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
Trying to pay the bills, trying to keep it together. She did everything she could to try to keep the house so there would be some semblance of normalcy to the outside world. I know that she took a big hit on her pride. She's a very prideful woman. And I knew that when everyone that she knew in her life saw our family disintegrate that midnight mass, I knew that it was just ripping her apart.
But she was trying to keep the house together, you know? And she was a million miles away. My mom was my best friend. It was the two of us, man. She was my partner. She was like my road dog, you know? It was like me and her against the world. And like being there with her and having her be a million miles away was killing me. Just like I knew this house was killing her too.
Well, you know, it got to be Christmas Eve, and my buddy Brian came over and picked me up, and we went to a different church for Midnight Mass. When you're under 21, you can't go to a bar, so you go see your friends at Mass. And we split a jug of wine in the parking lot, and the Mass was awesome. It was pretty great.
And afterwards, I come home, and the next morning I wake up, and it's Christmas morning. So I go and I gather up all the little pictures of the gifts that I want to give to my mother, all wrapped up and tied in ribbon, and I put them under the tree.
And I hear my mom stirring upstairs, and she comes downstairs, and her hair's in corkscrews, and she's got this big flannel house coat on and her big red plastic Sally Jesse Raphael morning glasses with the broken ear thing on the side taped up, you know. And I say, Merry Christmas, Mom. And she goes, Oh, honey, oh, hold on.
And she goes upstairs, and she's upstairs for a minute, and then she comes back down, and she has a few. And I give her hers first. And there's the jaguar and the jewelry and the island and a picture of a baby grand piano and a picture of a new dining room set. And a picture of a new mahogany bedroom set. And all these things I wish I could replace for her.
And she's smiling and laughing the whole time. And then when it's all done, she gives me mine. And there's three of them. There's a picture of a bag of Reese's peanut butter cups. There's a picture of a pair of Homer Simpson slippers. And there's a picture of a karaoke machine. And they were all from the same Rite Aid catalog that was up in her bathroom.
Because she had completely forgotten about this thing that I thought was going to bring us together. Because she was working so hard. So we're stuck in the middle of this O. Henry story that he never should have written. And I thank her so much for the gifts. And we go upstairs. And my mom makes the best pancakes in the world. You might think your mom does. But I'm so sorry. You're wrong.
My mom made the pancakes, but this morning she burned them a little bit.
And I'm sitting in the kitchen eating these pancakes, cutting around the burnt pieces, and I'm looking out through our backyard at everybody else's houses, and all the light in their houses looks like orange and colorful and friendly with all these people, and our house just feels empty and stark and white in the fluorescent light eating these pancakes in silence together, the two of us.
Couple months later, she finally did send me my present. I was back in college. Man, I'd taken out all the tuition and loans and we couldn't afford it otherwise, but it was important to her that I go. And I had just finished a day of classes and I was heading to the dining hall and I stopped over to check my mail. Remember mail? When people used to send mail?
And I open up the mailbox and there's an envelope with my mother's postmark on it. And I take it up and I fill up my, into the dining hall, and I fill up my tray with too much food because that's what you do and I go over to a table and I sit down and before I start eating I open up that envelope and inside there's no note, there's just one photograph.
It's of her standing in front of the house with a for sale sign. And the house sold pretty quickly. And she got it. She offloaded it. And she took a little bit of a hit financially. And she took a bigger hit on her pride. And she moved into a much smaller place that she could afford. And, you know, it hurt her. I know it hurt her. And it took a big hit.
But the most important thing to me was right then, we're looking at that picture. I got my girl back. Thank you.
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