My mother, father, sister and I circa 1964
This is a great shot of my family in one of the five places we lived for the first five years of my life. Each one comes with stories of surviving hurricanes and our neighbors. But this one, the last one, is the only one I remember. My father was not around much, but I'm sure my mother wanted to have a picture to prove he was there. My sister didn't understand what he was doing in our lives. He had disappeared when she was six, had never sent the money he promised to get her and her mother out of Cuba, and failed to create a life for them together in New York or Miami. She had told my mother to divorce him more than once. When he finally showed up it was to ask them to leave Florida for the Northeast; she complained terribly. My mother had managed to save a little money to buy a house. Now my father was encouraging her to spend it moving to New York. "I'll pay you back when you get there,” he had told her. I remember riding the train north, the story of things being stolen by the movers, and the first little apartment we lived in in Corona, Queens. But my father never paid her back. He barely gave her enough for us to live. The happy family in this picture would go forward to live through some of the worst years of their life.