Return to 1953
Afew days after I was born in November 1953, my father snapped a picture of me in my mother’s arms, our German shepherd Carly lying at Mom’s feet. I grew up looking at that photo, made spectacular by a dramatic cliff and the brilliant blue water just a few feet away.
I was born in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, when my dad, a pediatrician and Air Force captain, was stationed at Ramey Air Force Base. Now decommissioned, Ramey was a Strategic Air Command base from which nuclear armed B-52s flew prolonged missions at the height of the Cold War.
By virtue of my island birth, I’ve always had an interest in Puerto Rico’s history and culture. We moved away when I was only a few months old, but I dreamed of revisiting the place where I came into the world.
Finally, in December 2010, my wife and I traveled to Puerto Rico with our sons, then 20 and
15. I wasn’t just curious to see Aguadilla and the old base hospital where I was born, now a Marriott hotel. I wanted to find the spot where my father had captured that moment of my mother and me, when my entire life still lay ahead.
It took some doing. Access to the beach wasn’t well marked at the time, and the road was little more than a washboard dirt path. As we walked into what was to me a familiar scene because of that treasured photo, my reaction surprised me and, I think, embarrassed my kids because they couldn’t understand it: I started to cry. And the waves of emotion just kept coming.
My dad had died in 1997 and my mom in 2008. But here they had stood, on this deserted beach in the Caribbean with their newborn baby, with so much living, some of it difficult, ahead of them. It was a future they could not know, but which I knew in great detail because it was now my past. On that November day in 1953, they didn’t know that two years later they would have another son, and decades later, the two grandchildren standing next to me on that same beach. They couldn’t foresee that their young marriage would later become fraught and end in divorce.
Dad didn’t know his cigarette habit would likely contribute to the lung cancer that would kill him 44 years later, and Mom couldn’t have imagined her fatal pancreatic cancer 55 years on. They didn’t know how their lives would play out, or how they’d end, but I did. It was as if I were simultaneously standing at two points in time, decades apart.
As I walked the beach, I found myself looking down at the sand, half expecting a Twilight Zone moment in which I might find something — a driver’s license perhaps, or Carly’s dog tag — that they’d dropped that November day decades ago.
Standing there, I felt an intense and surreal connection to my late parents. My connection to the island grew, too. Puerto Rico is a US territory, both apart from and part of the United States, which has exploited it for over a century. A 1917 act of Congress making all Puerto Ricans American citizens was followed weeks later, not coincidentally, by a new federal law allowing the US military to draft young Puerto Rican men to fight in World War I.
A legally recognized Puerto Rican national citizenship still exists. In 2020, approaching 70 and reckoning with mortality, I formalized my birthright citizenship. My citizenship certificate signed by the Puerto Rico secretary of state, that 1953 snapshot of Mom and me, and my memories of standing on that shore with my wife and kids more than a half-century later bind me to the place where I drew my first breath.