Ranchito Morbido, Never to be on The Back Word

All good things must end, but must it be before my essays get published? The Back Word, the Texas website that brought several essays to the public, is no longer publishing new material. That's a shame, because I had more topics I wanted to explore. The shutdown came just before the site was going to publish this essay, a "lighter" version of an essay that should appear a Jewish paper in October.

I'll miss the Back Word, the thrill of waking up on the first of the month to check for a new essay being posted, the chance to email the URL to friends. I had fun and I got my creative cogs kickstarted, so I'll buckle down and try to market these essays and others still a-borning to other outlets (perhaps some that will even pay me). And now, the grand finale:

Ranchito Morbido: My Little Place in Texas

I grew up in a rented house on a dusty alley in Mission, Texas, about three blocks from the Missouri-Pacific tracks that divided the town into Hispanic and Anglo sections. My mother rented the house, which didn’t even have its own mailbox, for 21 years and never had any interest in buying real estate. She preferred to invest in the stock market. I still have shares of General Motors, Sunoco and TXU (formerly Texas Utilities) that I inherited when she died in 1984.

Yet, her legacy includes a little bit of Texas land that proudly bears the Wallach name. I haven’t seen our portion of the state since 1989, but I think about it often. I can picture it in my mind’s eye, shaded by the oak and mesquite trees in Gonzales, the historic town on the rolling road from San Antonio to Houston. In the distant future that draws closer every day, I’d like to return to Gonzales and the only property I’ll ever call my own in Texas.

I’m referring to the Jewish cemetery on Water Street in Gonzales. The place always fascinated me, as the final resting ground for my mother, two grandparents, two great-grandparents, and one great-great-grandmother (Charlotte Bath, died 1912), along with aunts, uncles and cousins. I want to be buried there, too. In doing so, I’ll be part of a family presence in Gonzales that goes back at least to the 1890s. The last living Gonzales cousins headed to the bright lights of Lockhart in the 1970s, but the deceased liked Gonzales just fine, and there they remain.

My mother died in Tyler, where she lived with her older sister Charlotte during the last three years of her cancer-shortened life. Afterward, Aunt Charlotte arranged for the headstone in the Jewish cemetery. It was as simple as Mom’s life. It says, “Shirley Lissner Wallach, March 11, 1920 – January 12, 1984.” It lies a few feet from her parents, Jared and Eva Lissner.

I first saw Mom’s gravestone on July 3, 1989, when I visited the cemetery with my then-fiancé. I hadn’t visited the place since 1966, when Mom brought my younger brother and me there to see the gravestones of her parents, both of whom died in 1959. On that 1989 visit I had to chuckle at the thought that Mom finally had some land to call her own under the Texas sky. I was starting to build a family life in the Northeast, so I saw the Gonzales cemetery as part of my past, nothing more. My fiancé and I followed the ancient Jewish tradition and put a rock on Mom’s grave, then left into our radiant future together.

Fast-forward 12 years, and the radiant future was flickering out in divorce. Fortunately, my ex and I hadn’t bought a joint burial plot, so I had the freedom to get buried wherever it so pleased me. The Northeast never held much appeal in that regard for me, since the place has never felt like “home” in a gut-level sense.
I quickly decided to be buried in Gonzales. As a final resting place, it has a lot going for it: all those family connections so I will be among my own landsmen, as the word goes in Yiddish; a temperate climate so my gravestone will last for centuries without the wear and tear caused by snow and cold in the Northeast; an inland, semi-rural location unthreatened by excessive housing development, global flooding, or any other unpleasantness coming down the pike to endanger Yankee cemeteries. As the real estate agents love to chant, “Location, location, location.”

OK, sounds great, I’m sold on the place! Where do I sign up to buy what I call my ranchito morbido?

And that’s the funny part. My efforts to find out who controls the Gonzales cemetery and buy a plot there have been utterly inconclusive. In Gonzales, as in other Jewish communities, cemetery records fade away, synagogues close, the old folks die and the young ones leave and forget about cemeteries with headstones written in the Hebrew language few can read, let alone understand. Even when a paying customer comes along, it can be impossible to find somebody in charge of Jewish cemeteries, somebody to take the check and give title to a few cubic feet of prime memorial space.
God knows I made a determined effort to find an administrator. During the divorce, I called my cousin David “Buddy” Michelson in Lockhart, formerly of Gonzales, one of the last members of my mother’s Depression-era generation. We talked about the cemetery, but he did not know who ran it. A Texas Jewish Historical Society member provided leads to information, but not what I needed.

A few years passed and I tried again. I learned that Buddy had died in 2004. The Gonzales city government directed me to Buddy’s family and I soon had a long talk with his widow, Abbi. She reminisced about the time, shortly after their marriage, when Buddy showed her his parents’ graves in Gonzales. She said Buddy cared deeply about the cemetery, establishing a trust fund to ensure its perpetual care. Ironically, Buddy wanted to be buried in San Antonio, near the graves of Abbi’s parents.

My cousin Linda, Aunt Charlotte’s daughter, recently sent me photos of the place, showing Mom’s grave and the Texas Historical marker at the cemetery. She wrote, “The cemetery is well maintained and appears to have room for more graves.” Abbi is now checking around Gonzales to find definitive information about the cemetery’s management.

In the mean time, life goes on. The divorce that led to this sequence of discovery recedes into the past, while my new life unfolds day by day. My ex and I recently wrapped up post-divorce financial matters that give me the resources to become a homeowner if I so desire. Given the run-up in real estate prices, I may delay before I take the plunge again into homeownership. I imagine I’ll buy my little plot of earth in Texas, my ranchito morbido, before I get something fancier up here.