When I meet people and introduce myself, they sometimes give me a confused look regarding my name: Armando Jacox.  My first name is very Mexican, and my last name is not very Mexican.  People wonder how I got such a strange name with two words seemingly in conflict and no middle name at all. I do have a suffix that gets used depending on my mood.

Both of my parents were born in Mexico. My biological grandfather who I never met, was known as a charming man full of life and very good with his hands.  My great aunt would tell me that he could fix anything and he was always very happy to help anyone with handyman chores free of charge. Unfortunately, he suffered from severe alcoholism and when he drank he was the classic tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with his dark side magnified by the overconsumption of alcohol.

When Armando Aras drank, it was more than just a bad night or bad hangover the next day. He had violent tendencies and became a genuinely terrifying figure. The worst night; possibly the worst night of their lives, was when he beat my father’s mother down to a bloody mess and my father, still only a small child, ran to his grandmothers house holding his sister’s hand as they both cried with an intense horror in their eyes. The next day my father’s stuttering began and created a trauma so deep that it permeated our genetic makeup that continued with me having stuttering as a child and even to my two sons who stutter to this day.  When life gets particularly stressful my stuttering peaks it’s head up even after years of speech therapy.

After that horrid night, my grandmother finally had the courage to leave him. She attempted to leave him before numerous times but she just kept going back. His charm, charisma, and authentic caring while sober would lure her back to him time after time.  This time it was different. He had never beaten her like that before and the pain set deep in heart to the point that where even the mere thought of him repulsed her. I spoke to my grandmother about her memories of him, and even after fifty years, I could sense the bitter coldness that lived deep in her heart for that man.

Coincidentally, my two great grandmothers, on each side of my family, happened to live on the same street in Juarez, Mexico. My mother would spend her summers in Juarez and she even spent some school semesters there and that was when my father got to know her. My mother used to tell me how she would sit outside on the porch and he would walk by and put his elbows on the elevated ledge and start talking to her. He would ask her questions about her life and my mother being shy would just give him one word answers.

As the years went by they got to know each other better and better and they eventually became romantic and would write each other love letters to pass the time between summers and random visits.  I saw these letters once as a teenager when looking through old boxes of family mementos. I remember reading some of these letters and being stunned at the nature of their love. I had never known or seen my parents love each other.  My experience of my parents ranged from dead silence when each others presence to verbal altercations teetering on physical violence. It was my first time feeling that my parents did care about each other. I realized that at one point they had true love.

My grandmother was very beautiful in her younger years and finding employment was easy for her. She was the attendant at a local furniture store and my non-biological grandfather Christopher Jacox happened be in the market for furniture. He loved a bargain and Mexico was not far from Albuquerque where he happened to be stationed as a lieutenant in the army.  He decided to take trip to Mexico and see if he could find a nice piece of furniture.  He did not bargain for meeting my grandmother at the local furniture store in Juarez Mexico and he fell in love at first sight.  

One problem was that he didn’t speak Spanish and she didn’t speak English and that language barrier made her uneasy about dating him when he asked her to have lunch with him.  She jokingly told him through a colleague at the store that if he learned Spanish then she would go to lunch with him. He promised to learn Spanish and said he would be back. She never thought she would see him again so when he arrived at the store knowing several phrases and even basic and broken conversational Spanish, she was pleasantly surprised but still reluctant to have lunch with this strange man from America.  She was a single mom with two small children at the time and living at home with her mother, brother, sisters, in a small three bedroom home where they had to share bedrooms and live in a crowded way. The prospect of meeting an American and having it worked out was appealing to her youthful self so she decided to be open minded and see what this man had to offer her.

They had lunch that day and the continued to see eachother.  After a year of dating he got orders to go overseas and this is when he asked her to marry him and he would also adopt her children and give them his name: Jacox.  He would provide for them and they would be a family.  His was to be stationed in Turkey for the next two years and after that things were unknown. He was also twenty years her senior and never had a family.  This was a chance for him to be a father to some degree and experience the joy of family.  She accepted his proposal and within weeks they had their passports and started the paperwork for my grandmother, father, and aunt to eventually become American Citizens.  

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