Family nostalgia project ‘10 continues and thankfully ends.

Tap shoes and the training potty at my abuelita’s house.

My entire family went on vacation when I was almost two and my mom didn’t want to deal with my hair since it was so hot out so she chopped it off and this is why I am ambiguously gendered in this photo with my grandpa.

This is newborn me. I was three weeks late and a monstrous baby at birth. I just typed “at bitch”. very telling.

I have no words for my father’s fashion choices.

I am going to flip furniture over Teresa Giudice/RHONJ-style, just wait.

My mom reading in the 70s. She commented: “You see, it wasn’t just glitter and cocaine. Not that I ever did cocaine. You know.” Note: she then married a man with the last name Escobar. I rest my case.

I’m surprised the Sartorialist didn’t come calling.

I don’t know either. Also, PUBLIX brand foil. Nice.

See my dad’s balding patch? Well, I learned how to crochet around age 5 and I made him a little pink yarmulke-looking thing so “no one would”. I’m pretty sure he cried.

The terminal just opened and is entirely, eerily empty. One other woman sits 15 seats down from where I found an outlet. She nodded politely as she passed me. No matter how many times I take an early flight like this, I will never, ever get used to how dead airports are in the wee hours. If I could get comfortable, I’d take a little nap but I am between exhausted and something not human. I’m squinting in the harsh lights, purple behind my eyes when I close them.

My dad picked me up a bit ago and drove me to the airport. It was kind of him so I wouldn’t have to take a cab or car service with someone who took the worst routes to the airport. I sat curled up in my dad’s front seat and we listened to some European satellite radio station switch between World Cup news and thumping house music. We passed a billboard for some kind of mojito drink and we once again debated the merits of a mint julep vs a mojito. He pulled out the low stuff and reminded me that a mojito saved my life.

“You cut your foot open, remember? In the mountains?” He looked from the road to me.

“It was a splinter,” I yawned.

“No, you tore a jagged cut in your foot on that deck.” He was right.

I remembered being 12 and standing on the back deck of our house in North Carolina. I had been swimming and running around barefoot near the edge of the woods, my feet getting their summer skin from not wearing shoes at all. I stepped on roots and rocks and God knows what but I didn’t hurt myself until I opened the bottom of my foot with a nail sticking out of the deck.

I screamed and saw the puddle of blood forming under my foot, some skin stuck to the boards. My parents were in the kitchen making a pitcher of mojitos. They ran outside as blood dripped from my foot. My mom froze and seemed unsure whether to run to me or run away; my dad came towards me and picked me up. He carried me inside and put me on the kitchen’s island as blood got everywhere inside. I felt myself sway a bit but I couldn’t help but notice how much darker the blood was than the red in my gingham swimsuit.

He looked at my foot for a minute before running out of the room. She stood near me and stroked my ponytail but her hand was shaking. He came back with the medical kit we kept in the hall closet. It had much more than your average Neosporin and bandaids kit and I watched as he pulled out packages for sutures. He washed his hands.

“Pour her a mojito,” he said to my mother.

“Are you kidding?” she replied.

“Just do it.” He muttered under his breath in Spanish.

She shakily poured me a small juice glass worth of the dink and handed it to me. He nodded at me and I took a sip. I made a face at the burn of alcohol.

“I know but finish it,” he said.

I swallowed the rest of the glass and felt my face glow. My dad put on gloves and told my mom to look away. He didn’t tell me to for some reason. He sewed up my foot, out of practice but smooth. He cleaned my foot after he was done and it seemed to be back in one piece, throbbing but whole. He breathed heavily for a few minutes.

“I forgot that you’re a doctor,” I said, and he was even though he hadn’t practiced in years, even though he left it behind to do something he loved. His father had not been pleased.

“I was a doctor.” He put away the rest of the supplies in the kit and kissed the top of my head as he walked past me.

Now before the sun rises, he kisses my cheek as he lifts my suitcase out of the car. I walk into the airport and know he is terrified for me, his little girl who flies 10, 12, 20 times a year. If he can’t drive or sail somewhere, he doesn’t like to go there. If he can’t put his hands on something and fix it, guide it, he has no idea what he’s doing. I swear I can still feel the bottom of my foot throb sometimes and I wonder what he’s doing. The terminal is full but no one says a word.

my mom and dad (with my aunt!) before i was born.

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home

I’ve seen my dad cry twice in my life. When I was ten, his stepfather passed away. Passed away is actually too peaceful for what happened, his stepfather owned a small store and he was shot by some teenagers trying to rob the place. I remember my dad looking stern the morning we found out, shuffling around stirring cream into his coffee. My mom drove me to school that day and told me quietly what had happened; I didn’t cry, it felt very distant from me. When I got home from school that day, my dad was still at home, sitting at the dining room table where a gift basket full of muffins and fruit with a condolences card sat. I left my backpack in the foyer and sat down opposite him. I stared at him and he stared at the basket. Suddenly, he picked the whole basket up with his big hands and walked towards a hall closet. He opened the door, shoved the basket inside, and slammed the door closed. When he turned to walk back towards his den, I could see tears streaming down his cheeks, into his mustache. My dad looked really small then and somehow I knew better than to follow.

My dad has never been one to cry. He looks like a small, round Jewish accountant, actually when I was a kid I was convinced they modeled the Pringles guy after him. He’s lived a big life in his sixty years. He grew up in Spain and Cuba and lived in Mexico for a while. When he was young, he spent summers working on sailboats and fishing boats. He taught me everything I know about the ocean. When I was little, we used to go out on the boat with a fishing net and catch these tiny little fishes, hundreds of them at a time. We would come back to shore and he would show me how to cook these by rubbing them in your hands in salt and pepper and then frying them in a sizzling pan over a fire built on the sand.

“If you get sand on them, it’s okay, they’ll taste better,” he said, as he tossed another handful of tiny fishes onto the pan.

Once they were fried to a crisp, he would take them out and lay them on brown paper to cool for a bit. Then he would pick up the crunchy fish by its little tail and stick the whole thing in his mouth and eat it.

“Their bones are so tiny that when you fry them, they become crunchy. You can eat them whole,” he said to me. No matter how many times we did this together, I would never eat one, content with just rubbing the little fishes in salt and pepper and sand, and throwing them on the fire.

My dad was a teacher of the practical things for a childhood. If my mother taught me about literature and good films and fashion, he taught me how to fish, how to ride a bicycle, how to build a quality experiment for the science fair. In the fifth grade, he helped me build an invention which would hold a nail in place while you hammered it. My dad was a crafty parent due to his being a contractor and he built me things with his hands, doll beds and the perfect desk chair. We went camping together and he shared with me his love of mountains, just as strong as his love of the ocean. He and I became tan in the ocean and the mountains, watching the way nature surrounded us and made us feel infinite.

I claim my mother to be the patron of the arts in my life but my dad also helped greatly to develop my tastes in this area. I love spaghetti westerns and action movies because of him; I listed A Fistful of Dollars as one of my favorite movies in our first grade “About Me” project. My dad also instilled in me a lasting love of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Let me tell you, you have never heard the Beatles sung if you haven’t heard them sung in a Spanish accent. He would let me play Hey Jude all the way through in the car, singing every na na na along with me. When the song would end and I would look at him shyly, he would rewind it and we’d sing it again. He played drums in a band when he was a teenager and he respected music in a very serious way. When my mom was pregnant with me, she laid down the law and declared that she alone would be selecting my first name but told my dad he could select my middle name. Being the Dylan and Blonde on Blonde fan that he is, he chose Marie from Absolutely Sweet Marie. To this day, he’ll still call me Absolutely Sweet Anaïs Marie from time to time.

My dad is not only a great man but a good one. He has always told me to study whatever I want in college, being more concerned with my happiness than how much money I’ll make or if I’ll have a corner office or not one day. I’m his only child and he has grown comfortable in his role not only as father but as friend. I’ve always been able to have a drink with my dad and talk about anything and vent. He tries to shut his ears to talk of men but he’s been a good sport about the boyfriends who have run through my life. Thus, all these reasons explain why I feel so bad that I was the reason I saw my dad cry the other time in my life.

The same year I was born, my dad was blessed with another baby: his 1967 blue Ford Mustang. To be honest, I’m still not sure which arrival, mine or the car, he was more excited about. My earliest memories include my dad underneath that car in our driveway on Saturday mornings, tinkering with it and fixing it up. He had it reupholstered in gorgeous leather, replaced a shattered back window, repainted it a beautiful smoky blue. He helped my mom create me in less than twenty minutes I imagine and was proud of me, but he spent years nurturing that car into top shape; if he could have given birth, that would have been his child. He finished that car when I was about four years old, and I remember Sunday afternoons driving to brunch in it, my parents and I all in sunglasses. We were never cooler than at that moment.

He was living the life, my dad was. Wife, daughter, nice house, dream car. My dad was probably on top of the world right then when someone decided to give me a present. I remember my mom’s friend from high school sending me this amazing glitter t-shirt painting kit. Being four years old, glitter was literal cocaine to me and I grabbed it like a junkie. I followed my mom around to help me get set up for painting but my mom knew better. She sent me out to the driveway and put down cardboard and my t-shirt and my painting supplies and left me to paint away from her new rugs.

Nothing is more magical than glitter when you’re a child. The way it shimmers on everything and reflects light, it’s fantastic. At the time, I lacked the part of my brain that says, “That’s enough glitter, Anaïs, you look like you belong in Labyrinth.” That’s the same part of my brain that sometimes malfunctions when I see truffles now. I painted my shirt along with my arms and it was glorious, a creation of hot pink and gold and silver wonder. As I sat hopped up on glitter fumes, I realized that glitter could only make things better so I began to leave my mark on the sidewalk. I looked at my work and thought myself as the Picasso man who was in my Art for Toddlers book my mom had bought me.

I looked around for something else to make beautiful and set my eyes upon my dad’s Mustang. For a split second, I worried that he might get mad but I really didn’t see how making something prettier could be a bad thing. I grabbed my little paint tray and brush and went to work on the back chrome bumper. I painted swirls and tiny flowers; it was really quite subtle work, mostly in silver. I worked on it for a bit and then stood back to admire the masterpiece. It looked amazing, silver glitter popping from the blue paint and the chrome. I ran inside to my dad’s den and grabbed him by the hand.

“Daddy, come outside. I have to show you something!” I said, barely containing my excitement.

“What is it, princesa?” He smiled at me and got up from his chair. He was always really good at paying attention to anyone who required his time.

“It’s a surprise for you.” I led him by the hand down the hall and out through the garage door onto the driveway.

“Is it cake? You know I could go for that right now,” he replied, smiling as I led him to the back of his car. I pointed to the back and grinned, beyond pleased with myself.

“TADA!” I threw my arms in the air and stood back so he could take it all in.

My dad’s brown eyes widened in that Ricky Ricardo way and he opened his mouth but no noise came out. His face got red and he put his hands up to it, shaking his head no again and again.

“Don’t you like it, Daddy?” I said, still not entirely sure why he hadn’t hugged me and thanked me for taking the time to do this.

“My.. oh my god. Ugh,” he groaned. He sank to his knees and began to cry with his head in his hands.

I sensed that perhaps this audience was not yet ready for my art and so I creeped behind him and ran inside to get my mom. By the look on my face, she didn’t even ask questions. She ran out to the driveway and I followed close behind.

“Hiram, are you alright? What happene-” she asked as she laid her eyes on the back of the Mustang, covered in glitter.

My mom stared for a while in shock. She tried to inch closer to my dad and put her hand on his shoulder but he just pushed her away. The man was a mess. My mom looked from me to the car.

“It’s ART.” I mouthed to her and she tried not to laugh. She began to pick up my painting supplies and she grabbed me by the hand to take me back inside. We left my dad outside, hysterical on his knees.

My mom sat me on the bathroom counter and used a washcloth to wipe my arms and face clean of glitter. She tried to scold me but she kept laughing every time she started talking about it again. There was no need for her to reprimand me, I felt bad enough seeing my dad cry. I tried to peek out the living room window to see what he was doing but only caught glimpses of him pacing around his car, inspecting the damage. He came in before dinner, washed his hands, and kissed me on the forehead; it was rarely mentioned again.

He had the paint fixed and pretty soon the Mustang was back to her glory, although I still thought she looked pretty grand in glitter. My dad picked me up from school in that car every day and no matter how much time had passed, I still felt nervous about doing anything to that car even though my dad didn’t hold a grudge. Hell, I wouldn’t even drink water in that car. I was careful to never make my dad that upset again which was hard anyhow seeing as he was the most laidback person in the whole world. The glitter was forgiven by him but not forgotten by me.

My parents got divorced when I was fifteen, and my dad sold the old Mustang; he said it didn’t feel right to ride in it alone. He sold it to a friend of a friend and I was there when the man came to pick it up. The man was busy paying my dad for the car while I walked around it, looking at the car that had chauffeured me around my entire childhood. I stopped at the back of the car and looked at my former canvas. I squatted to inspect the back of it and found that near the edges of the Mustang logo, there was still some silver glitter in the paint. I smiled and wondered if my dad had noticed that after the paint was fixed. He had to have noticed, he knew every inch of that car better than he had probably ever known any woman. I realized he must have left the little bit of glitter there for reasons I still don’t know.

I walked back to him as he gave the man the keys. We watched the new owner drive away in the Mustang and my dad put his arm around me as we stood on the driveway. He and I stood still for a long time, neither of us letting the moment pass; we soon would be moving out of the house we’d lived in almost my whole life. We watched cars come and go in the cul-de-sac and stood together until the sun went down. I thought of how we used to stand on the sand together, frying fishes. He turned toward the house and walked inside with his hands in his pockets.

This time I stood on the driveway with my head in my hands; it would be a long time before we would stand anywhere together again.

you mean, you’re not the Pringles man?

When I was really young, I was convinced my dad was the guy on the Pringles can. I would look from the can to him and back again. I realized that this is what he was doing from the time he left in the morning until he got home in the late afternoon: modeling for Pringles and possibly even making said Pringles. Needless to say, I was disappointed when I found out that he was not this famed figure beloved by all children with a taste for the salty. He laughed heartily and pulled me into his lap when he saw my unhappy face.

My dad has put up with a lot from me. I learned to crochet when I was 4 and I made him a tiny yarmulke/Pope hat to cover the bald spot on his head. It was pink. He looked sad that I had pointed out this effect of age but he put that damn round cap on his head and wore it all through dinner that night. He also did the Father-Daughter Dance in my dance recital every year without fail; the year we danced to Uptown Girl was probably our best but he really did hit his stride with Michael Jackson’s Bad. I am his only child and he has never denied me anything except when he felt that something could harm me. Older and wiser now, I thank him for that.

Neither of us can handle dairy very well but we both pop Lactaid and indulge in ice cream. No one loves ice cream more than my dad, and we both love mint chocolate chip. My mother always compared it to Mylanta as we sat on the couch watching movies from Blockbuster and eating monstrous bowls of the stuff. He made me love action movies, he made me love good wine and even better beer. He always let me dance on top of his feet at weddings and always rode every rollercoaster with me when I was a kid. He took me to baseball games and grinned like a fool while I crooned Take Me Out to the Ball Game with the rest of the stadium. We still go to baseball games now and he buys me $12 beer and $10 nachos; I pack sunscreen for us both. He taught me how to play the drums when I was 7 and the first song he taught me was Somebody’s Baby by Jackson Browne. He told me I was good when I definitely wasn’t.

“Someday a boy is going to put this song on a mixtape for you and I’m going to kick his ass,” he told me as I counted the beats in my head.

Boys have put that song on mixes for me but he hasn’t kicked anyone’s ass.

I’m still his little girl but he treats me like an adult. He respects the decisions I make and the way I live my life. When my mom tells me she just wants me to grow up to be happy, I know she really means she wants me to go to law school. My dad actually wants me to be happy.

“Do what makes you happy and just learn to live with less,” he says, and I know he’s already proud of me, no matter how grad school or a future career turns out.

My dad is only a few inches taller than me but he looms large. We share a love of the Beatles and Steven Seagal and jokes that never die, no matter how annoyed people get with us. We also share the same leg hair but thanks to razors, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me. We used to share the same nose and we still have the same chin, his slightly more Jay Leno, mine making my face heart-shaped. He is a good man and perhaps most importantly, his own man. As a result, I’ve been a lot of things but I’ve always been my own woman. Thank you, Dad, I’ll always be your girl first even if I’m now somebody’s baby.

Sometimes late at night, I call my dad when I get anxious. We talk in Spanish and his s sounds are comfortingly the th sound of Spain. Cothina as opposed to cocina. I tell him that most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing, that all I know how to do is write and bake things when I get nervous which is why my fridge gets full of five and six pies at a time. I tell him that I worry about how to take care of myself entirely one day and how no one teaches you how to be an adult in college, especially not in creative writing or literature or film classes. I see nothing of how to be a grown up and pay bills in the books I read and movies I watch, all I learn is how to write more and more. I tell him this and I can hear him listening to every word, him, the man who moved to a new country and built a life and a business and took care of not only himself but an entire family. He waits for me to finish.

“Do what you like and the rest will come,” he says for the thousandth time in my life. “Just live your life and it will all work itself out, I promise.”

It’s terrifying when someone believes so much in you when you’re often entirely unsure of any possible outcome.

My parents met at my aunt’s wedding, that is, my dad’s little sister. Somehow because of family friends in common, my mom ended up being a bridesmaid because in the very late 1970s, there were still not so many Cuban families in South Florida and they all seemed to know each other, having fled in the 1960s on airplanes as opposed to the rafts now seen on tv, just before the Mariel boatlifts that brought a mass exodus of Cubans to the United States. My mom came to the United States from Cuba when she was little, four or five, with my grandparents and they settled in the middle of the country, Indiana, where they experienced their first winter in a non-tropical climate. My grandpa’s first job in this country was chopping logs in the snow. They grew used to the weather and made a home, falling in love with this new country they found themselves in. My dad was also born in Cuba but left as a child, growing up in Spain and for a while in Mexico. Somehow both of their families found themselves in Florida almost twenty years later, assimilated into middle class America and sharing similar histories. The world is small.

The wedding was at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. My dad, having been out of town for a while, was not a groomsman but he sat near the front of the hall during the ceremony. He told me that he noticed my mom when she stood at the altar during the ceremony but thought she was too young, 21 or so at the time (he was 30 or so). His eye kept drifting to her throughout the night as she danced with other men and laughed with her friends. The younger members of the reception drifted out towards the pool, including the bride and groom, and they drank more champagne on a balmy May night.

My mom told me she caught my dad looking at her and winked just before she jumped into the pool still in her bridesmaid dress. Some of the wedding party followed while the rest of them laughed and watched from the edge of the pool. My dad reached a hand out to help my mom out of the pool and lifted her out. He gave her his tuxedo jacket and they talked quietly as they went back inside. My grandma caught sight of my mom’s soaking wet dress and smeared makeup and fumed. My parents talked quietly at the edge of the dance floor, laughing at the puddle she was making with her wet dress. With her veil tipsily askew on her red-haired curls, my aunt tossed the bouquet and it landed in my mom’s hands without effort. They laughed about it awkwardly and too loudly, the way you do when you first meet someone. She left with flowers beginning to wilt, he left with her phone number.

They dated and got married a year and a half later. She now remembers that she was nursing a broken heart from her first love around that time and he recalls being charmed but unsure about commitment. They almost divorced a few years later, had their one child, me, and finally did divorce twenty years after meeting. They are still good friends and are remarried or involved with other people now. Both my mom and dad have told me my entire life, especially since they got divorced, to never settle for anyone less than who you are madly, passionately in love with, to live my life and go to college and know who I am and do the things I want to do and be independent but to never settle for anything other than that person who would kiss your spleen if he had the chance. They never loved each other like that.

But damn did they meet cute.

mom & dad before their honeymoon. check out that beegees suit and that mustache.

facts about my aunt’s 13th birthday party:

1. i was in my mom’s belly at the time, my aunt and i are actually closer in age than she and my mom are.
2. that’s my dad and he used to be a badass pipesmoker.
3. my aunt attached pubic hair to her head for some reason.
4. she had a michael jackson birthday cake.
5. in case you were wondering, this was in 1986.

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home

Reposted. I was thinking about my dad today.

I’ve seen my dad cry twice in my life. When I was ten, his stepfather passed away. Passed away is actually too peaceful for what happened, his stepfather owned a small store and he was shot by some teenagers trying to rob the place. I remember my dad looking stern the morning we found out, shuffling around stirring cream into his coffee. My mom drove me to school that day and told me quietly what had happened; I didn’t cry, it felt very distant from me. When I got home from school that day, my dad was still at home, sitting at the dining room table where a gift basket full of muffins and fruit with a condolences card sat. I left my backpack in the foyer and sat down opposite him. I stared at him and he stared at the basket. Suddenly, he picked the whole basket up with his big hands and walked towards a hall closet. He opened the door, shoved the basket inside, and slammed the door closed. When he turned to walk back towards his den, I could see tears streaming down his cheeks, into his mustache. My dad looked really small then and somehow I knew better than to follow.

My dad has never been one to cry. He looks like a small, round Jewish accountant, actually when I was a kid I was convinced they modeled the Pringles guy after him. He’s lived a big life in his sixty years. He grew up in Spain and Cuba and lived in Mexico for a while. When he was young, he spent summers working on sailboats and fishing boats. He taught me everything I know about the ocean. When I was little, we used to go out on the boat with a fishing net and catch these tiny little fishes, hundreds of them at a time. We would come back to shore and he would show me how to cook these by rubbing them in your hands in salt and pepper and then frying them in a sizzling pan over a fire built on the sand.

“If you get sand on them, it’s okay, they’ll taste better,” he said, as he tossed another handful of tiny fishes onto the pan.

Once they were fried to a crisp, he would take them out and lay them on brown paper to cool for a bit. Then he would pick up the crunchy fish by its little tail and stick the whole thing in his mouth and eat it.

“Their bones are so tiny that when you fry them, they become crunchy. You can eat them whole,” he said to me. No matter how many times we did this together, I would never eat one, content to just rubbing the little fishes in salt and pepper and sand, and throwing them on the fire.

My dad was a teacher of the practical things for a childhood. If my mother taught me about literature and good films and fashion, he taught me how to fish, how to ride a bicycle, how to build a quality experiment for the science fair. In the fifth grade, he helped me build an invention which would hold a nail in place while you hammered it. My dad was a crafty parent due to his being a contractor and he built me things with his hands, doll beds and the perfect desk chair. We went camping together and he shared with me his love of mountains, just as strong as his love of the ocean. He and I became tan in the ocean and the mountains, watching the way nature surrounded us and made us feel infinite.

I claim my mother to be the patron of the arts in my life but my dad also helped greatly to develop my tastes in this area. I love spaghetti westerns and action movies because of him; I listed A Fistful of Dollars as one of my favorite movies in our first grade “About Me” project. My dad also instilled in me a lasting love of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Let me tell you, you have never heard the Beatles sung if you haven’t heard them sung in a Spanish accent. He would let me play Hey Jude all the way through in the car, singing every na na na along with me. When the song would end and I would look at him shyly, he would rewind it and we’d sing it again. He played drums in a band when he was a teenager and he respected music in a very serious way. When my mom was pregnant with me, she laid down the law and declared that she alone would be selecting my first name but told my dad he could select my middle name. Being the Dylan and Blonde on Blonde fan that he is, he chose Marie from Absolutely Sweet Marie. To this day, he’ll still call me Absolutely Sweet Anaïs Marie from time to time.

My dad is not only a great man but a good one. He has always told me to study whatever I want in college, being more concerned with my happiness than how much money I’ll make or if I’ll have a corner office or not one day. I’m his only child and he has grown comfortable in his role not only as father but as friend. I’ve always been able to have a drink with my dad and talk about anything and vent. He tries to shut his ears to talk of men but he’s been a good sport about the boyfriends who have run through my life. Thus, all these reasons explain why I feel so bad that I was the reason I saw my dad cry the other time in my life.

The same year I was born, my dad was blessed with another baby: his 1967 blue Ford Mustang. To be honest, I’m still not sure which arrival, mine or the car, he was more excited about. My earliest memories include my dad underneath that car in our driveway on Saturday mornings, tinkering with it and fixing it up. He had it reupholstered in gorgeous leather, replaced a shattered back window, repainted it a beautiful smoky blue. He helped my mom create me in less than twenty minutes I imagine and was proud of me, but he spent years nurturing that car into top shape; if he could have given birth, that would have been his child. He finished that car when I was about four years old, and I remember Sunday afternoons driving to brunch in it, my parents and I all in sunglasses. We were never cooler than at that moment.

He was living the life, my dad was. Wife, daughter, nice house, dream car. My dad was probably on top of the world right then when someone decided to give me a present. I remember my mom’s friend from high school sending me this amazing glitter t-shirt painting kit. Being four years old, glitter was literal cocaine to me and I grabbed it like a junkie. I followed my mom around to help me get set up for painting but my mom knew better. She sent me out to the driveway and put down cardboard and my t-shirt and my painting supplies and left me to paint away from her new rugs.

Nothing is more magical than glitter when you’re a child. The way it shimmers on everything and reflects light, it’s fantastic. At the time, I lacked the part of my brain that says, “That’s enough glitter, Anaïs, you look like you belong in Labyrinth.” That’s the same part of my brain that sometimes malfunctions when I see truffles now. I painted my shirt along with my arms and it was glorious, a creation of hot pink and gold and silver wonder. As I sat hopped up on glitter fumes, I realized that glitter could only make things better so I began to leave my mark on the sidewalk. I looked at my work and thought myself as the Picasso man who was in my Art for Toddlers book my mom had bought me.

I looked around for something else to make beautiful and set my eyes upon my dad’s Mustang. For a split second, I worried that he might get mad but I really didn’t see how making something prettier could be a bad thing. I grabbed my little paint tray and brush and went to work on the back chrome bumper. I painted swirls and tiny flowers; it was really quite subtle work, mostly in silver. I worked on it for a bit and then stood back to admire the masterpiece. It looked amazing, silver glitter popping from the blue paint and the chrome. I ran inside to my dad’s den and grabbed him by the hand.

“Daddy, come outside. I have to show you something!” I said, barely containing my excitement.

“What is it, princesa?” He smiled at me and got up from his chair. He was always really good at paying attention to anyone who required his time.

“It’s a surprise for you.” I led him by the hand down the hall and out through the garage door onto the driveway.

“Is it cake? You know I could go for that right now,” he replied, smiling as I led him to the back of his car. I pointed to the back and grinned, beyond pleased with myself.

“TADA!” I threw my arms in the air and stood back so he could take it all in.

My dad’s brown eyes widened in that Ricky Ricardo way and he opened his mouth but no noise came out. His face got red and he put his hands up to it, shaking his head no again and again.

“Don’t you like it, Daddy?” I said, still not entirely sure why he hadn’t hugged me and thanked me for taking the time to do this.

“My.. oh my god. Ugh,” he groaned. He sank to his knees and began to cry with his head in his hands.

I sensed that perhaps this audience was not yet ready for my art and so I creeped behind him and ran inside to get my mom. By the look on my face, she didn’t even ask questions. She ran out to the driveway and I followed close behind.

“Hiram, are you alright? What happene-” she asked as she laid her eyes on the back of the Mustang, covered in glitter.

My mom stared for a while in shock. She tried to inch closer to my dad and put her hand on his shoulder but he just pushed her away. The man was a mess. My mom looked from me to the car.

“It’s ART.” I mouthed to her and she tried not to laugh. She began to pick up my painting supplies and she grabbed me by the hand to take me back inside. We left my dad outside, hysterical on his knees.

My mom sat me on the bathroom counter and used a washcloth to wipe my arms and face clean of glitter. She tried to scold me but she kept laughing every time she started talking about it again. There was no need for her to reprimand me, I felt bad enough seeing my dad cry. I tried to peek out the living room window to see what he was doing but only caught glimpses of him pacing around his car, inspecting the damage. He came in before dinner, washed his hands, and kissed me on the forehead; it was rarely mentioned again.

He had the paint fixed and pretty soon the Mustang was back to her glory, although I still thought she looked pretty grand in glitter. My dad picked me up from school in that car every day and no matter how much time had passed, I still felt nervous about doing anything to that car even though my dad didn’t hold a grudge. Hell, I wouldn’t even drink water in that car. I was careful to never make my dad that upset again which was hard anyhow seeing as he was the most laidback person in the whole world. The glitter was forgiven by him but not forgotten by me.

My parents got divorced when I was fifteen, and my dad sold the old Mustang; he said it didn’t feel right to ride in it alone. He sold it to a friend of a friend and I was there when the man came to pick it up. The man was busy paying my dad for the car while I walked around it, looking at the car that had chauffeured me around my entire childhood. I stopped at the back of the car and looked at my former canvas. I squatted to inspect the back of it and found that near the edges of the Mustang logo, there was still some silver glitter in the paint. I smiled and wondered if my dad had noticed that after the paint was fixed. He had to have noticed, he knew every inch of that car better than he had probably ever known any woman. I realized he must have left the little bit of glitter there for reasons I still don’t know.

I walked back to him as he gave the man the keys. We watched the new owner drive away in the Mustang and my dad put his arm around me as we stood on the driveway. He and I stood still for a long time, neither of us letting the moment pass; we soon would be moving out of the house we’d lived in almost my whole life. We watched cars come and go in the cul-de-sac and stood together until the sun went down. I thought of how we used to stand on the sand together, frying fishes. He turned toward the house and walked inside with his hands in his pockets.

This time I stood on the driveway with my head in my hands; it would be a long time before we would stand anywhere together again.

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home

I’ve seen my dad cry twice in my life. When I was ten, his stepfather passed away. Passed away is actually too peaceful for what happened, his stepfather owned a small store and he was shot by some teenagers trying to rob the place. I remember my dad looking stern the morning we found out, shuffling around stirring cream into his coffee. My mom drove me to school that day and told me quietly what had happened; I didn’t cry, it felt very distant from me. When I got home from school that day, my dad was still at home, sitting at the dining room table where a gift basket full of muffins and fruit with a condolences card sat. I left my backpack in the foyer and sat down opposite him. I stared at him and he stared at the basket. Suddenly, he picked the whole basket up with his big hands and walked towards a hall closet. He opened the door, shoved the basket inside, and slammed the door closed. When he turned to walk back towards his den, I could see tears streaming down his cheeks, into his mustache. My dad looked really small then and somehow I knew better than to follow.

My dad has never been one to cry. He looks like a small, round Jewish accountant, actually when I was a kid I was convinced they modeled the Pringles guy after him. He’s lived a big life in his sixty years. He grew up in Spain and Cuba and lived in Mexico for a while. When he was young, he spent summers working on sailboats and fishing boats. He taught me everything I know about the ocean. When I was little, we used to go out on the boat with a fishing net and catch these tiny little fishes, hundreds of them at a time. We would come back to shore and he would show me how to cook these by rubbing them in your hands in salt and pepper and then frying them in a sizzling pan over a fire built on the sand.

“If you get sand on them, it’s okay, they’ll taste better,” he said, as he tossed another handful of tiny fishes onto the pan.

Once they were fried to a crisp, he would take them out and lay them on brown paper to cool for a bit. Then he would pick up the crunchy fish by its little tail and stick the whole thing in his mouth and eat it.

“Their bones are so tiny that when you fry them, they become crunchy. You can eat them whole,” he said to me. No matter how many times we did this together, I would never eat one, content to just rubbing the little fishes in salt and pepper and sand, and throwing them on the fire.

My dad was a teacher of the practical things for a childhood. If my mother taught me about literature and good films and fashion, he taught me how to fish, how to ride a bicycle, how to build a quality experiment for the science fair. In the fifth grade, he helped me build an invention which would hold a nail in place while you hammered it. My dad was a crafty parent due to his being a contractor and he built me things with his hands, doll beds and the perfect desk chair. We went camping together and he shared with me his love of mountains, just as strong as his love of the ocean. He and I became tan in the ocean and the mountains, watching the way nature surrounded us and made us feel infinite.

I claim my mother to be the patron of the arts in my life but my dad also helped greatly to develop my tastes in this area. I love spaghetti westerns and action movies because of him; I listed A Fistful of Dollars as one of my favorite movies in our first grade “About Me” project. My dad also instilled in me a lasting love of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Let me tell you, you have never heard the Beatles sung if you haven’t heard them sung in a Spanish accent. He would let me play Hey Jude all the way through in the car, singing every na na na along with me. When the song would end and I would look at him shyly, he would rewind it and we’d sing it again. He played drums in a band when he was a teenager and he respected music in a very serious way. When my mom was pregnant with me, she laid down the law and declared that she alone would be selecting my first name but told my dad he could select my middle name. Being the Dylan and Blonde on Blonde fan that he is, he chose Marie from Absolutely Sweet Marie. To this day, he’ll still call me Absolutely Sweet Anaïs Marie from time to time.

My dad is not only a great man but a good one. He has always told me to study whatever I want in college, being more concerned with my happiness than how much money I’ll make or if I’ll have a corner office or not one day. I’m his only child and he has grown comfortable in his role not only as father but as friend. I’ve always been able to have a drink with my dad and talk about anything and vent. He tries to shut his ears to talk of men but he’s been a good sport about the boyfriends who have run through my life. Thus, all these reasons explain why I feel so bad that I was the reason I saw my dad cry the other time in my life.

The same year I was born, my dad was blessed with another baby: his 1967 blue Ford Mustang. To be honest, I’m still not sure which arrival, mine or the car, he was more excited about. My earliest memories include my dad underneath that car in our driveway on Saturday mornings, tinkering with it and fixing it up. He had it reupholstered in gorgeous leather, replaced a shattered back window, repainted it a beautiful smoky blue. He helped my mom create me in less than twenty minutes I imagine and was proud of me, but he spent years nurturing that car into top shape; if he could have given birth, that would have been his child. He finished that car when I was about four years old, and I remember Sunday afternoons driving to brunch in it, my parents and I all in sunglasses. We were never cooler than at that moment.

He was living the life, my dad was. Wife, daughter, nice house, dream car. My dad was probably on top of the world right then when someone decided to give me a present. I remember my mom’s friend from high school sending me this amazing glitter t-shirt painting kit. Being four years old, glitter was literal cocaine to me and I grabbed it like a junkie. I followed my mom around to help me get set up for painting but my mom knew better. She sent me out to the driveway and put down cardboard and my t-shirt and my painting supplies and left me to paint away from her new rugs.

Nothing is more magical than glitter when you’re a child. The way it shimmers on everything and reflects light, it’s fantastic. At the time, I lacked the part of my brain that says, “That’s enough glitter, Anaïs, you look like you belong in Labyrinth.” That’s the same part of my brain that sometimes malfunctions when I see truffles now. I painted my shirt along with my arms and it was glorious, a creation of hot pink and gold and silver wonder. As I sat hopped up on glitter fumes, I realized that glitter could only make things better so I began to leave my mark on the sidewalk. I looked at my work and thought myself as the Picasso man who was in my Art for Toddlers book my mom had bought me.

I looked around for something else to make beautiful and set my eyes upon my dad’s Mustang. For a split second, I worried that he might get mad but I really didn’t see how making something prettier could be a bad thing. I grabbed my little paint tray and brush and went to work on the back chrome bumper. I painted swirls and tiny flowers; it was really quite subtle work, mostly in silver. I worked on it for a bit and then stood back to admire the masterpiece. It looked amazing, silver glitter popping from the blue paint and the chrome. I ran inside to my dad’s den and grabbed him by the hand.

“Daddy, come outside. I have to show you something!” I said, barely containing my excitement.

“What is it, princesa?” He smiled at me and got up from his chair. He was always really good at paying attention to anyone who required his time.

“It’s a surprise for you.” I led him by the hand down the hall and out through the garage door onto the driveway.

“Is it cake? You know I could go for that right now,” he replied, smiling as I led him to the back of his car. I pointed to the back and grinned, beyond pleased with myself.

“TADA!” I threw my arms in the air and stood back so he could take it all in.

My dad’s brown eyes widened in that Ricky Ricardo way and he opened his mouth but no noise came out. His face got red and he put his hands up to it, shaking his head no again and again.

“Don’t you like it, Daddy?” I said, still not entirely sure why he hadn’t hugged me and thanked me for taking the time to do this.

“My.. oh my god. Ugh,” he groaned. He sank to his knees and began to cry with his head in his hands.

I sensed that perhaps this audience was not yet ready for my art and so I creeped behind him and ran inside to get my mom. By the look on my face, she didn’t even ask questions. She ran out to the driveway and I followed close behind.

“Hiram, are you alright? What happene-” she asked as she laid her eyes on the back of the Mustang, covered in glitter.

My mom stared for a while in shock. She tried to inch closer to my dad and put her hand on his shoulder but he just pushed her away. The man was a mess. My mom looked from me to the car.

“It’s ART.” I mouthed to her and she tried not to laugh. She began to pick up my painting supplies and she grabbed me by the hand to take me back inside. We left my dad outside, hysterical on his knees.

My mom sat me on the bathroom counter and used a washcloth to wipe my arms and face clean of glitter. She tried to scold me but she kept laughing every time she started talking about it again. There was no need for her to reprimand me, I felt bad enough seeing my dad cry. I tried to peek out the living room window to see what he was doing but only caught glimpses of him pacing around his car, inspecting the damage. He came in before dinner, washed his hands, and kissed me on the forehead; it was rarely mentioned again.

He had the paint fixed and pretty soon the Mustang was back to her glory, although I still thought she looked pretty grand in glitter. My dad picked me up from school in that car every day and no matter how much time had passed, I still felt nervous about doing anything to that car even though my dad didn’t hold a grudge. Hell, I wouldn’t even drink water in that car. I was careful to never make my dad that upset again which was hard anyhow seeing as he was the most laidback person in the whole world. The glitter was forgiven by him but not forgotten by me.

My parents got divorced when I was fifteen, and my dad sold the old Mustang; he said it didn’t feel right to ride in it alone. He sold it to a friend of a friend and I was there when the man came to pick it up. The man was busy paying my dad for the car while I walked around it, looking at the car that had chauffeured me around my entire childhood. I stopped at the back of the car and looked at my former canvas. I squatted to inspect the back of it and found that near the edges of the Mustang logo, there was still some silver glitter in the paint. I smiled and wondered if my dad had noticed that after the paint was fixed. He had to have noticed, he knew every inch of that car better than he had probably ever known any woman. I realized he must have left the little bit of glitter there for reasons I still don’t know.

I walked back to him as he gave the man the keys. We watched the new owner drive away in the Mustang and my dad put his arm around me as we stood on the driveway. He and I stood still for a long time, neither of us letting the moment pass; we soon would be moving out of the house we’d lived in almost my whole life. We watched cars come and go in the cul-de-sac and stood together until the sun went down. I thought of how we used to stand on the sand together, frying fishes. He turned toward the house and walked inside with his hands in his pockets.

This time I stood on the driveway with my head in my hands; it would be a long time before we would stand anywhere together again.