Being a Carreon

Mom was bathing in India one day, her beautiful 20-something body exposed to the world, when a scary man came up to her and grabbed her breasts hungrily. Mom tells the story with a sense of humor now, because of what happened next. Charles Carreon, not a man who tends towards physical aggression, rescued her from the creep's clutches. Dad picked the Indian man up and threw him down, picked him up and threw him down, picked him up and threw him down -- momma tells us all with glee. And the men on the shore just watched, stone cold. "I would not have touched her if I knew she was married!" the man had cried. Completely humiliated, he scurried away.

Tara and Charles Carreon were free spirits back then, still are you could say. But mom had not had her first child yet. Back home in Arizona, a little boy child struggled to take his first breaths. Joshua Arklow Carreon, they named him. His lungs were filled with fluid. Why was Josh's cup always half empty? We ask ourselves this question, again and again. Why did I not know he had food sensitivities? Dad says this as he bends over his pan of rice, toasting breakfast cereal, his body still youthful but his hair creeping away from the center of his crown. All the strength leaves his shoulders as he weeps. And I am the strong one, for a moment at least, even though I struggle now in telling the story. Dad has always allowed himself to cry, and I love him for that.

Dad held little Joshua to his breast, close to his warm beating heart, and Josh's little struggled breaths softened and deepened till he was breathing almost normally. Eventually mom and dad left the hospital to seek alternative health treatments, and Joshua was cured. He became a normal child, on the outside at least. On the inside he was different like all the rest of us. Joshua drew and painted his strange visions on paper. He made a duck-tailed platypus out of paper mache in school. His teachers weren't impressed, but Joshua had his loyal friends, his pretty girlfriends, his graffiti-skateboard-hip hop community. Joshua was loved.