confessions of a reformed tourist
My grandfather was a veteran of World War II. He’d been on the Normandy coast, though he missed the gruesomeness of D-Day proper. In 1998, when I visited the graveyard there, I walked down to the ocean and collected some sand for him. I filled an empty film canister. (Remember those?) It was an eerie experience. I’m [...]
My brother has one of those video cameras with a little screen that you can flip around. I guess so that you can use it to tape yourself? Yeah. He brought it out on Tuesday to record Bean blowing out his birthday candles and opening his presents. At first he kept the monitor where he [...]
He loves brooms, mops, the dishwasher, all varieties of soap, buckets and sponges. Mommy, I want to wash. Mommy, I want to sweep. Mommy, why don’t you use the dishwasher? These are some of the first sentences he ever spoke. He was about eight months old when I went back to work. Carol, whose primary [...]
You’re too big to climb on my back but too little to monkey up the tree. You’re too big to be carried everywhere but too little to make any of your own decisions. (Except for maybe sometimes you get to choose between chicken nuggets and sunflower butter.) I never said life was fair. Or that [...]
I used to take lots of videos. Short things, nothing too special. The idea was to capture a minute’s worth of what my life in Grenada was like. What Bean was like as a baby. For a while I forgot about the videos. I was busy with other things. Primarily, being miserable. But recently I’ve [...]
It started about two years ago when Bean first figured out that neither his grandmother nor I have a penis. He was AMAZED. For a while afterward, he’d randomly point at one of us and say, “No penis?” He’d ask me. Then his grandmother. And his babysitter if she happened to be there. Once we [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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, [...]
