Letters from Grenada

how to remember

The thing about being young is that you can’t imagine forgetting.

You can’t imagine that you won’t remember the name of that Italian movie, the one that takes place right after the war, the one where soldiers who aren’t supposed to be soldiers are slogging through a marsh, not knowing who they’re supposed to shoot because nobody wears uniforms anymore, so they shoot everyone.

You can’t imagine you’d forget the name of that boy, the one you purposely collided with at the ice rink so he’d talk to you, just for a minute.

You can’t imagine that you’d remember that argument, the one you had with your best friend at the pool party, the one right after graduation, the one that was so bad you never really talked again even though you still miss her. You’d remember the argument itself, but not any of the details or any of the substance. You’d think it must’ve been important, some kind of dealbreaker, but really you’re just guessing because you do. not. know.

The thing about being young is that you can’t imagine forgetting. You can’t imagine that you’d have to write things down or they’d be gone the next day. You can’t imagine that well before your child is old enough for kindergarten you’d forget which word it was, exactly, that was the very first one he ever spoke.

You can’t imagine that in order to remember these moments you need to reach back into the past, close your eyes and recreate every detail still available. That you’d have to do this, and that you’d have to do it often. That you’d have to study. That your memory would require refreshment, as if the precious mental images that make up your history were not really all that different from the irregular French verbs you used to mutter under your breath, repeating and repeating and visualizing and repeating until you could – and did – recite them in your sleep.

I review these things like I’m going to be tested on them later. The pale green taste of that grapefruit soda, the one I can’t get here in the States unless I go to Brooklyn. The smell of the carrot oil my son’s father used to smooth back his hair. What it felt like when my skin was never cold and the water in the pipe was always hot. How slowly the sun set and the way the sky looked like a broken egg yolk. The thickness of the island air that you can feel even before you step outside the airport.

I study these details, I recall them often, I write them down and THAT is how I make them forever mine.

the time with the passport

He’d had a passport but it got wet – ruined – in the hurricane. The day of the storm he’d gotten home and found the contents of his house afloat and the dog perched atop the refrigerator. Bean’s father – though he was not yet Bean’s father, had not yet even laid eyes on Bean’s mother – he opened the door and the water rushed out, soaking his feet. He gathered some clothes and his TV and DVD player. The electronics he laid out in the sun to dry. He didn’t expect them to work but they did. The clothes too, of course, were fine once he’d rinsed and hung them. Everything else was lost, destroyed by the wind and rain or simply washed away. He abandoned the house, leaving behind a mattress and his family photos. All were waterlogged beyond recognition.

He’d never gotten the passport replaced. It intimidated him, the prospect of going to town, speaking to officials, filling out forms. He was much more comfortable climbing a mast, swinging his cutlass, driving that forklift, holding an iguana. Besides, he wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t leaving the island. Why would he? Everything he needed was right there.

It was almost two years later, in the summer, that a friend of mine was getting married. One of my best friends – I was to be a bridesmaid – and so I wanted him to come with me to the States, meet my family. By then he was the father of my child.

He needed a copy of his birth certificate in order to get a new passport, and that too had been lost, so we went to the Registrar’s Office in Saint George’s. The building sat on the crest of a steep hill, and as we walked up it I felt the muscles in the backs of my thighs pleasantly pull. Pleasantly because by then I was accustomed to such exertion and noticed but no longer minded the tropical sun that poured itself over my head on its way to the steaming asphalt beneath my feet. The asphalt was black and they say that black absorbs heat, which it does, I guess, but it also has an energy saturation point, and once that point is reached the heat bounces off the asphalt and hits me behind the knees and under the chin, and I’m reminded of those foiled, reflective triptychs of cardboard that American women, desperate to be bronze at any cost, hold beneath their faces, amplifying the light of the North American Spring.

There had been a lot of back and forth, from one office to another, this place to buy the necessary tax stamps, another to fill out the proper form and a third where the records are actually kept. It’s in that third place that we wait, on metal folding chairs in a small office, while the registrar herself retreats to look up his original birth paper. While she’s gone I imagine it’s like the Library of Congress, where you fill out a slip and they bring you your book. Or perhaps more like wherever Dickens’ Marley stored his completed ledgers, shelved and dusty; cramped and in chronological order.

She’s gone for close to 20 minutes, which feels too long, and when she comes back she’s empty-handed. She asks us to confirm the year. 1967, I tell her. She smiles. She disappears.

When she returns for the second time she holds a slip of paper in her hand, and I breathe, relieved. I watch her as she writes out our copy. She uses a real fountain pen and her penmanship is flowery, filled with old-fashioned curlicues and other details I haven’t seen since Paris.

She fills in the year, affixes the stamps and hands it to us. 1966.

He’s a year older than he realized. There must be a mistake, he says. No, she assures us. She’s quite sure. 1966.

We make our way back down the hill, towards the oceanfront bus terminal. I’m smiling, more than a little amused. He asks me what the joke is and I tell him: Sweetie, you missed your fortieth birthday.

On our way home we buy a jug of red wine, because, as I explain and he is easily convinced, we simply must not miss the opportunity to fete this occasion.

not-so-lucid dreaming

His after work ritual began as soon as he walked in the door, when he’d sit down on the chair in the verandah that looked like wicker but actually was made of fiberglass.

He’d slide his fingers under the laces of his sneakers, which were invariably sparkling bright, white and clean. Slowly, deliberately, he’d pull on the laces, and only when they were fully loosened would he slide the sneakers off his feet.

That’s what he was doing the day he told me about his dream. The dream in which we’d been liming at the beach bar and I’d had too much to drink and refused to come home with him. The dream in which I’d danced with half the guys in the yard, close close. The dream in which I’d cussed him every time he said it was time to go.

“Now why would you do that, babes?” As he asks this he’s still looking down, still working his laces.

“I don’t know, sweetie. Why would I?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.” And that’s when I finally hear the accusation in his voice.

“You… You want me to explain my behavior? In YOUR dream?”

He blinks and nods slowly and I know he’s dead serious, I know he believes in the power and truth of dreams and loup-garou and obeahmen. So I know, I know I shouldn’t laugh but I can’t help it, because all I can hear is Harvey Keitel saying,

You shoot me in a DREAM, you better wake up and apologize!

I lose control of my laughter. It spills out of my mouth and leaks from the corners of my eyes, then floats on the cool night breeeze, up up until it’s carried out over Westerhall Bay. My mirth is so heavy that in spite of himself and the overproof rum in his blood, he finally cracks a smile, stands up, kisses my mouth, roughing my lips with his beard, and goes to the kitchen to see if I’ve seasoned the meat the way he taught me.

mommy gets hosed: a video

This one time Bean and I were hanging out at the boatyard and he took off all his clothes (as nakedly) so I sprayed him down with a hose because it was hot and he was covered in salt from the ocean but then he got hold of the hose and turned it me.

And some guy was videotaping.

dear grandpa josé

Do you remember when I was 16 and going to Hawaii? You told me about the Honolulu Santiagos, your cousins who left Puerto Rico as teens, like you did. Except they went to Hawaii instead of New York. (They’d heard, you said, about the pineapple.) You wanted me to look them up.

But Grandpa, I countered, will they believe that this white girl is related to them? Back then I didn’t even speak Spanish.

You raised both of your wrinkly eyebrows at me. Are you saying… that Puerto Ricans are black?

I almost laughed, but managed to keep it down to a snort. No, Grandpa. I’m saying that I look like a gringa.

Ah. Well. Yes. That is true.

You told me more about your cousins, but I don’t remember any of the details. I’m sorry about that. While I was on Oahu I got out the phone book and discovered hundreds of Santiagos listed. Nice, I thought. It’s a common name in many places, but this was ridiculous. (In the Grenada phone book, there are zero Santiagos. Bean and I are the only ones on the island and we can’t be bothered with land lines.)

I’m not shy, exactly, but I’ve never been a fan of the phone, not even at 16. So I didn’t make any calls. Do you remember that to make up for that I brought you some sand from Waikiki beach? And that years later I brought you sand from Normandy, France?

When I told you about the crush of souls I’d felt there, at Omaha Beach, you knew exactly what I was talking about. You believed in stuff like that.

I admit that I always thought you were more than a little bit racist. Like the thing you said about Puerto Ricans being black, as if that were offensive. Or how you’d go on about Maury Povich and Connie Chung being married. Or the time you called my college boyfriend a k!ke. I didn’t like that. At all. But I balanced it against your life.

You’d lived in rural Ohio during the late 40s and 50s, speaking faulty and accented English, saddled with your imported temper. All your friends called you “Joe”, but that never felt like your name. You should have been a world-class architect, but were foreign and self-educated and stuck. You talked rough but you had buddies of all colors. You only insulted my friends when they weren’t around. I used to joke that your only real prejudice was against fat people. And when I compared you to Redd Foxx, told you you were just like him except Puerto Rican, you tried not to smile but failed miserably.

I learned to watch the news in your living room. I learned to understand it at your dinner table. You were a storyteller. I like to think that I inherited that gift.

José y Joaquín (Click to enlarge.)

I knew you were my favorite long before you died. I was still surprised, though, not by how much I missed you, but by how I missed you. I want to write down that story you told me about how your mother ended World War I through prayer, but I can’t remember enough of the details. I want you to tell me again how much Grandma June would have loved my son. I want to hear you complain about the lack of ingredients in the food. I want you to rant about the purity of National League baseball. I want you to make another cuatro, build another dresser, draw another house.

More than anything, I want to know what you would think of Barack Obama. I think you’d like him. I don’t think you’d care about the color of his skin, though I’m sure you’d have something to say about it. I know you would have voted for him, because you never – in your mind – finished your penance for voting for Richard Nixon. But really, I can’t quite imagine what you’d say and that tears at me. I miss your voice.

The day we took this photo was the last time I ever saw you. You knew you were dying. I knew you were dying. And you knew that I knew. Etcetera. Later, after your funeral, I kept telling myself how lucky it was that you got to meet my Bean, and that 94 years is a very long life. Both of those things are true, yes. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re gone and I wish you weren’t.

I’m greedy for you, you and your stories.

Sometimes I’ll have an idea, a compulsion, an impulse that I don’t think is wholly mine. You plant ideas in my head. You whisper in my ear. You inspire me. Please, Grandpa. Please don’t ever stop doing that.

Love always, your gringa granddaughter, María

my dad, religion and 9/11

As long as I can remember, my dad has gone through “phases”. Like a kid who has just discovered baseball cards. He goes out and collects every single thing he can about baseball cards. These things he collects are both concrete (the cards themselves) and abstract (biographical details and stats and other such ephemera). And then, like a kid, he discovers something new (holy wow, PAINTBALL!), and moves on, discarding the fruits of collection like they’re rookie cards of a guy who never made it to his second season.

The first phase I was old enough to notice was the time he threw himself headfirst into Catholicism and bought a little wooden saint with peeling gold and red paint and no hands. Then one day, about a year later, he up and decided that was idolatry and threw it down the incinerator chute in his building on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. I watched this happen and I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how he could change his mind like that, so completely and so suddenly. (Today, two days shy of turning 33, I understand. I totally understand.)

The phase he happened to be going through when I was eight resulted in my being baptized a Methodist, a religion about which I still know next to nothing, because he lost interest within a year and so we never went back.

I was ten for the Whitley Strieber phase. Whitley Streiber wrote some novels — including Wolfen, which, if memory serves, was made into a movie. Then he wrote the first in a series of ostensibly autobiographical books describing his encounters with and abductions by alien visitors. The cover art was a close up of a visitor from the shoulders up. (South Park later used the same basic depiction of “Greys” as a model for the aliens that give Cartman an anal probe.)

Dad really digs this book, and encourages me read it. Then, as now, I will read anything, and I have a weakness for stupid supernatural shit like vampires and space aliens and schools for the gifted in outer space. (When ARE they making Ender’s Game into a movie, anyway?) We both read the books, and conduct many in-depth discussions about them. Mostly, I just listen. I’m ten, remember? Lo and behold, I start having nightmares. I suddenly develop an intense fear of the dark. His response? “Oh! She was totally abducted by aliens! And this proves it!”

My dad is a very post hoc ergo propter hoc kind of guy.

But here’s the really funny part. He hasn’t said anything to any of us about this in ages. Fifteen years at least. Then last year my dad and my brother are on some road trip and end up in a redneck bar somewhere to-the-far-left-of-nowhere western New York. After a few beers, Dad says to Robert, “You know your sister was abducted by aliens? Don’t you remember those nightmares she used to have?” It so totally never occurs to him that the books were perhaps the CAUSE of the nightmares. But what really gets me is that this is still something he thinks about, even after all these years.

I wish I could make up stories like that.

My father long since left the whole alien thing in the past. Not surprisingly, because none of his phases last more than a couple of years. Until the last one, that is. When I was in high school he got really interested in Kabbalah. Jewish mysticism. The magic of numbers. The “bible code”. That esoteric blah blah blah that the rabbis in the movie Pi: Faith in Chaos are going on about? Yeah. That.

He never actually converted. He’s a self-described Righteous Gentile, descended, in spirit at least, from the goyim who chose to go with Moses when he parted the Red Sea.

It’s all very amusing to me. Not because I don’t have respect for religion in general or Judaism in particular. The opposite, in fact, is true. I grew up in Rockland County, New York, which boasts one of the highest concentrations of Jews east of Israel. Palestine. Either way. The only reason I don’t have a degree in Near Eastern Studies is I would’ve had to get proficient in Arabic or Hebrew. I was already taking both French and Spanish every semester, and so a semitic language was, I decided, simply beyond the scope of my ability. So I contented myself with studying the history of Muslim Spain, the “real” story of the Christian Crusades, and reading the Torah, the Koran and a whole lot of Arabic love poetry and midrashim. (If you glean from the above that my primary interest in religion has always been academic, you’d be right.)

About five years ago I was so seriously considering conversion to Judaism that I signed up for classes. I didn’t, but that’s another story.

It was a long time before I understood why my father felt the need to find himself a rabbi and a shul. But he did. And I accepted that. Because far be it from me to belittle of anyone’s convictions, you know? Besides. The fact is that while his earlier phases, the ones I remember from my childhood, were all short-lived, this one has lasted now for about two whole decades.

He lives in a section of the Bronx that was once home to a thriving Jewish community, but is now primarily Irish and Italian. So the congregation is very small and the rabbi is quite happy to have him.

In 2001 Yom Kippur started at sundown on Thursday the 27th of September. I called him a week or so before and asked, “Daddy? Are you going to synagogue for Yom Kippur? Can I come with you? Please?”

I surprised myself with that request. I’m not religious. I’m not Jewish. But I hadn’t been to church in more than ten years, so I didn’t have one. (I never had.) In the days immediately following September 11th, I felt, for the first and only time in my life, like I needed some religion. Any religion would do, and a day of atonement felt serendipitously appropriate.

So I went to Yom Kippur services. I drove from my apartment in Nyack to his house in Throggs Neck. The highways were nearly deserted. The sky was still dirty. There was a raw ache pulsing in the air. When I got there he looked at my clothing – dark grey skirt that reached my ankles, darker grey cardigan sweater, red wine colored collared shirt and black not-leather shoes with rubber soles. He looked at me and smiled.

“You look nice, honey”, he said. “You’re dressed perfectly. How did you…”

“How did I know what to wear? Kosher Dining Hall.” (One of my roommates in college was an orthodox Jew.)

He nodded and smiled again and took my hand. We walked together to the synagogue, and when we got there I quietly took a seat in the women’s half of the pews. I don’t remember anything about the service, because I wasn’t paying attention. I did not hear a single word, because I was staring at my hands and weeping. I had needed to cry, very badly.

And so I did.

And it was awesome, in the way that only wholesale, visceral regurgitation of grief can be awesome.

Since then I’ve been in a “house of worship” only once. My stepfather’s funeral was held in a Catholic church. There was incense and stained glass and light, and a priest from West Africa with a voice that rubbed against my soul like music. I wore a bright pink shirt, because that’s what John would have wanted, and a terrible hair cut, because in my hazy, numb fog of grief I’d gone to the barber shop in the Wall Street subway station and told the guy, “Cut it. Just cut it.”

Sometimes I tease my dad. About collecting religions. Trying one on for a while, then discarding it and moving along to the next. But now that I’m older, I kind of get it. I think I understand. So my teasing is loving. I say things like, So, Dad… Golem. Do they have a bris? And he bellows at me, Are you talking about Abraham’s covenant with GOD? And then I start to giggle and he can’t help it, he finds my laughter infectious and joins me.

< 160

Make an entrance. Use your words. Take that trip. Forget fear. Love hard. Swim with dolphins. Hold your own hand. Hold on. Let go. Slide.

sidebar

My sidebar mysteriously jumbied itself the other day. Which is probably yet more proof that Benadryl and CSS do not mix.

Anyhoo. The content of my invisible sidebar, not including the widgets that are built into my WordPress theme, is now available on its own page. It will live there until I get around to sorting out what happened. (I might choose to leave it be. I think I kinda like how it looks with text and header alone. I think. The page looks awful, though, because it’s hosting data that was meant to be displayed at about 200 pixels wide.)

thus spake mommy’s little bonaparte

“You may call me Bean or Honey. And I will call you María.”

He spoke those words to me yesterday, in response to my saying, “Joaquín! Don’t climb on the kitchen table, please!”

A few hours later he told me that he and his grandmother went for a walk to the pond. I asked, “Oh, you mean that pond over there?” And I pointed. He rolled his eyes at me and said, “Mommy, we don’t have TWO ponds.”

It’s as if he leapfrogged right from toddler to teenager. Bless him.

the truth about moisturizers

Well, [the face] doesn’t [require different products than the rest of the skin]. Nor do you need eye cream. Or decolletage cream. You could just slather your whole self in Vaseline and call it a day. You can use Oxy pads on your face and your feet. You don’t need any of those thousands of products. You want them. You want the promise they contain. You want the solitary ritual of cleanse, tone, exfoliate and moisturise. The entire skincare industry is based on magical thinking. If I follow these steps exactly I’ll have perfect skin. I’ll have thick eyelashes. I’ll have full lips. I’ll get a payrise. I’ll buy a house. I’ll find the perfect partner. I’ll have more time. Then you don’t get those things and you’re about 2/3 of the way finished with the products. You go back to being disenchanted. Something else catches your eye. It contains an exciting new ingredient. The bottle feels just right in your hand. The product smells familiar and you’re gripped by olfactory deja vu. The salesperson assures you that there is nothing else like it on the market at the moment and rambles about patents and how the company secured the entire crop of this magical ingredient for the next 5 years so no other brand could use it, all the while loading you down with the entire 8 step morning and evening range. You fly home on a cloud of optimism. As soon as you walk in the door you line your new stash up in your bathroom, a personal altar to self-improvement. The cycle begins anew.

Erin, in response to Rachel’s question: “Why is that the face requires different products than the rest of the skin?” (Erin and Rachel are two of my favorite Tumblr friends.)

I’m posting this here for three reasons. First, because it’s refreshing to see such no-nonsense beauty advice. Second, because it’s hilarious. And third, because it reminds me of the time I told my exboyfriend’s mother that she should stop wasting so much money on bullshit moisturizers, because they’re all basically pertroleum jelly, except for the ones that are basically cocoa butter. She was not pleased and we broke up soon afterwards. The exbf and I, that is, not his mother and I. Although I not-so-humbly submit that it was basically the same thing.