When
I was a child, my father
and I used to race
to
see who could finish
their dinner first;
he
always won.
But
it wasn’t how fast he
ate that intrigued me.
It
was that when he finished
his plate,
it
was absolutely spotless,
like new.
I
remember watching him
finish,
a
masterful mambo of knife
and fork
sweeping
up the last grain of
rice.
I
always wondered why
he troubled himself
with
that
last grain of rice,
why
on earth a man who drove
a Mercedes
and
sported a Movado
cared
about one grain of rice.
Then
one day, I returned
home to visit,
and
it all suddenly made
sense.
I
was rummaging through
our old photo albums
and
came across a black-and-white
photograph
I’d never seen before.
It
was my old man as a
child in Cuba,
naked
and standing on a dirt
road
riddled
with refuse,
a
leaning makeshift home
of
tin sheeting and mud
behind him.