Songs That Followed Me: Fernando.

A series featuring songs that have had lasting relevance in my life.

A gallery wall at my parents’ house features my beautiful grandmother, Delia Soria (upper right).

For me - and I don’t think I’m alone in this - songs are something that immediately transports me. So I’ve decided to write about songs that have stuck with me through my life, coming up time after time to say hello and remind me of the people and events that shaped me.

The other day I was at the gym and a cover of a familiar song came on. “Fernando” by Abba. This cover is so beautiful and mysterious that it almost felt more like the song I remembered than the original does. Last week ended pretty emotionally. I wrote about a classmate that died and that just dredged up some memories for me, not all of them good. So when this song came on, I got emotional almost immediately. So there I was at my fancy obnoxious West Hollywood gym, trying to prevent the surrounding muscle hunks from seeing that I was full on crying at the squat rack.

“Fernando” is emotional for me because it reminds me of my grandmother, Delia Soria, who passed away in 1999. She used to sing it to me, with “Fernando” removed and “Orlando” added. I actually have no idea how many times she did this, but in my mind it was a thing she did. It’s weird how there are things people do that you remember forever and other things you should remember that you forget. Maybe she only did this once. But my memory tells me it was something she did at least a few times.

Sometimes people from my past come up to me and repeat something I said years ago, an inside joke we shared, and I’ve totally forgotten it. Like you never know what is going to imprint on someone forever. Last summer I ran into Casey Spooner on Fire Island, someone I’ve known in passing for maybe twelve years but haven’t seen in a decade. He repeated a joke to me that we used to do while out dancing (or maybe did once, who knows?). I felt like an idiot, because I’d completely forgotten it. But in some ways you have no way of controlling what your brain decides to store and what it doesn’t have room for. The joke was too stupid and visual to repeat here (basically it was something about how people in LA dance like cartoons). But it had clearly imprinted somewhere in his brain the same way my grandmother singing “Fernando” had.

My parents met in high school in Salinas, California, an agricultural town near the central coast. My grandparents on both sides lived in adjacent mid-century suburban housing developments. Grandma and Grandpa Soria lived in Serra Village while Grandma English lived in Toro Park. I have memories of walking with my cousins between the two houses. I think they must have been about a ten minute walk from each other. Years after all my grandparents were gone I went back to drive through these two developments and was shocked at how tiny everything was. To me as a child, their houses felt enormous. But as a fully grown man (I think I was in college when I went back) their scale felt so small, the streets felt so narrow, everything just felt less majestic and more humble than I remembered.

I have a lot of guilt and shame about the fact that we spent more time at Grandma English’s house than Grandma and Grampa Soria’s house. The Soria’s house was dark. Like actually dark because my Grandpa was cheap about electricity. But also dark because they’d installed knotty pine literally everywhere and then accented it with dark, heavy early American antiques. My Mexican grandparents were patriotic and loved old American furniture. Meanwhile, my maternal grandmother lived in a brighter house with brighter furniture, HBO, and the overwhelming smell of cigarettes (a smell that seemed romantic and cozy at the time that I now find completely disgusting).

But there was an additional heaviness to Grandma and Grampa Soria’s house. For most of my life Grandma Delia was confined to her bed with severe Rheumatoid Arthritis. Her joints were enlarged, she couldn't walk unassisted, from time to time she’d inhale quickly, a small, subtle hint that she was in pain. Looking back I feel really guilty about not spending more time with her. She passed away when I was a senior in high school.

Before I go on I feel like I need to explain something. I do not plan for this Substack to just be a bunch of sad essays memorializing dead people. I had something pretty traumatic happen over the weekend that left me physically injured and I am kind of in a state about it. I may never talk about it but I haven’t been able to rip myself out of it to write the humorous post I’d planned today about why dating sucks. But I promise, I’m gonna be adding levity. Just maybe not a ton today.

Delia Soria was a really bright person. I think she’s where my dad gets his hyperactivity from (as we speak he’s trying to get me to go up to my cabin with him so he can shovel snow). There are photos of her holding me and my siblings when I was really young, maybe two or three, and she’s just so happy. She loved us so much and just thought we were all so beautiful and smart and sweet.

Being seen that way is so powerful.

When I’d visit, Grandma Delia she’d sit up on the edge of her bed and I’d sit in a chair next to the bed. She was normally watching some sort of sensational news show, Oprah, or another daytime talk show. I think the news programming she watched colored the way she saw the outside world, which she rarely saw in person anymore. Whenever anything happened even remotely close to Yosemite, she’d call my dad to ask if our house was on fire or smashed in a rockslide. She was a smart lady (just maybe with slightly questionable taste in television).

I don’t really remember many things she said to me. I wish I remembered more. I remember one time telling her that I felt ugly because I was fat and was covered in terrible, painful cystic acne that was so intense it changed the shape of my face and left me almost unrecognizable. “All young people are beautiful,” she told me. I think what she was saying, subtly, is that I should enjoy myself because health doesn’t last forever. Here she was stuck in a dark room, in a bed she couldn’t get out of herself, in pain.

Rheumatoid Arthritis is a terrible, destructive disease. I don’t think Grandpa Soria really had the tools to care for my grandmother the way she wanted to be cared for - he was a man from a different generation. So their house felt sad to me and I always resented my grandmother’s situation because she deserved better. She was happy and positive but had no way to physically express that, to hold her grandkids, to control the logistics of much of her life.

I think I must have been about ten or eleven when she started singing “Fernando” to me, maybe younger. I know this roughly because I know “Muriel’s Wedding” (which featured a wonderfully Abba-heavy soundtrack) came out in 1994 when I was twelve and after that, I knew Abba songs. But when Grandma Delia sang it I hadn’t ever heard it before so I thought she was just singing some ancient folk song.

My mom used to take us “to town” to shop every few weeks, usually Fresno because they had a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s. After we grocery shopped, we’d often go to Tower Records to look at CDs and magazines. A few months after we’d seen “Muriel’s Wedding” (in the theatre, my mom love going to movies) I remember thinking I wanted to get an Abba CD because the music was so catchy, if a bit campy. My mom helped me look through their different albums - she didn’t know their music terribly well but she knew it better than I did so she helped me pick out a few albums.

I put the CDs in my basket and continued looking around. I loved magazines back then so I looked through those while I was waiting for my mom to be done shopping (which always seemed to take forever). At some point, a little gay self-hatred creeped in and I questioned whether I wanted to get the Abba CDs. “Wait, is this band just for cheesy old gay men?” I asked myself. We learn at a young age, in ways big and small, how to edit ourselves to avoid derision.

I put the albums back and never thought about owning an Abba CD again.

Somehow we ended up with the “Muriel’s Wedding” soundtrack (which sadly does not feature “Fernando” even though it’s in the movie). My father’s claim to fame at the time was that he had a CD player that could hold three hundred CDs in his dental office. It’s possible he bought it. So even though I was too pretentious to let myself own an Abba CD, I still managed to listen to their music all the time.

I love the placement of “Fernando” in the film - it comes in a particularly fun and empowering scene. My siblings and I must have watched the VHS of “Muriel’s Wedding” a thousand times. My parents didn’t want us to watch TV so we never had one until I bought my own at age twelve. My siblings would smoke pot then demand to watch movies in my room and it was kind of annoying at the time but created some pretty warm memories. My bedroom was the smallest bedroom in the house, with windows that looked out over Yosemite Falls. But we crammed in there and watched the same fucking ten movies over and over, one of which was “Muriel.” We can still quote it to each other.

“Fernando,” whether it be the incredible original by Abba or the beautiful cover featured here (if you can figure out the name of the artist, please let me know in the comments) will always remind me of my grandmother. And of seeing “Muriel’s Wedding” and identifying so strongly with the character and Toni Collette’s beautiful performance. It’s a film for anyone who’s ever felt different or left out.

I mean, I think literally anyone who grew up in a small town wanted to do this at some time or another:

And, for good measure, here’s the photos of Grandma Delia I mentioned before:

These pictures make me so happy. My grandmother before she was confined to her bed. Here is Delia Soria with her grandkids: My siblings Elisa and Miguel, Melissa (in yellow), and me (chubby baby).

And that’s the story of how “Fernando” followed me.