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This play was originally written to be accompanied by my family’s “photo album,” what actually were several albums, as well as boxes, drawers and closets full of pictures. My grandmother had a Brownie box camera that went clink when she pressed the shutter and took perfect pictures for years. Every time company came over, every time kids visited from out of town, every time an event was celebrated, there she was. Clink clink. “Mama, would you put the camera away? You have fifty pictures of me already!” When she was gone, I realized that every moment of her life was precious to her. There was no insignificant hour. And I’m so grateful for her chronicle. Having come to Texas on the wave of the Galveston Plan, my grandparents settled in a small town where full religious observance was difficult. Through the years, they raised three sons and entered the American community. All outward signs of the life they left behind were gone. For the family, however, the experiences of my grandparents’ past lives were daily stories that were passed around the dinner table, or in the living room where there was more room so Popo could demonstrate his stories. Popo would put a foot up on the sofa with his chin in his hand and pantomime, then face the other direction and pantomime the reply.

These stories – descriptions of the boat passage, of the banana peddlings, of the port of Galveston – became apocryphal and entered into family legend, which is what I wanted when it came time to write. Don’t bother me with the facts, give me the atmosphere.

For the few details that I lacked, I talked at length with one of two elders in our family, as well as other immigrant couples I’ve met along the way, as I tried to learn more about the dynamic of an immigrant husband and wife. The Hamilton County Courthouse is the repository of their naturalization papers. The Rosenberg Library in Galveston had microfilm of the original ship’s register.

As my grandparents’ days came to an end, I was compelled to see what connected me so strongly to them, to see if there was something beyond local love and family habit. That search led me to my grandmother’s photo album.

In the early pages, my grandfather, a fresh immigrant, a “greeneh,” has a young man’s face – a face that resembles mine. As the pages turn, my father’s face appears, a baby at first, then a high school graduate. I look a lot like him, too. And there is a feeling, after I begin to make an appearance, that there is a single spirit – ageless and unaffected by circumstance – that is born, grows old, is born again, grows old again; little then big, then little, like a beating heart that exists on the land, on the earth. And my grandfather’s orthodoxy does in fact reside in me. What was old and fell away landed in the new to be carried on in a new form.

What this is I cannot tell you. But I do know that you bear it from your fathers and mothers as much as I do from mine. You are them, in an unseeable, ungraspable way. And by your single glance back, their invisible lives are made worthy and meaningful and immortal.

The story of the American immigrant reveals a constant process of letting go. The most firmly held beliefs, those upon which life depends, are challenged as being mere superstition. And in the end, when even memory is gone, that which remains lives only in the telling. I must tell you this story, for it’s all that remains of a good man’s life, and all that’s immortal in me.