Goodbye Miami, 1979

It’s an odd thing walking through your oldest memories. The video is shaky, a signal from lo-res lenses, long obsolete. The depth of what you see is shallow but curious; you see a lot of things, but not too far into them. You are mostly happy, a little scared, you don’t know enough to be more or less of either. You are 3 years old, not much larger than a puppy, you say things and people laugh without you knowing why. You yourself find everything hilarious, so you don’t mind. You’ll carry that forever.

You always say your first language was Spanish, but that isn’t entirely true. Your first language is absurdity. The world looks loosely knit together out of a box of the spare parts of all its incompatible purposes. You marvel at how it seems to crumple but never collapse. When you’re older you’ll read somewhere that it’s miraculous and unlikely that humans manage to successfully take a single step, the balance of hundreds of muscles and bones on a tiny piston navigating an uneven road you mostly cannot see. To you the world seems similar, a glass menagerie never quite safely on the shelf.

You are a weird kid and you don’t know it yet but you’re not growing out of that one either. You steel up and press against your fear, you jump where you shouldn’t just to see what’s at the end. When you’re still 3 -but not for long- your stepfather walks you onto a plane and buckles you into a seat, all of the stewardesses watching you in fascination like a baby panda wobbling around. Your stepfather says he’s going to get you snacks and when the pilot announces the plane is leaving you shout out to wait for him. You take that first plane ride alone, the center of its attention, everyone consoling you for a mishap you won’t know for years was by design.

When you get where you’re going, after what seems like a year to a brain that’s only known three of them so far, not yet enough to measure time, your grandmother greets you at the entrance. Every single time you fly this route to Florida in your life will be to see her. To you, Abuela is its north star, her house its center. Her driveway curves past the front door and pulling in always feels like docking at a space station.

Tomorrow is your birthday, an enormous shift from 3 to 4. A full 25% older: an unreasonable leap too big for your tiny feet. You are now somehow double the age of your younger brother. This feels like a great responsibility.

Miami is very different from your world, behind Abuela’s house there is a lake, and below the tree in her yard a pile of coconuts. You aren’t allowed yet alone in the water, which is full of ducks, and those 2 truths in that order are calamitous. You still watch them, tiptoeing closer, trying to make their sounds without convincing them to join you.

In this house are things you’ve never seen. There are the couches where your family sit and then another room off-limits, the seats covered in plastic. There are cookies here and sweets which are not allowed in your mother’s kitchen. They’re too high to reach but your aunt and uncle are still taller than you and bridge the gap.

Your grandparents sit in matching chairs on the far wall like on the set of All In the Family. The room will morph through the years but the artwork and placement will stay mostly the same. An abstract painting of a bicycle, the first time you see an intentionally distorted shape in art. There is a cuckoo clock that must be wound every day… maybe more than once? You’re not yet big enough to know. The room is lit mostly from the sliding doors out to the water, at night the windows are shuttered like a bomb shelter. They have a swimming pool, to a NY kid impossible, like owning a rainbow. You don’t know how to swim and a few years later your teenaged uncle will try to teach you by pushing you in. Mostly the pool to you is like a portal in the center of the floor. A portal you watch from a distance.

You spend your birthday there, away from your mother and your siblings, eating tiny boxes of raisins, walking into and through these lives already in progress. Your immigrant family 20 years into their new life displaced 90 miles from where they were all born. The house is thick with culture, there are always stories being told, but it’s like you’re not tall enough to hear them. Your grandmother is the funniest person you’ve ever met, with a devotion to a gag that inspires you even then. She speaks mostly Spanish to you, but when you hear her speak English with her accent you notice she leans into it for laughs. You get spoiled early eating black beans that are slightly sweet, and you’ll never enjoy them at any restaurant as long as you live. But you order them anyway, because the plate looks wrong without them, like a bed without a pillow.

Years later you will drag your first heartache through those rooms.
You will sit with your grandmother and ask her about Cuba. She is relatively stoic, speaking matter of factly, but even feigning emotional distance your family teaches you to miss a place you’ve never been. Anyway, it’s unconvincing. The barest whisper of a bongo drum is like a hand on a cat’s butt lifting your family out of their seats, kicking off their shoes and doing a copa across the kitchen. The house is perfumed with the forever boil of cuban coffee on the stove. This new city rising as both the offspring and the ghost of a Havana left behind.

Through your life you move from city to suburb and back again, sharing bedrooms in various configurations with the army of children your mother has filled the house with. You arrange yourself in all these new worlds, always alongside the parallel life your cuban family mourn implicitly every day. The only constant is that house on the lake, the furniture shifting, the family in photos multiplying. At its heart your tiny Abuela like a lighthouse you can always find.

In her last days she will lie breathing slowly in a bed too big for her, her family pulled in from across the world trying to keep their heads above the water rising between you and this beautiful creature that brought every one of you into existence. You sit in your memories, the things you are to her and to each other, this little matriarch of three generations, her own reflection filtered through time into dozens of tiny faces all stumbling past her blue chair at the back of the living room. One of the last times she opens her eyes, after the doctors have given the bad news that nothing can be done, it is to stick out her tongue at the nurse and make her granddaughter laugh.

A last one for the road.

In very loving and very silly memory of Marta Silvia Hernandez, 1928-2026