In 1969 our family visited Quito and San Rafael...I was approx 8 yrs old, and vividly remember several things.  For just over 2 months we stayed at our grandparent's Luis/Ines's farm in San Rafael, and had a chance to see what life was like on an Equadorian family farm.  Many stories here, but there was another wambrita we would meet.

Cousin Susanna was about my age, one of the few children that we got to play with while in Ecuador.  We would play in the fields, avoiding the bulls, but doing all the things kids do:  playing by the creek/river, throwing stones, picking fruit when we could.  There was an old, dilapidated choza with the roof falling in, which we played nearby.  Susanna told us that the Devil had been there, and that we couldn't get too close to it because children would disappear.  We got really close, but not close enough to encourage the Devil.  Then she said...we need to get rid of the Devil...and to our astonishment, she produced matches and began to set fire to the dry field around it.  The winds kicked up and we panicked...we started stomping on the spreading fire, worried that we were going to get San Benito's whipping if we set the whole field ablaze.  It was the first time we had ever played with fire, and we were so scared. Three dumb kids wearing shorts, we were able to stomp the fire out, but had ashes all over our legs and shoes.  I remember going by the creek and doing our best to wash off the evidence that we had been playing with fire.  Thank God we overcame that fire.

Susanna surprised us by saying that she could fly.  Really?  Yes, let's jump off that big rock over there.  She would dare us to jump off, that she did it all the time.  Oh yeah?  show us.  She wouldn't show us, she would touch us on the shoulder and say, "there, I touched you, now you can fly like me..".  but she always wanted us to jump first.  Andrew and I were so skeptical, that we didn't do it...you show us first!  It never happened.  

Susanna la wambrita probably laughed at us boys from the city...we almost set the neighborhood on fire and we could have jumped off a big rock into the fast flowing creek.  Years later when we confessed to mom about what had happened, she laughed and said...un aventura. (an adventure).

So like all kids, we got into trouble.  
On the first day at Catholic School, dad and mom presented us to the nuns, and Dad told them:  "if my kids misbehave, you have my permission to smack them...".  Mom looked worried, which worried us.  The nuns took it to heart.  If you were bad or just got the blame for something you didn't do, they would have you stick out your hand, they would grab your wrist and smack your hand with a ruler.  After getting smacked, you had to sign your name on the ruler!

At home, mom would say to us when were bad or being obstinate:  When your father gets home, San Benito is also coming to you.  (Cuando viene to padre, San Benito viene tambien).  San Benito was one dad's old thick leather belts with a silver cowboy belt buckle.  San Benito (St Benedict was a famous catholic saint known for his power of evading the Devil and escaping the traps the Devil had set for him).  To be hit with San Benito was to be "blessed" with good, (according to our parent's thinking) even though it hurt. 

I can still remember my brother Andrew running around the house and backyard like a bunny rabbit, trying to escape mom who chased him with San Benito in her hand, saying "  aqui viene San Benito.." and seeing my brother duck in an out of crawl spaces to avoid being hit.  One time, we had seen a movie where the heroes used twine and a steel hook and would throw the hook to catch on things and flip items towards them, saving the day.  We though it was so cool that we made our own from dad's collection of hardware in the garage.  One day we both simultaneously hooked onto the same ashtray and we both pulled it apart, having broken it into two pieces after being told not to use our hooks inside the house.  That was the worst evening, when San Benito was used to whip us until blood just started to come out.  It was a terrible experience and we never saw much of San Benito after that.  Mom and Dad were horrified that we had been injured.  Of all us kids, Andrew got it more often...he was always stealing beef off off everyone's dinner plates, even when we had parties or family visiting.  And so the blessing of San Benito was part of our lives, until it was banned.

Next to fruit, mom's favorite thing was seafood...any seafood.  Dad grew up in El Paso, Texas and in Greenbay, Wisconsin, land-locked areas so lake fish were fine, but seafood was as alien to him as those nasty russet potatoes were to mom.  Apart from the occasional Halibut or Snapper that mom gave us on Friday's (no meat on Friday's, mom was very catholic), no other seafood was tolerated at home except Van de Camp's fish sticks.

La wambra had her ideas altogether.  She would tell dad that we were off to the market on a saturday, and we would drive out to Marina Del Rey, or to the famous San Pedro Fish Market with dockside eating.  In Marina De Rey on Fisherman's Wharf, mom would search out seafood restaurants and while we kids would feed the seagulls and run around the wharf, she would get herself a bucket of clams, or even her favorite, Dungeness Crab.  Mom taught us how to use the crackers to break open the shells, and she would suck the meat out of the crab, with juice running down her chin.  Afterwards we had to wash up carefully, so as not to arouse dad's suspicions should he smell seafood on us or our clothes.  It was our secret, she even took us to McDonalds to get an ice cream cone on the way back home.  She wasn't going to be denied seafood!

Mom's favorite thing to eat was fruit...any fruit.  She would choose fruit over sweets, chocolate, anything.  Our backyard had 7 fruit trees, which were mom's pride and joy.  But Dad hated all the leaves and dropped fruit on the ground...every day after work he would be outside sweeping up those leave and fallen fruit.  He liked it neat, mom was ok when it was messy outside.  Both had grown up on farms, but dad needed order.  

One day mom came home from work to find dad had cut down her prized persimmon tree.  It had the largest sweet persimmons, I can still remember us eating them straight from the tree with juice running down our mouths and chins.  "Tony, eres un Soquete, porque cortaste mi fruta?  (soquete es necio o tonto en Uruguay y Argentina).  Dad Tony, you're a stubborn idiot, why did you cut down my fruit tree?

Sadly this was repeated many times, (avocado, lemon, persimmon, plum, grapefruit & Mandarin orange) until the only tree that survived was the Valencia orange tree.  So what did mom do? 

Mom loved not just eating fruit, but her real joy was picking the fruit off the tree and eating right there and then.  She was so excited that she barely cleaned the fruit off...she loved freshly picked anything.  So we used to at least twice a month drive to a (free at the time) public garden called Descanso Gardens, in La Canada-Fllintridge, CA, (known for its camelia collections, fruit trees and lilac grove) about a 45 minutes away.  We kids loved to run wild enjoying the flowers, the peacocks and to feed the ducks at the pond; we had wonderful picnics, with mom's famous baloney sandwiches.  In the back of the gardens was an area where they had groves of fruit trees...oranges, grapefruits, etc.  Mom would have one of us kids posted as lookouts while she would run into the grove, pick fruit and eat it right there, hiding from the garden's gardeners and security people.  If we saw someone official coming by we would whistle to warn her of impeding doom.  La wambra never got caught!  Tutti Fruiti was the name of a very popular musical piece that our parents had on a vinyl record, from Little Richard 1955, one that got played whenever we had parties in our home.  The meaning of tutti frutti?  All fruit, in Italian.

When we were at least 4 yrs old, mom had each one of us kids grow our first crops.  Each kid has his own row or furrow to tend.  Mom loved gardening and picking from her fruit trees.  She taught us how to prepare the soil, make a nice straight furrow with our fingers, and then we would drop the radish seeds in, cover it up, and use the watering can to water the seeds.  (We started with radishes, then tomatoes, then carrots, peas, eggplant and corn).  Every day we would run outside and check on those seeds, until the first green shoots came up.  We ended up with so many radishes that we couldn’t possibly eat them all…we got tired of eating them and mom would try to hide them on our plates under lettuce, but we would find them and try to hide them in our napkins.  “Caramba, tienen que comerlos todos…, los pobres quisieran tener esta comida”….(darnit, you’ve got to eat it all, the hungry poor would love to have this food).  We eventually gave them away to the neighbors as throwing it out was unthinkable..  Lessons learned--don't grow it unless you're sure you can eat it all.  

Cartoons fueled our imagination.  My favorite program back then was the Hanna Barbera cartoon classic  “Touche Turtle & Dum Dum”, a turtle dressed up like a musketeer with a crooked sword and his dumb sidekick, a shaggy dog.  He fought injustice and his favorite saying was to run his sword through things and say “Touche away!”.   I know, it’s lame by today’s standards, but it was fascinating for me at the time.  I bugged and bugged my mom to buy me the Touche Turtle Halloween costume and finally she got it for me at White Front department store.  Mom never liked or understood cartoons, saying that they were “unreal, not like real life”.  Somewhere she had read that cartoons were invented for children with mental deficiencies “para los pobres con dificultades mental, los locos.  Que Dios les bendiga”.  (For the poor with mental difficulties, the crazy ones…may God bless them).  We kids were only allowed only 3 hours of TV watching per day.  Eventually we kids loved watching cartoons Tom & Jerry, Batman, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Porky pig, Bugs Bunny, and Kimba the White Lion (Japanese Manga). Bugs Bunny was our favorite.  Mom used to say “el sol nos espera afuera, aprovechamosle!” (The sun is waiting for us outside, let’s take advantage of it!).  Each kid then had to do his chores, and we would act out the silliness we had just seen in our cartoons.

I can remember the first TV set we got…it was black and white Zenith model, as color TV was too expensive for most people until it’s price came down in the late 1960’s.  One evening we happened to be watching the program American Bandstand when dancer/singer Chubby Checker came out and did his famous dance, The Twist.  All of us kids ran in front of the TV and we all started doing the Twist!  The only words we could understand/copy were “Do the Twist…”  and we’d run around the house and do the Twist.  For some reason it was hilarious for us and we would laugh and fall down afterwards.

Our family used to go on most Sunday's for a few years to go visit Tio Enrique, Tia Patita and cousin Pablo.  We loved playing with Pablo.   I can still remember Tio Enrique showing us the new Quasar/Motorola TV set he had just purchased...it was in color and it had so many features.  Tio showed it to my father Anthony, who carefully listened to his explanation of this new technology.  Being an engineer, he was explaining the electronics contained in this new TV, and he got excited explaining it, I could see my father's eyes glaze over...dad never really understood electronics.  Within a year dad finally got us a Curtis Mathis RCA color TV...our first.

About once every 6 - 8 weeks or so mom would trim our toenails.  We kids wiggled, complained, screamed, cried, and it didn’t help that Andrew was always poking and pulling daughter Carmen’s hair when he could sneak up on her.  Always a rascal, mom would collect the toe trimmings and tell us:   “If you don’t behave, tonight you’ll be eating nail soup…”.  (toenail trimming soup).  The terror in her kid’s eyes was enough to make them settle down.  No one wanted toenail soup!

When we moved next-door into the 2nd old house on Roseland Ave, it was an old wooden starter home, with no insulation in the walls and no heater!  Mom carmen always suffered with cold feet…no matter what the season was, she always had cold feet.  How to keep them warm?  She would turn on the kitchen oven, pull up a chair and while sitting in the chair and reading a magazine or while peeling potatoes, place her feet on the racks in order to heat up her feet.  When visitors asked why she did this, she’d say to us “…I’m cooking my feet..”

In our 1st old house on Roseland Ave, I can remember it had a large backyard with tiki torches in the patio, a bamboo shield and crossed spears motif on the bamboo fence, it had a Trader Vic’s feeling to it (Trader Vic’s was a famous restaurant known for its Hawaiian/Polynesian atmosphere and food in Beverly Hills) and an unrolled bamboo fence lattice surrounding the back of the property with several banana trees--Dad was into the Polynesian look back then.  I remember how we would ride our little tricycles (mine was blue and Andrew’s was red) by the porch.  We had a phone in the house, and it was one of the favorite “toys” for my brother Andrew to play with.  He loved picking it up and talking into it and would have full conversations with imaginary callers.  Mom (Carmen) used to say to us:  “No toque bebito”.  (don’t touch it little baby).  She said it so often that I (Tony) would take phone’s receiver from my brother and parrot back to him… “no toque bebito, no toque bebito”.  When daughter Carmen started doing the same thing, Andrew would take the receiver from her and say “No toque bebito”.  Not sure if later daughter Carmen ever did it to daughter Monique…Monkey see, monkey do!

When mom arrived in Kansas City to take care of Enrique, she didn’t speak or read English at all. She was new to the country. While Enrique was at school, she was so hungry she found a small café. People were eating this strange food, and because she couldn’t communicate, she just pointed to what someone was eating, and asked for the same plate using hand gestures and facial expressions .It was spaghetti. When the waiter asked her more questions several times without getting answers, he finally walked away exasperated. Her plate arrived – spaghetti with no sauce! Plain noodles! The waiter wanted to know what kind of sauce she wanted (red? white? meatballs?).Everyone in the café looked at her oddly and laughed at her. She was so embarrassed that she kept her head down and ate slowly. By the way, she hated the plain spaghetti noodle plate! That’s her first experience in an Italian restaurant.

I loved mom’s positive attitude.  When something went wrong (like a flat tire or dad taking a short cut that took twice as long), mom would calm us down by saying, “Just think about it as an adventure!”  

That positive attitude has helped me view life’s difficulties with less stress and has been my “go to” phrase when I need to cheer someone up.  It’s a great way of keeping a smile…

A daily mass was celebrated at St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City on February 9th, 2022 to honor and remember Carmen Victoria De La Torre Arregui.
We would like to thank Jim Russo along with the Perpetual Mass Association, servants of Mary for this great honor and opportunity.

A Mass was celebrated at St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, Rome on February 9, 2022
We would like to thank Jim Russo with The Perpetual Mass Association, Servants of Mary for this great honor and opportunity.2 to honor and remember Carmen Victoria De La Torre Arregui.