Halloween. I’m pretty sure I’m nine. Maybe ten. I’m positive I did that makeup myself.

I used to be really embarrassed by this photo but right now I lurve it. 

#iamamazing

Because he just emailed to say I don’t have to hide his eyes. 

This will not become a habit.

“We were a pair of unhappy, frustrated hermits.”

He’s still one of my favorite people though.

I do so adore him. 

Yawn? Or baby prepared to swallow whatever crosses her path?

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.)

For Throwback Thursday. Possibly my favorite of the old photos I found recently.

“”Baby girl glam.”“ 

Because it’s been too long since I shared the horrible awesome that was Maria at 10.

(Also.)

Tumblr, meet my mom. This photo was taken in 1970. She was a year out of college and teaching biology at Cathedral High School in New York City. She was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. Living in Manhattan was an enormous challenge for her. That first winter, she tells me, she got herself a long brown coat, her secret weapon against the weirdos on the subway who’d otherwise ogle her bottom.

That summer, she made costumes for Shakespeare in the Park. In the fall she continued to teach and also started graduate school at Columbia. The following summer, she and my dad got married. (This is my favorite of their wedding photos. It’s very Buddy Holly meets Annie Hall meets American Gothic.) Five years after that, they moved to Nyack and had me. My brother arrived two years later.

It wasn’t easy for her, of course, when my dad left. But after a while she pulled herself together and did things she might never have done had they remained married. In Montana one summer, under the wing (ha) of a Native American named Brooke Medicine Eagle, she went on a vision quest. She taught at the Audobon Camp in Maine. She lived for a time on the Clearwater, the Hudson River Sloop. She published a short story.

Whenever there were breakthroughs in science, she’d get the newest college textbooks and teach herself whatever there was to learn. Dinosaurs, global warming, mitochondria, and neurotransmitters. For example. She was an enormously popular teacher and at least once a month I pass along to her Facebook messages that I can only describe as fan mail.

In 2001 she and her boyfriend of seven years got married, retired, sold the house I grew up in, moved onto a 45’ Herschoff Mobjack and sailed to the Caribbean. The lived on their boat and sailed from island to island until 2004. They were in Grenada when my mom got word that her father had passed away. She went to Indiana for the funeral, and several weeks later, while she was still in the States, her husband was very badly injured in an accidental fall. He needed orthopedic surgery, and medical care that was simply unavailable in the Caribbean, so she flew back to Grenada so she could be with him while they medievaced him to Florida. He was at one of the best hospitals in the country, and I was so certain he’d be fine, I didn’t talk to him on the telephone before his surgery. On the operating table he suffered a massive stroke. He never woke up.

It was, simply, the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. Not only John’s death, but what it did to my mother. I was so worried about her I couldn’t breathe, or cry, or imagine how we would ever again be whole.

She stayed with me in New York for a while, but by January she was itching to get back to Grenada. It had become home. And so she went. I followed her a few months later. I was supposed to stay for six weeks, but when my time was up I didn’t want to leave. So I stayed. For four years. By the first anniversary of John’s death, we had found a house, brought my grandmother to live with us, and I had met a guy and found a job. I was also pregnant. With Bean. Who is, by the way, named after the grandfather he never got to meet.

I still think about John a lot, and I know my mother does too. I do not think that I will ever, as long as I live, stop missing him. Nor will I forget what it was like to witness my mother become a widow. To watch her face crumple up with a sorrow I could not ever hope to soothe. But I am at peace with the knowledge that we survived the hardest part. We weathered the storm. And we are stronger for it.

Today is Mom’s birthday. She’s 63. She’s just as beautiful as she was at 24. She doesn’t have any wrinkles, and her white hair doesn’t really say “old”. It says “hippie snow princess”. She still bakes and sews and has an almost supernatural touch with our garden. She loves dark chocolate-covered chili peppers. She devours the books I recommend and then wants to talk about them for hours. She is quiet and shy and soft-spoken. She is nothing like me and she is also everything like me. And she is the best Grandma a Bean could ever have.

I love you, Mom. Happy Birthday.

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.]

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.

High school graduation. I’m at the podium.

To my undying chagrin, there was an article in the local newspaper about our ceremony and the headline was a phrase from my speech: The soul is the only thing that endures.

Undying chagrin.

Christmas 1995. Me and my brother. It was my first winter break home from college.

I’m actually not certain about the year, but I dated this photo based on the pair of glasses I’m wearing. This method is slightly more accurate than carbon dating.

At school, 11th grade, holding a baby bunny.

Now I’m really done.