Peter Aguero
speaker
214 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 8 Sep
Peter Aguero’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And there's nothing quite as damning as a bedroom without furniture, because you see all the dings and the scratches in the wallpaper, like all the mistakes that can usually be covered up, but you see them all now. My sister's room is exactly the way it looked when she moved out to go live with my dad.
It's Pepto-Bismol pink walls and a canopy bed and this big toy box in the shape of a rubber strawberry, as if she was going to move back in and be the little girl that she was. uh, before she moved out. My room, uh, looks exactly the way it was when I left. There's just posters all over the walls and, and, uh, it's, it's ridiculous like, like me.
So I, I start to do my laundry and my mom comes home from work and she immediately takes over. It doesn't let me do it myself. And I ended up helping her with it. And she's happy to see me. She's happy that I'm home. Uh, when we're done that, we go up to have dinner and my mom makes, uh, tomato casserole was one of my favorite things.
It was canned tomatoes with cubes of Wonder Bread and American cheese baked in the oven. If you put enough shaky cheese on it, it's delicious, you know. So we're sitting there in the two kitchen chairs and I'm telling her all about my first semester of college and how it finished up. And she's so proud of me. And she's telling me about work.
My mom's a nurse and she's been taking all of the shifts that she can. But She had warned me that she was starting to have to sell stuff in the house to be able to catch up on the bills because the house was too big for the two of us. Now that I was away at school, it was just her. So she was doing everything she could. And she warned me, but it was still shocking, you know.
She had just taken a second job, a part-time seasonal job at the mall behind the perfume counter. My mom didn't like people telling her what to do, so I knew that wasn't going to last very long.
And while we're sitting there at dinner, she tells me that, she says, Pete, we're not going to have a lot of money this year for Christmas, so I don't think we're going to be able to give each other presents. And I said, that's okay, Mom. And I'm being completely honest. I'm just happy to be home with her. I don't need anything. And that's the truth.
And we sit there eating quietly for a minute, and then she says... You know what would be funny? What if we cut out pictures of things from magazines that we would give to each other if we could? And we laughed about it. And then we cried about it because it's really sad. It's a really sad thing.
But then we laughed again because, man, like no matter how hard things are, you just have to laugh, you know. The next day I decide I'm going to make the house look as Christmassy as possible. And I go up to the attic and I get the boxes down with the lights and I hang the lights in the bushes out front and around the gutters. I want to go get a Christmas tree.
I grew up in a little small town in New Jersey called Delanco. It was a little small town, 2,500 people, mostly farms. At that time, there wasn't Walmart or big stores or anything. So I went over to the local Christmas tree farm to get a Christmas tree. I figured they'd give me a deal because I used to date their daughter.
But it turns out they didn't give me a deal because I used to date their daughter. And a Christmas tree was like 40 bucks, man. I couldn't afford that. So I went back home and I got an old saw out of the garage and I cut out a tree from the side yard and I brought it in. It wasn't even like a
pine tree it was like a stunted maple tree and I put it in the tree holder had like five branches I put 20 ornaments on each branch and just kind of put the lights on it and called it a day and uh and that's you know my mom came home from work and she just laughed about it you know
When I was visiting my friends who were also home from college, I would steal their mom's fancy catalogs and bring them home and cut out pictures of stuff. My mom always wanted a green Jaguar convertible. I found a picture of one of those. I cut out pictures of gold and diamonds and jewelry.
island like all these things that I would love to be able to give my mom for Christmas and like as I was doing it I knew it was sad it was like a sad thing to do but I kept collecting them and folding them up and tying them up with ribbons and hiding them in my room and I was waiting to put them under the tree and like I said it was a sad thing but I knew it was something that would bring us together I knew it was something that we would always be able to hold on to as something that we would be able to hold on to together you know
There was one night toward the end of December, close to Christmas, when we're sitting there in the living room watching the TVs and the Charlie Brown Christmas special is on. One of the TVs hooked up the cable and the other one gets the antenna so the sound doesn't quite jibe up, you know. And we're sitting there just right next to each other on the couch. We're world's apart. My mom's exhausted.
I've been trying to get her to sell the house for years, because I knew it was just too big for her to be in by herself. It was too big for the two of us to be there. If I'm being honest, it was too big when all four of us were living there. I don't know why they got it in the first place.
But four years before that, my parents, who had been separated on and off the whole time that they were married, they were giving it one last try. And the plan was that they were going to sell the house and take the money and we were going to move to Georgia from Jersey and have a fresh start. And that was the big plan.
And it went along okay for a couple of weeks and then somebody just came in and poured the eggshells all over the floor again and they started the fight and things were back to normal. And that fresh start never really happened. And it culminated with us, the four of us, in the third pew at St. Casimir's Church in Riverside, New Jersey for a Christmas Eve midnight mass.
And right before the priest started the mass and the packed church my dad stood up and he walked out of the church. And the only sound you could hear in the sound of the church was the hydraulic door just go, shoom. And the four of us, the three of us left stood up and we went outside past the priest and everyone we knew. And we walked the two blocks to where the car was parked.
And my dad was nowhere to be found, but he left the keys of the car on the hood. And that year, my parents were done. That was it. I got what I wanted for Christmas that year. My parents never got back together. But so here we are now today, the two of us sitting on this couch and trying to watch this thing and let us be happy or something. And she's a million miles away. It's all killing her.
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