My grandmother was raised in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. She said the name, Vega Baja, meaning the “low plains,” with such romance that it was clear she longed for the place. In her stories she described a big house, and a farm where the children could eat the fruit from the trees and learned to milk a cow. Every Sunday after church they went to the beach. She taught herself to swim because the other children always played in the deep water and she hated being left behind. The beach was a strange one geographically. There was a sand dune stretching out perpendicular to the shore and into the sea. On one side the water was wild and rough; the Living Sea, it was called. The other side, protected by a row of rocks, was calm, and so was called the …
Stories
A Grandfather’s Art in Postcard Poetry
MY father was a great believer in the Postal Service, and when his grandchildren were young, his postcards to them arrived almost daily. They were plain white postcards, never the photo variety, so there was plenty of room to write on both sides, and from edge to edge. What he wrote was almost always nonsense verse, with titles like “The Mother of All French Fries,” and “Reasons to Sneeze.” I keep them, now that my father is gone and my children are grown, in a couple of file boxes under a bed and pull them out occasionally to remind myself of that time. They have almost nothing to do with reality, and yet they are the reality that survives. On a postcard from 1985, my oldest child is still a 2-year-old hunting for jelly beans with his …
Diary of a Teenage Grandmother
My parents recently found five journals in one of those listless cardboard boxes that leaves an attic only when somebody dies or the house is sold. (Don’t worry, everyone survived the sale of the house.) The journals were written by my paternal grandmother when she was living with her widowed mom in Gloversville, N.Y. It was July 1910. She was 16, an only child. The first entry begins “Dearest Anybody,” which I took as permission to start reading. Each of my grandmothers died before I was born. I’ve seen a few austere photographs, but I don’t know what their voices sounded like or how they moved through a room. My family is small, and its history has never been part of my identity. I can probably name more ex-members of Black Flag than I …
The Boss of the Pumpkin Cartel
GROWING up in the ’80s, my brother and I sold pumpkins door to door every October. Whenever 4-foot children selling Halloween squash ring your doorbell, you’re hamstrung into purchasing one, or risk being labeled the local curmudgeon. But it bears mentioning that we were the only children in Corning, N.Y., our small town upstate, with our very own pumpkin supplier and that we had a virtual monopoly on the market. Each spring, Grandpa Charlie planted a pumpkin patch with the sole purpose of providing us with a crop. As far as pumpkin connections went, he was exactly what you would want — green thumb, hard worker, uncomplaining about the sowing and the toiling and the harvesting and the battling of wildlife that dined on our fruit. While …
Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match
Dear Diary: When I was 10 in the 1960s, my parents would load us into the Studebaker Lark every couple of weeks and scurry us through the Lincoln Tunnel to 10th Avenue and Grandma Katy’s deli. At lunchtime her store, Katy’s Delicatessen, was a melting pot of hungry regulars. The stage was set for Grandma to become an envoy to unmarried patrons. “Young man,” she would bark at the first pairless male in line, “where is your girlfriend today?” If a response of “I don’t have one anymore,” echoed through the lunch line, Katy would say, grinning like Lewis Carrol’s Cheshire cat, “My neighbor lady upstairs is out of this world.” She got Roy, her hard-working right-hand man, to marry the mysterious “A,” a girl with Rapunzel-like hair. Proposals …
Lessons from a Senior Skinny-Dipper
In one of my favorite family pictures, I am standing in a semicircle of women — my mother, my aunts and my cousins — all of us barefoot on the grass, dressed in white terry cloth robes. We are about to take a memorial skinny-dip. It’s a year after my grandmother died, and this is the best way we know to honor her.My grandmother spent her summers at a family lake house in northern Wisconsin. Every morning, she’d rise at dawn, put on her robe, and trek barefoot down the dirt path to the lake. Sometimes I’d go with her. We’d walk the cold metal dock to the end, where she’d pause to scan the lake for any fishermen before shaking off her robe and jumping into the water. “Chilly beans!” she always sang out, at the water’s touch. “Chilly …