Most people when they start to write first start with something about themselves, a personal experience, a strange dream, the happiest or saddest time in their lives and incorporate that into their story (I know I do, but it's not very obvious) This assignment is to write a memoir about an experience in your life. Just to clarify you are not writing an autobiography! You just write about a personal (it doesn't have to be personal it could be funny, scary, etc.). Usually this helps with writing because than you really understand your own voice because you have to write about your own experiences. And, it's very fun! So if you want to do this you can!

Have a good day!

We would go at least once a year and on occasion one or more of my older sisters or brothers would come with us, but not too often.

We would all pack up the car and head out 'cross country' to get there. It was an unusual blend of fun and solemnity - us kids in the back seat playing 'quiet' car games, (no seat belts whatsoever) and my parents in the front. My mom prayed non stop till we got there. It was an odd experience for a child, like we were going to a hanging, or something.

We went out to a ranch road where there were only scattered and scrawny mesquite trees and two low houses surrounded by cars from other 'patients'. They parked everywhere! There was not a spot of grass left anywhere at least three hundred feet from the houses. It was like a carnival field parking lot. We parked, too, and I remember thinking, 'Is this a rest stop?'

But we all got out and headed for this low, wide ranch house and waited in line near the front door with about 20 other people ahead of us and continuous carloads of other people pouring in behind us, my mom still praying.

After about 40 minutes we were able to squeeze inside a tiny 10 X 10 living room with four tattered couches and with what seemed like about 40 other people and their kids. It smelled like an overdose of B.O. and it was stiflingly hot in there. No air conditioning, no fans. But, back then, that was the norm, so we couldn't complain too much about it.

The 'doctor's' wife offered us warm Coca Cola in reused plastic cups as a refreshment, which I always took a double helping of. I love Coke.

There was one door leading out of the 'sala' into a 3X3 hall that went one way to a bedroom and another into the kitchen. While sitting in the sala I could hear lots of activity from the kitchen. Sounds of rapid chatter in Spanish, which I could not clearly decipher because it was Mexican Spanish and not Tex-Mex Spanish, and lots of chopping sounds.

It turned out that they were chopping chickens into various parts and pieces for the 'doctor' to use in his 'diagnosis'.

My parents went in to see the curandero for a long while before coming out. They offered no report about what went on in there.

My mom herded my younger siblings in before me for a quick 5 minute exam and then it was my turn. I figured, great, a quick in and out and we get to leave this weird carnival.

But no. The minute I stepped into this candle lit, lung-killing incense filled examination bedroom, 'el curandero' gasped like he'd seen a ghost and took my hands in his. He put his sweaty hand on my forehead and announced to my mother that I was running a dangerous fever. All this was in that weird Spanish, but I got the gist.

Well, yeah, I thought. I was just in that oven you call a living room!

Then he picked me up and laid me down on an old-timey twin bed covered with a thread bare, what may have been white at one time, sheet. He mumbled some sort of prayer over me while sweeping me with what I found out later was an herb called Yerba Buena. My mother swears by it.

He lifted up my T-shirt and started, literally, poking at my belly with his bony fingered hands. It kinda hurts when you're not expecting it. He did some weird shaking with his hands and kept pushing into my belly like you would check for an appendicitis, but on the wrong side.

Then, miraculously, and with possibly a little chicken blood, he 'pulled' some kind of blackish sea-weed looking stuff 'from' me and left its bloody remains there on my belly as some sort of proof that it came from me. He was so theatrical about the whole thing that I almost laughed until my mom started to cry into her handkerchief. It was weird.

Then he proclaimed me a nine year old anemic weakling that would not survive the summer if I didn't drink the tonics that he would have to prescribe. He had saved my life by removing that horrible evil from my body and only his tonics would make it possible for me to survive.

Needless to say, my mom bought his story, hook, line and sinker. She also bought twenty dollars worth of the most vile 30 ounce, brown bottled, alcoholic, dirty weed juice I have ever had the misfortune of having had forced down my gullet. I could have died from that!

But from then on, I was the weakling of the family and was forbidden to play games that might hurt me or play with friends that might cause me to play games that might hurt me, or just about any other activity that had that hidden danger of perhaps causing me to be normal. I was never allowed to play sports or ride bikes farther than up and down my driveway. Although, once I road my bike a couple times around the block when my mom wasn't looking.

Unfortunately, my dad saw me as he was coming home for lunch one day. I got the tanning of my life. I could have died from that!! But, I survived.

So, as you could probably figure out, I don't have a high regard for curanderos. And yes, my mom and sisters still do the egg thing with the prayers and the sweeping over you with sprigs of Yerba Buena.

I guess old habits are hard to break.

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