By Tommy Acosta
Sedona, AZ — Today’s Mother’s Day and naturally I’m thinking about my mother who passed away. What an incredibly strong and beautiful woman she was. She was well known here in Sedona as Mamacita, allthough her full name was Aida Acosta Balbin. She loved going to all of the different events and restaurants when she would come up to visit and spend the weekend. She made friends with everybody.
The shop owners knew her the restaurant owners knew her staff knew her, community luminaries knew her, because she was always bubbling charm and beauty even at the age of 93 until she succumbed to the various maladies we suffer when we are older.
What a woman.
There was the time when I was taken to the hospital when I was 8 years old because I was running an extremely high fever. The doctors performed a Spinal Tap on me because it was during the height of the polio epidemic. I remember fighting and screaming as they held me down and stuck the needle into my spine. I didn’t remember anything because I went unconscious.
When I awoke I remember reaching for a toy that my mother had left on my bed and I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. I was paralyzed. Completely from head to toe.
And I remember hearing my mother outside of the hospital room she was crying and she was screaming at the doctors in that shrill banshee-like voice that she had whenever got really angry.
She was yelling at them “My son will walk again,” she screamed. “He will walk again. You cannot tell me that he will never be able to walk1” She would not let the doctors say anything else.
Well, the truth is I did walk again. She lived by my side in the hospital and in three months I regained the use of my limbs, and I was able to walk out of the hospital. Not well because I was so weak from the damage the spinal tap did, but I was still able to walk.
So wanted me to be as normal as possible. She would not let me or anyone else see me as handicapped. So, every day she would walk me to school. she didn’t want me to take the bus or ride in a car. She wanted me to walk. We would walk 20 steps and I would fall and she’d pick me up and pushed me to keep going.
I would go another 50 steps, and I’d fall. She’d make me get up and keep going.
She would say this word in Spanish “Levántate” whenever I went down, which means “get up.!” Get up! And soon I was walking to school by myself. She would not see me in any way as handicapped, in any manner whatsoever.
She saw me complete and whole. Period! And it was that vision of me that held me, that strengthened me that gave me the power and the mobility to move on to enjoy sports, to play ball, to play music, to box in a ring.
And it was always through life that whenever I would fall, physically or weaken to a challenge that I thought I could not overcome, my mother’s voice would come into my head “Levántate! Levántate!”
I remember another time when I was driving home from Florida and I thought I had food poisoning or something. It was terrible. I thought I was going to die. I managed to pull into a motel, rent a room and drag myself into the bed where I prepared myself to pass. I was that sick. My partner was with me, and she called my mother and put me on the phone with her and she screeched “Levántate! Don’t lie there. You will die if you don’t get up!”
And I got up. I got up, as sick as I was as dizzy as I was, as scared as I was, I got up. I left the hotel. I got behind the wheel of the car and hearing my mother’s voice reverberating in my head I drove and drove and got us home safely.
She was also a professional woman.
She immigrated from Cuba after fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist regime. Her family was very well off at the time, but they lost everything to communism.
However, she was resolute and determined to succeed in her new country. She took a job working for the Beverly Hilton and by her own bootstraps pulled herself up to become Director of Communications for the Hollywood hotel. Everybody knew her and loved her because she was such a bubbling and caring, loving personality.
But watch out if you crossed her. Like I said she had a banshee screech that would shatter åçglass.
Yes. An amazing woman in every single way.
Mamacita, all I can say is I love you. I love you. I love you and hopefully I’ll see you in Heaven (If I get there that is) but I’m sure you will. So anyway, Happy Mother’s Day, Mamacita and one day we will all be united in that great wonderful Sedona in the sky.
