In my parents house there is now a table...one of those glass tables you buy to show off memories, heirlooms or collectibles. It is an elegant little thing, about sixteen inches long, maybe ten inches wide. Inside that table are all that remains of my parents' childhoods. The heirlooms of my family all fit in a single glass box smaller than one of my dictionaries.
All they have of the houses they lived in... in that box. All they have of their years in school...in that box. All they have of their teenage years...in that box.
In contrast, my childhood fills nearly two attics and spills over into boxes and photo albums in the house proper. Every little scribble I ever drew. My report cards. My trophies from "helping" with Gym Day. My school uniforms. Photographs of my birthday parties...all my toys. If you really cared to, you could map my life from the first day I was born until today.
It's not that my grandparents loved such mementos less. They valued memory and those days and their children just as much. It's that Communism destroyed the fabric of my extended family, cast them all over the Western Hemisphere and took from my parents all those cherished reminders of who they were as they grew up. To this day in their birth country all evidence that they lived is locked away or destroyed purposefully by a brutal dictator who has a problem with churches existing, much less keeping records of people he regards lower than worms.
I look into that glass box on its elegant wooden legs and see torn and soiled papers, tiny medallions...fragmentary bits of life that are cyphers, unknowable to me. My parents got out alive, but all that's left of everything they went through is right here. They struggled until they finally reached America because(as they told young me) this was the land of oportunity. They wanted their children to be free. They wanted their children's lives to overflow the attic. They wanted photographs to be of happy young people blowing out candles on their cakes, rather then fleeing as tanks crushed the foliage on either side of the city streets. They wanted me never to have to have a glass box too small for a lifetime to share with my children...they wanted my family to live peacefully alongside one another, not sundered member-from-member, child-from-parent...memories-from-adulthood.
My parents are sorry that they are no longer Cubans...but they are proud that my sister and I are Americans. And so am I...forever and always.
Margarita Cristina Hogarth
------ Original Message ------
Received: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:01:16 PM CDT
From: "Meylin"
Subject: Letter from my daughter Maggie.....(4th of July)
A Site For A Free Cuba
