A Letter To My Avó

We only have a few photographs of you, Avó, most of them are worn with age, and taken from a distance, where you are only recognizable by the bowler hat you wear slightly tilted. My mother says that when she was a child, she remembers other pictures of you, but those lost images along with your treasured hand written verses were negligently tossed and passed down through the years, from one person to another, only to be put away in forgotten boxes and dark closets. My mother left the island without any photos of you in her possession, and it wasn’t until many years later did she obtain the above portrait. This family portrait was given to her by a cousin, your brother’s son, who had come across it while going through boxes of old family photos. In this picture, you are standing there next to your brother, Gilberto, and your sister Maria and her husband and son. It’s a special picture for it is the only one that we have that clearly shows your face; a face my mother only remembers of as a child, framed proudly in her living-room for all your grandchildren to see. This portrait was taken a long time ago when you were a young man visiting California. You had just left your island to be with your siblings who had previously ventured to America to start a new life in the dairy lands of Central California. They worked hard and had made a good life for themselves, and you were curious of what life was like in the United States. For two years, you worked alongside your brothers and so many others like you who had immigrated there. Some of them you knew from home, while others came from different islands in the Azores, mainland Portugal and even Brazil. You felt most comfortable living there because you felt a familiar sense of community and kinship amongst them. The traditions from your homeland were well alive in California with celebrations of the Holy Ghost in the spring and summer, and in the winter, Carnaval. You wrote danças, sang and danced, for your family and new found friends and they welcomed you. You were asked to sing Cantoria, and to write danças to remind them of home, but when you did, it only made you think of your home. Your words and melodies must have reminded them of home, but no matter how much they urged for you to stay, the memory of the people of your island called out to you louder. You yearned to be back to the island and the people that inspired your music, and you also had a promise to keep. Before you left Terceira you told your mother that you would return one day, and you kept that promise. The rest of your life has been told by so many you had once known you, and others who have read your words; most of whom have since gone. You were a mason by trade, but you were more than anything else, you were an entertainer; a village celebrity of your time. I’ve read that you were sought out and recognized as someone who possessed a great talent lyric improvisation; an author of many danças, and a singer, who also gave dance lessons. You were even immortalized in the writings of a fellow poet, Charrua. Like Charrua, you had your own nickname; they called you, “Chico Roico” because of your distinctive hoarse sounding voice. Books of your danças have been published and your memory has been preserved in your village of Vila Nova, by Carlos, the grandson of your youngest brother. You were also described as charasmatic, friendly and warm-hearted man, but I know you best from my mother’s stories; stories that were told to her as a child by my grandmother. You wrote like a writer who was running out of time. It is said that verses would come to you in your dreams, often waking you up from a sound sleep, sending you to stumble out of bed in search of a match to light a candle so as to write them down. You also loved the laughter of children, and were inspired by them. You would often tug at their ears playfully, and teach them to dance. You routinely would take my mother to dance and singing rehearsals when she was an infant, often dancing and singing while holding her in your arms. Your words and music drew people to you, and when you died, the whole village wept for you. At 39 years of age, you left my grandmother a young widow with an infant daughter, and sadly, my mother has lived in your shadow ever since the day you left. I was raised with these stories about you, and I confess to you now they have only inspired me in my own writing. Most of what I write is written about your island; an island that I’ve adopted as also my own. I’ve been fortunate to have walked it’s narrow streets, and picked its roadside hydreania off the side of its rocked walls. I’ve swam in the blue ocean you had crossed so many years ago, and I’ve slept in the house you had built that still stands on the street that bears your name. I’ve searched for your spirit on warm summer nights by candlelight and I’ve sought out your voice outside my grandmother’s window in the sound of the crickets and the mandolin that pierced many a summer night from the village square. As I sit here in front of the glow of my laptop, I can hear my older son’s voice singing from the other room. Happily It seems he has inherited your talent and spirit, and this only makes me feel closer to you. Avó, I write this letter fully acknowledging that you will never read it. How do I explain this need to preserve your memory, and how can I possibly connect with someone who I’ve never met? Perhaps I write this only to satisfy my own need to tell the world about you. I have nothing but pictures and written words, of my grandfather, but somehow they will have to be enough. So I end this letter to you my Avó, to thank you for your words you have left behind. You will forever be remembered to me as a kind and young spirit, a writer, a singer and a dreamer of music; a man forever in the background, wearing the bowler hat tipped to one side.