This podcast contains my reading of the sixth part of my longest free verse poem to date, Unsung Heroes, and chronicles details about my mom who lived an incredibly difficult life--more so than even my dad--full of personal tragedy and unfulfilled potential as she left school at the age of 11 to help her mom put food on the table for her 8 brothers and sisters when her dad died shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War by working full time (illegally) at an uncle's cannery. She had missed school for more than a year prior to that because of blindness caused by an infection that her local doctor eventually cured through a surgical procedure, returning her perfect vision. She was a willful child who always put others ahead of herself and sacrificed her youth and schooling for her family's sake. She would remain a hard worker throughout her life, possessing a gift for story-telling and as a writer despite the fact she did not learn to read and write until after emigrating to Argentina to her aunt's house from her native Galicia at the age of 16 with a younger sister in tow, working there (again illegally by lying about her age) to pay for passage for her mom and two younger brothers, working as a Maid in a hotel in Mar del Plata, as a nurse's aid and eventually as a packing machine operator for Ponds. She was not only a far better person than her only son would ever be, and a better natural writer of fiction and poetry had she had only a few more years of formal education. Her prodigious memory always astounded me as, unlike me, she could remember the names of everyone she ever met, as that of their own families and could recount verbatim conversations had years before with nearly anyone she met. She could sing like an angel and was offered a recording contract when a producer heard her singing in the hotel where she worked while going about her chores--a contract she turned down, no doubt in part because of insecurity about her formal education though she was a natural entertainer as anyone who knew her will readily attest. She and my dad were married 61 years when he died--and she followed him two years later, a victim of the dementia that robbed her of her many natural gifts, including her prodigious memory. I was the last person she forgot. I miss her and my dad every day.