end of a telescope to look into. I would call myself a sky watcher. I keep the chart and photo to remind me of my place in the universe. It is a very small place though certainly larger than I need.

I thought it was very small, but then he probably wasn’t talking about his house. I told him about Morgan and Alex’s progress in med and law school and that we didn’t hear from them often. We ran the gamut of topics, omitting religion, the weather, and politics.

We finished eating, cleared the table, and returned it to its service as a chair. He placed the bucket between the chairs. We sat down with coffee. Padre Cisco placed his cup there demonstrating its use. Without segue, Padre Cisco said again, Tell me what brought you.

I’m not sure, but I know that I need to talk to someone.

Padre Cisco’s response was nothing more than a slight tilting of his head and the turning of his hand, bidding me to continue.

I gave the padre a thumbnail of my dilemma. I turned fifty-nine in August. Sixty is above the horizon. It’s weird and unsettling. Birthdays have never bothered me before, but this one snuck up on me. It’s different. I don’t know what I am supposed to do. I lost my syndication. They wanted a younger artist to appeal to a younger demographic. I had talked with my agent about altering the strip, but this happened out of the blue. Sixty is supposed to be the new fifty, isn’t it? My hair is barely turning gray. I’m not ready for the rocking chair. I’ve worked all my life. I don’t have to work. Gen and I are more than financially secure, but I don’t know how not to work.

My friends told me that this is a gift. My entire future is open to me. I get to relax, take up golf, or go on a cruise. Get real! I don’t like golf, and I get seasick in a rowboat. I called Alex and Morgan and shared what had happened. She told me the same thing; it’s a gift. She didn’t hear a word I said. Sometimes, I wonder who raised her. Alex seemed to have some sense of commiseration. He at least he gave me more than five minutes.

You wouldn’t recognize those kids, Padre.

Alex is six-two and has grown a beard. It’s more than one of those scraggly beards young men grow. It’s full and dark like his hair. He has filled out. He doesn’t have that gangly look as he did when he was in high school. Morgan looks like her mom. She has the tanned complexion and short, sun-bleached hair of a surfer. She’s six foot and carries it well. She’s aware she turns men’s heads. She’s another California girl.

I would enjoy seeing them again.

So would I, Padre. They are hard to corral. They are very independent, Morgan probably to excess. I love them dearly, but they can try a father’s patience.

That is their calling.

I’m hearing no support here, laughing at myself. I should get back to the work issue. I’m not ready to retire. Retirement has never been a part of my vision of the future. I just can’t just see myself in my town car motoring safely down the freeway at 55 mph to the Social Security office and shuffling up to the window to check in so I can check out.

Padre Cisco sat quietly. I wanted him to respond. I wanted him to nod, agree, commiserate, say something, anything. What I got was…I don’t know what I got. I wanted his sympathy. He was there. He was attentive, seemingly focused on what I had said, but he was mute. We sat there in silence for what became an eternity.

Why did I think this was going to make a difference? Maybe this was a mistake; I should go. Finally, the exasperation coming through my words, I said, What am I doing here?

You seem to have a lot of questions. His response startled me.

Yes, I do. I don’t know what I am supposed to do. I’m out of work for the first time in forty years, know nothing but drawing, and I’m climbing the walls.

So what is the deeper question?

What is the deeper question? What do you mean?

What is the deeper question?

I don’t know what it is.

Padre Cisco shifted his weight up straighter. Let us sit on that. He closed his eyes and inclined his head forward.

Seeing no alternative, I followed suit.

We sat there for five or more minutes. It took me a while to feel comfortable, first physically and even more so with my thoughts. My mind was awash with ideas, questions, and distractions. I thought about my career, a failed marriage, meeting Gen, the twins, trips and vacations. Morgan. Meningitis. She could’ve died. I wasn’t there for her. Dad. We’ve been at odds since I left. I journeyed to New York to the awards banquet and my award. Now they’ve put me out to pasture. I guess I had my fifteen minutes. I relived a thousand moments in the span of those few minutes. Experiences soared through my head like comets, and I had no star chart on the wall to plot them. The deeper question, what is the deeper question? I tried to focus. Was it worth it? You get your moment, and then they axe you. Is that it? Did it matter? Did I matter? Is that the deeper question? I drew cartoons, comic strips, and I’m done?

I heard Padre Cisco in the distance, When you are ready, come back to the present. Silently rousing myself back to the moment, I sat there in this strange self-inflicted circumstance. Finally, I said, I’m here.

So what is the deeper question? I heard for the third time.

Is my name the only thing that is stellar about me? Can I be proud of what I have done? Do I have anything to be proud of? Is anyone proud of me? Am I a good man? Was it all worth it? What am I supposed to do now? The questions came rushing out of me, and the air seemed to go with them. I took a deep breath and experienced a sense of relief just having voiced them.

Padre Cisco sat silent for a few moments, and then a smile came over his face. "Peter, It just occurred to me that you have quite a sixtuation here."

Do you mean situation, padre?

No, sixtuation is the word. I read an article by two young women approaching thirty. They referred to being in ‘a thrisis.’ I think if approaching thirty is a thrisis, then approaching sixty would be a least a sixtuation.

Padre Cisco picked up his cup from the bucket and asked if I wanted more coffee or a glass of water. I said, I’m fine. What I wanted was a drink, and it was more than water that I wanted.

He continued as he went to the kitchen. "I keep a list of words I think might be useful some day. I call it a fictionary. I will have to add sixtuation. If you had lost your syndication ten years from now I might say, it is natural because you are approaching the sevenerance generation. I like that one. Let’s see. I have no thought for the seventies, but the eighty and ninety-year-olds would face ninecessities and eventually centastrophies.

"It is just a frivolity. It started with my kids. Gionic I think was the first one. It was one of my children’s