Blog 14

"How many Cubans does it take to get a turkey out of the oven?" It's random, I know, and a bad joke at that, but still. It’s the last trivial thing I ever heard before my life basically changed forever. Is that dramatic? I don’t think so. How would you feel if you found out for the first time after twenty-three years of living that your grandfather had been in a concentration camp? How would you feel after learning that information, casually, just before sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner? As if it were just the weather.

Grandpa. The man who had been in a bad car accident just before you were born, rendering him brain damaged and perfectly content just sitting in his chair all day staring at the television. Not saying a word unless he needed a cigarette or to go to the bathroom. You know, the basics. Apparently he used to be hysterical. Always willing to crack a smile and spread it around. Everyone says I’m just like him. Or how he used to be, I mean.

That was the man who wanted a better life for his family. Who decided to leave a country that punished its people just for speaking out of turn. That was a man who spent two years in the sugar cane fields and who only got to see his daughters and his wife maybe every six months if he had enough to bribe the guards.

That was the man I had shared the same blood with, and I only knew him as my silent grandpa, sitting in his chair and watching the television. It made me angry that they had waited this long to tell me all this.

But then I thought on it some more that night. Long after the last piece of pumpkin pie was cut and I was back in my own bed. I remembered that, sometimes, when I was sitting with my grandfather and watching a channel that I couldn’t understand in Spanish, sometimes he would turn to me and for no reason in the world that I could figure, he’d smile.

By the way, it takes three Cubans and a Dominican to get a turkey out of the oven.