Obituary of Fernando A Frias

FRIAS Fernando A. departed this life February 29, 2020. In Repose Sunday, March 8, 2020 from 2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M. Prayer Service 5:30 P.M. Burial at Hollywood Memorial Gardens North Cemetery. Arrangements by Joseph A. Scarano Presidential Circle Memorial Chapel-4351 Hollywood Boulevard Hollywood Hills, Florida 33021. Our thoughts and prayers goes out to the family. Our dad sang ... when he spoke at my mothers funeral less than a year ago. It surprised me. He was moved, in that moment, to send her off with a song though I never remember him serenading her in life. But that was my dad: full of surprises that made you smile even in the worst moments. He had a way of turning something negative into a positive. If you look on the back of those prayer cards that are not prayer cards, you’ll see one of the poems he loved to recite that describes this ability: A lifetime of making the best of a bad situation. In that poem, a Farmer finds a thorny bush — a Zarza villana, a villainous bramble — among the swaying wheat. Instead of tearing it out and throwing it away, he carefully digs it up and transplants it to the boundary of his property where it would stand guard. I think he loved that poem for a lot of reasons: He was güajiro, a country farmer at heart, one of 11 children raised on a rented farm in Manzanillo, Cuba. But mostly, I think he loved that poem because it talked about being transplanted into a life you never expected — and blossoming there. With our dad, you could take your pick among all the times he had to adjust to new soil. The Cuban revolution took his family businesses and put him in jail for wanting to leave the country. In jail, he learned to speak English from a jailed university professor. He learned to play chess — a game he would teach me, my brother, my nephew — from a young Chinese-cuban kid who was led away by soldiers and never returned. Then, he had to work in agricultural fields for two years to earn his freedom. He dug latrines and cut sugarcane among fetid ground and swamp vipers. But when the cook of the 80-man concentration camp got his visa to the US, my dad volunteered to cook. He’d had learned at the side of the Chinese-Cuban cook at their restaurant in Marianao. Seeing that the men were sick of chícharos, split pea soup and rice, he noticed seven felled Palm trees. He remembered a story his father had told him, about the Mambises, the Cuban soldiers in the Spanish-American war, subsisting in the mountains for weeks on the hearts of palms. So he asked his fellow prisoners to cut out the hearts out of the trees. He did what I had seen him do for years with everything from mangoes to papaya: he chunked and boiled the hearts in sugary water with cinnamon and star anise until it rendered down into a sticky, sweet dessert. That night for dinner, he wrote on a chalkboard outside the kitchen: “Today’s specials: Chicharos and white rice. Dessert: Dulce de Palma Frías” Opinions vary on how tasty it was. But that night 80 men tasted something sweet for the first time in months, maybe years, because my dad saw where something good could come from something bad. He was uprooted and transplanted again when he arrived in the United States in 1969 — just days after his 42 birthday. Here, he flourished again. He learned to make plaster vases in a Hialeah factory until he had saved enough money to buy an ice cream truck. Then he learned to sell ice cream and sold sweet treats to the children of Carol City until he had saved enough money to open a jewelry store. And then he learned to be a jewelry salesman. Life changed again, and he learned to be husband at 44. He and my mother, Iraida, were married for 46 years until she died last spring. And even though he had been a young father to my my brother at 30, he found himself a father again in middle age — at age 46. And I can tell you — he flourished at that, too. He raised fruit trees in the backyard of his Pembroke Pines home that bore way more fruit than he could ever eat. But that was OK, too, because it let him spend his days in retirement hand-deliverying fruits to friends and family all over town. Wherever life moved our dad, he bloomed and bore fruit. Everywhere he went, he had a limerick, a poem, a song to share. My cousin Julio put it so beautifully: In the darkness, he was a ray of light. Our dad learned, that with enough care, enough love, and enough vision, you could turn a weed into a flower. Carlos Frías writer/author/journalist James Beard award winner