I went back and found and tagged all the stories and photos I’ve posted about my father’s father. It’s kind of amazing how much there is and how it happened without my ever making a conscious decision to write about him. Now I’m thinking about sharing some of it with my dad and my uncles, which would be an unprecedented event in the Santiago family’s history.
Also, another World War II army photo. He’s the one on the left.
Recently I posted two of the very last photos I have of my grandfather (here and here). This is one of the very earliest photos I have of him, and, well… Color me fascinated.
I’m pretty sure this is in Puerto Rico, partly because he looks so young, and partly because why else would there be a Puerto Rican flag? I suspect it’s at a boat yard or marina of some kind. I even wonder if this photo wasn’t taken the day he left Puerto Rico for New York, and I imagine it’s concurrent with this formal portrait.
(A month ago I shared photos of him circa WWII in his Army uniform, and in Belgium in 1945, and more recently I wrote a really emotional open letter to him. If you gather from this that my grandfather holds an exceptionally dear place in my heart, you’d be right. He is, after all, the man who confessed to me on his deathbed that he had not, in fact, invented the piña colada, he had merely PERFECTED it.)
It dawned on me that the photo I chose for the post about my grandfather is the kind of thing one might not appreciate if one didn’t know him. Because he’s wagging his finger in eight-month-old Bean’s face, and it looks totally obnoxious even though it wasn’t really. It was classic José hilarity.
I like this one better even though I can’t get the red-eye out. Or crop it into a square. I do so enjoy cropping photos into perfect squares. Yeah.
(Embiggen)
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.
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
(Embiggen)
My educated guess is that this formal portrait of my grandfather was taken in 1932. He would have been eighteen years old and about to leave Puerto Rico for New York. He did not return until decades later when he was a married father of four.
I find the youth and beauty in his face simply astonishing.
Many thanks to onesmallfire and anyone else who pointed out that that photo of my grandfather was taken in front of the Manneken Pis in Brussels, Belgium. The first person to tell me this was a lovely French gentleman who lives in Paris, fabiche, who emailed me this morning just a few minutes after my post. At first I thought he couldn’t be right because I’ve been to Brussels and seen the Mannekin Pis and thought I would have recognized it. But then I remembered that 1) the statue had been moved while I was there so it wasn’t behind that fence, 2) my grandfather was never stationed in Belgium but he did spend one of his military leaves in Brussels.
And then I remembered a conversation we had more than ten years ago. I had just returned from my semester in Paris. We were talking about the traveling I’d done and I mentioned that a friend and I had gone to Brussels and spent an entire day wandering around the city looking for the Manneken Pis and that when we found it I couldn’t believe how small it was. He started chuckling his trademark chuckle at that; told me he knew exactly what I was talking about.
But Grandpa. You’ve never been to Belgium.
Oh, yes I have.
When?
During the war.
Really? But I thought you were stationed in France.
I was, I was. I went to Brussels on leave. For a holiday. Vacation.
By this point he’s moved past his trademark Santiago chuckle and is really laughing. And what you need to know about my grandfather for the purposes of this anecdote is that his laugh had a Puerto Rican accent. Ach. I miss him.
He went on to explain that just like me, he and a friend had wandered the city for hours looking for the fabled Manneken Pis. And that just like me, when he finally saw it he couldn’t believe it was really just a rather small statue of a little boy, peeing. I asked him what he did when he saw it. He explained,
I laughed. I took a picture. And then I went and got another drink.
![Definitely my grandfather.
Probably France.
Probably 1945.
Maybe Normandy.
Maybe.
Family history is hard.
[Edit: I now know exactly where this was taken, and I even have a whole story about it.]](http://piscesinpurple.me/photo/1280/319810001/1/tumblr_kvsw2jZQ501qzqhpi)
Definitely my grandfather.
Probably France.
Probably 1945.
Maybe Normandy.
Maybe.
Family history is hard.
[Edit: I now know exactly where this was taken, and I even have a whole story about it.]
My grandfather was a World War II veteran.
On Christmas I announced to the family that I’m documenting our history and that I need their help. I need them to send me copies of all the photos and recipes and documents they have.
They listened.
My father’s father designed and built the house I grew up in. Legend has it that my mom went into labor while tiling the kitchen floor. When I was a kid my grandfather liked to tell me that I was almost born in the back of his pickup truck. Bullshit, I’d declare. The house on Haven Court was less than a block from Nyack Hospital. Mom WALKED.
That tile was never quite right, though. Unfinished.
Another thing that was left unfinished was one of the house’s two and a half bathrooms. Certainly it was nobody’s intention to leave it that way for thirteen years, but that’s what happened. My parents were too busy with baby me, and then less than three years later there was my brother too. Then when I was seven my dad moved out and it was a long time before my mom managed to do much of anything that wasn’t vital to our survival in the hunter/gatherer sense of the word.
By the time my brother and I were both in middle school and words like Aquanet and benzoyl peroxide and Gillette had entered our lexicon, we had grown weary of all sharing the one bathtub and shower. My mother, I imagine, was wearier still of listening to the two of us get on like two cats of Kilkenny, so she had the tile installed and, for a time, peace broke out. But that was later.
That unfinished bathroom was one of those things that seemed totally normal within the context of our household. None of my friends had anything analogous, but I didn’t notice. The toilet and the double sinks and the shower all worked, and there were cabinets and even a mirror, but no tile or wallpaper or plates covering the electrical outlets. There were old dusty boxes full of bottle green tile. The shower curtain rod had no curtain but it did have a wire hanger, and the wire hanger had herbs and flowers from our garden fastened to it with wooden clothespins, hung there to dry. I would go in there and search the contents of the cabinets that I already knew by heart, search them as if I’d find something new.
The summer I was ten I hatched a chicken. In an incubator. He was fuzzy and yellow and I imagined that he loved me. He slept in a cardboard box that I kept on the floor next to the head of my bed. He got bigger and stronger and some mornings I’d wake up to find him asleep on the pillow, right next to me. Then ihe got bigger and stronger still and when he could fly out of the box with ease, my chicken got his own room. My chicken moved into the unfinished bathroom.
I wanted to keep it forever, of course. I was ten and I was a girl and I had literally helped the bird out of its shell. It’s too messy, my mother told me. It needs to be outside, she said. To me it was obvious that my chicken should just live in the backyard. Problem solved. Why not? Because, my mother explained, there are zoning laws and this is a residential area. This is the suburbs and we are not allowed to have farm animals.
Zoning laws? Adults. Adults and their ridiculous constructs.
Christmas Day we drove upstate to my grandparents’ house. On the way, we dropped my chicken off with some farmer. In the car I smoothed his feathers and tucked him under my arm and felt his warmth and silently willed my mother to get lost and give up getting rid of my chicken. And then when we got there I put him down on the ground, and watched him inspect the hens. He walked off, oblivious to me. It was cold and we were already late for dinner, so we left. It was cold and I could see my breath and hear the crunch crunch of the frozen ground beneath my feet.
I missed my chicken, but not as much as I thought I would, and I’m sure he missed me even less.
Me and Grandpa Santiago, November 1977.
This is Grandpa José, my father’s father, in 1977, the year he built our house in Nyack.
I consider myself profoundly lucky to have had all four of my grandparents around until I was 28. They were all incredible, amazing people, so don’t you dare ask me to pick a favorite.
However. If there’s one I would give anything to be able to talk to again, just for a few hours? Grandpa José. No question. Because listening to that man talk was one of the greatest pleasures of my childhood.
Also, that finger? The signal that you should be listening.
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.
1. He loves the Yankees.
2. He lives in the Bronx.
3. He walks around in a Red Sox hat all the time.
4. He thinks he’s funny. Clearly.
5. After my grandfather died, he told me that Grandpa had, at heart, always been a Mets fan. Because why? Because National League. What. What. And you wait to tell me this until after he’s gone? In the same tone you’d tell me some deep, dark secret? God forbid something happens to me. You’ll tell my son, You know your mother was actually a Republican at heart.
(Not that I equate Mets fans with Republicans. They’re just equally unlikely reversals.)
