Me and My Dad

My father and I circa 1964

One of the things that people do with photographs is they use them as evidence. They use them as a way to prove that they have been somewhere, that something exists, or that something happened.

This photograph proves that my father was there, that he came to see me, that he knew he had a son, though I have no recollection of his presence in my life for those first five years of living with my mother and sister in Florida.  I certainly remember him after that.  He was a storm of anger and dissatisfaction, stumbling through our apartment in Inwood, Manhattan; sleeping, eating or raging like an ogre in a fairytale.

When we all went down to Cuba to take my mother's ashes to her family's niche in the Necropolis of Colon in 2015, my sister shared a secret my mother had taken to the grave.  The telling began with a remark from my cousin, and then neither was prepared to say it out loud, to me or anyone else present; in front of my wife, my daughter, or my niece.  They were not forthcoming so I let it go, but that night my sister came to my hotel room, crying.  I had known that my father's "other" family had always questioned my patrimony, a question that was resolved over time, as I had become the mirror image of my father.  But the secret my mother kept and my sister was about to reveal was the fact that my father had not bothered to come see me for the first two years of my life.  There are no photographs of me with my father holding me in his arms as a baby, you see, because he wasn't there.

Me and My Mom

My mother and I circa 1962

Everyone believes that their mother was a saint.  My mother was named for two: the Virgin Mary, Maria, the mother of the messiah; and, Our Lady of Mercy, Mercedes.  Her sister was named for Our Lady of Sorrows, Dolores, a name my mother would give to my sister, and how prescient she was, as my sister has had more heartache than any one should ever need. I was her "Hijo Querido del Alma," her cherished son of love, or love child, as we would say in America.  An accident of my parents’ reunion in El Norte, she poured all the love in me she could not share with my father.   At some point she became tired of pronouncing and spelling her first name, getting confused with others in the mail, and she changed her legal name to Maria M., and for the rest of her life received mail and signed her name that way.  My sister was known in the house as Lolita, the diminutive for Dolores, but eventually went by the moniker of Dee.  When my parents died she said the hardest thing would be that no one would ever call her Lolita again.  I make it a point to try, when I can remember. Sometimes my mother would say to me, "When I look at you I know how long I have been in exile."  She died when I was 53.