The Custodian of Men’s Memories
Francisco “Pancho” Saenz
6/20/1930 - 3/10/2025
The end of summer. Pancho, 93, is on the toilet.
His son, Manny, 57, who half-carried him there, sits on the floor to wait. They are comic-bickering, like they always do, exaggerated insults and lies.
Then Pancho interrupts the pantomime. “Hijo,” Pancho says. “I always loved you.”
“What? How? Never in my entire life has my dad said he loved me,” Manny will recall later. He laughs. “Afterwards, we go back to our same routine.”
A routine steeped in sparring and swearing, fishing and hunting, laboring and grilling, punctuated with shots of tequila. These are men’s men.
Now, though, Pancho is in his long period of forgetfulness. Manny has taken on the dual role of his father’s primary caregiver and custodian of his memories.
“Always together, always fighting like cats and dogs,” Manny says.
The recollections Manny safeguards flow, merge, separate, and merge again, like the voices of father and son.
Evening light pushes into an empty bedroom in the now unoccupied home where Pancho once lived and where he and his wife Amparo raised their children in Rio Grande City.
For years, they competed to catch the most fish. Pancho invariably won. “One day, I caught two bass first,” Manny recalls. “But then he caught three, back-to-back. ‘Who’s the boss now?’”
Pancho instilled discipline in his son, once rousing young Manny at 5 a.m. after a night of drinking and only two hours of sleep. “The beer was made for the man. If you can’t handle it, don’t drink no more. Now get your butt up and get to work.” This lesson stuck. Adult Manny remains able to spring from bed into action.
Memories: the Christmas his dad taught him how to ride his first bike–indoors because of the cold. Instructions in sanding and painting cars. The barbecues. The road trips.
Manny is also the keeper of painful recollections—the losses of his mother, his brother, his daughter. And the time in 2017 when Pancho confessed: “There’s something wrong with me. It’s like I get kinda lost, and I don’t know what I’m doing. Do you think I’m all right?”
For others, that conversation might be weighted with fear or sorrow, a sense of impending loss. Father and son took it in stride. “My mom would always tell us, no one is eternal in this life,” Manny recalls.
Pancho: The Party’s Heartbeat
Pancho was the epitome of fun—this is the first quality mentioned by his kids and their cousins. “He taught me how to drive when I was eight years old. And I remember him doing hand puppets with a gas lamp during a thunderstorm when we lost electricity,” says his daughter Carmen, kissing him here during a visit to Rio Grande City. “Sometimes he would put his hand under his armpit and make that sound. He always had a sense of humor, and today he is the same.”
Pancho hasn’t fished in six years. His former passion is no longer even a memory. Other details have vanished too. “He doesn’t recognize my wife. Once in a while, I even notice he doesn’t know me. I tell him, you’re hurting my feelings.’”
So far, though, Manny remains the anchor, Pancho’s consistent bantering partner. The son he loves.
