Peter Aguero (4:25)
And I just reach up and I grab her ear and I twist and I say, does this hurt? It was the first intentional time that a son will hurt their mother by accident, on purpose. It happens a lot after that. That's why every Mother's Day card, when it says, Happy Mother's Day from your son, is always an apology. And so that's just the way it goes. So she says, would you like to go on a treasure hunt? And of course, I'm four. And she hands me a brown piece of paper. It's all rolled up and there's a ribbon. I untie it and I open it up. It's crumpled up map of our house in black marker. And I don't see on the back that it says acme. You know, it was the shopping bag. But it looks like a treasure map that she had found somewhere. And so I follow the dots. I get up out of bed, I spring out, and I go downstairs and I follow this map out to the front porch. And at the front porch, underneath one of the chairs, is another rolled up Little piece of paper, and it tells me another clue. It tells me to go down in the basement. I go down to the basement. Underneath. The house is totally silent, and my father and my sister aren't there. I'm four years old. I don't know everybody's business, so I can't tell you where they were. That's lost to time. And from at the basement, at the base of the stairs, another roller piece of paper that sends me outside to the giant maple tree. I go to the maple tree. There's a spoon and some disturbed dirt, And I dig in that little disturbed dirt, and I pick up another little piece of paper. And that sends me to the dining room and under the dining room table. As I'm going through the house on this adventure, running around pretending I'm some kind of treasure hunter pirate, my mom is, like, peeking around the corners, and she's watching me do this, and she's got this big grin on her face. And eventually it sends me back up to my room, to the closet in my room. And in my closet is another brown paper shopping bag that's folded over with the black marker. It looks like it has wood grain on it, like a treasure chest. And I open it up, and inside, there's two things. A small little velvet box and a box of Duncan Hines devil's food cake mix. And my mom says, you want to make a cake? Absolutely I want to make a cake. So we go downstairs, and she cracks the eggs, and she adds the oil and adds the mix, and she lets me help with the mixer. Everything was avocado green in 1980, and it was those Pyrex clouded. Those Pyrex bowls that were. That were, like, painted green on the outside with flowers and mushrooms. Cause it was from the 70s. Everybody like flowers and mushrooms, if you know what I mean. And then the inside was white. And then you're mixing it up, and then it would chatter up the side of the bowl. And you felt like the most powerful kid in the world. At least I did. And we make the bowl, and as we're taking the cake and she's helping me scrape it out of the bowl into the cake dish, she starts to tell me about her brother, her brother Gregory that she loved so much. And Gregory was her big brother, and he was amazing. He was so smart. And he was in. He went into the army. When he got out of the army, he got a job with rca, and that was a big company. And he ended up going to Greenland to do work for rca. Was the first person in Our family, since they came from Poland to leave the country again and be allowed to come back and like it was. She. And I never knew Gregory because she told me when Gregory was at that time, you know, he was in his 30s before I was born. About five years before I was born, he got melanoma, she told me. She explained melanoma was. And she explained that at that time, once he. There was a mole, and then once that there was this mole, they couldn't do anything about it. And less than a year later, he was gone. So as the cake, she's telling me this as the cake is baking, and as the cake comes out of the oven, we let it cool. And as the cake is cooling, she shows me how to make this purple cream cheese icing. And we're gonna put it on there. And then she says, you want to open up the box. And the little velvet box is a tiny little pen knife. Like a small, little fold out pen knife from a world's fair. And she says, this was Gregory's knife, and I think he would have wanted you to have it. So in 1980, it was okay to give a kid a knife that was nobody. A lot of flowers and mushrooms, if you know what I'm saying. Like, it was like, that was. There was no problem with that. So I'm so excited. She's like, well, the cake has to cool down before we ice it. Why don't you go outside and play? And so I did. I'm with a knife and I'm out there and I'm fighting with the pirates again. This knife is this big. And I'm. But I'm having the best time. I can't believe it. Not only did it belong to Gregory, but it was now it was my knife. And it was just unbelievable. And she had told me. I forgot to mention that she had told me we were making the cake because today would have been Gregory's birthday. And she said it was my gift. I got to have the gift today. So it's like I'm singing Happy Birthday, Gregory, and I'm done all this. Then I see a branch that fell from the tree. A little small branch. So I start. What do you do with a knife?
