I'm a Veronica.

Nov. 10, 2009 at 6:43pm with 25 notes View comments

My grandfather was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York City when he was 18.

He lived there for a few years. Then he got drafted for World War II. He was on the beach at Normandy, not on D-Day but a while later. He never talked much about France. I never questioned that, but I questioned it even less after I visited that beach myself in 1998 and found it haunted.

Back in the States he met my grandmother. She was from Ohio, so they lived there for a time. When my dad was in high school, they moved to a suburb of Buffalo. Still later they moved to Orange County.

In the late 70s they went to Puerto Rico. Stayed there for ten years. My grandmother never learned to speak Spanish, though she clearly understood it quite well. Once my cousins and I started getting born, they moved back to Orange, where they lived the rest of their lives.

My grandfather never stopped complaining about the winters in New York. I always thought that made a lot of sense. Of course the winters were terrible for him, a native Puerto Rican. Not just the cold, but the darkness too. He lived in it for sixty years but never really got used to the annual assault on his system. I always thought that made a lot of sense but only NOW do I really understand.

Nightfall by 5PM is an obscenity.