Ann Martin
Today, we have two Tiny Love Stories about music taking people somewhere else, somewhere private and vivid and accessible only to them. Our first story is from Sonia Pérez.
Sonia Pérez
I inherited nostalgia from my father. On weekends in Brooklyn, he would play his 78 rpm Ansonia Records, drink beer and look forlorn. He'd lose himself in lyrics about "los jíbaros de los montañas," the noble farmers of the mountains. Humility and dreams would float through the air while my sisters and I rolled our eyes. We couldn't relate to music about Puerto Rico's countryside.
Once, I came home to my father sitting on the sofa, his records strewn about, cracked into pieces. We never asked. He never explained. The fissures remain. I long to hear those songs.
[Music - Florencio Morales Ramos, "Una Mujer En Mi Vida"]
[SINGING IN SPANISH]
Anna Martin
Thank you so much for that story, Sonia. Looking back now as an adult, why do you think your father felt like he had to destroy those records?
Sonia Pérez
I sort of feel like when you do this impulsive thing, right, you're fed up. You're done. I'm done with it. I think he was done.
Anna Martin
What was he done with?
Sonia Pérez
I think he was done with this idea that maybe he would go back to Puerto Rico, buy this house and live there. I think he was done with the sense that maybe he hadn't achieved everything he wanted to. And I think he wanted to be in this little house in the countryside of Puerto Rico.
Anna Martin
Right.
Sonia Pérez
And I think my sisters and I didn't have a connection to it. My brother didn't have a connection to it. And I'm really sad about that. I feel like if not for that impulsive moment, we would have this treasure of music that was his.
Anna Martin
Where in Puerto Rico was your dad from?
Sonia Pérez
He was from Aguas Buenas, which is a town in the center, in the mountains of the countryside. It's a place of creeks and beautiful mountains. The air is really fresh.
Sometimes you hear the roosters, but there are also just lots of crickets and chirping. Neighbors looked out for each other. There wasn't locks on the doors. And I think about what a shame that he felt he had to leave it.
Anna Martin
And what do you know about what his life was like there?
Sonia Pérez
He, I think, went to about eighth grade or so in school. He did all kinds of jobs from cutting sugarcane to moving to San Juan and selling furniture at one point in furniture stores. And so he went from the rural countryside of Puerto Rico to San Juan to Rio Piedras. All I know is that there were just simply not jobs in Puerto Rico, and my father always had this dream of buying a house. That was his dream.
Anna Martin
And did your dad ever buy the house that he wanted so much?
Sonia Pérez
Yeah, they bought a house. I was probably about nine or 10. But we were only there for two or three years, and then we moved into an apartment, which is the one that they lived in for the next 30 years.
Anna Martin
What do you remember about growing up in Brooklyn in that apartment?
Sonia Pérez
There were eight of us. My parents were extremely strict. We were seven girls and —
Anna Martin
Wow.
Sonia Pérez
— one boy. Very traditional and very structured because of what they perceived as just external influences. Yeah, and so that was the environment.
Anna Martin
Did your father keep in touch with his family back in Puerto Rico?
Sonia Pérez
My father did not keep in touch with people. My mother kept in touch with my father's family. He didn't talk about his family a lot. Except when he was drinking, he would talk about the past.
Anna Martin
Did you ask questions about his past or about Puerto Rico as a kid?
Sonia Pérez
We never asked questions because it was kind of understood that we didn't have that kind of relationship. And so I think when he was listening to this music, I feel like he allowed himself maybe, or it just came out a little bit more, but he wouldn't share it with us. It was more like he would sit there by himself, or then he would get mad that we didn't know this music. So it was just his thing, his space. So it would be playing, and we would hear it, but we didn't sit there and listen to it with him necessarily.
My siblings and I didn't speak Spanish to each other. We didn't visit Puerto Rico, so we didn't know a lot, other than what they told us or whether we were interested ourselves in learning about it. And I think that made him sad too, right, that it was sort of like we didn't have a connection to this place that was his home.
Anna Martin
Growing up, were you interested in learning more about the island?
Sonia Pérez
I was always, always interested. I'm not sure how it gets transmitted, but this feeling that you belong somewhere else, I never felt like I belonged here, even though I was born and raised in Brooklyn. I identified as Puerto Rican. It was like right deep in me.
When I went for the first time, I was 14, and I just loved it. I went with my mother. And then I didn't go back until I was about 25 with my husband, before we got married. And then we got married there and lived there for 10 years.
Anna Martin
Wow.
Sonia Pérez
There is a huge part of who I feel is my identity and also what I feel like inside, you know? What I feel like inside is somebody that's, yes, part Brooklyn but definitely part Puerto Rico, even though I did not grow up there. It was really, really important for me to learn Spanish, to know it, read and write it, live there, and carry that with me because I feel like I carry my parents with me, although my life is completely different than their lives were.
Anna Martin
Sonia, thank you so much for sharing this story. I feel so grateful to have talked to you today.
Sonia Pérez
Thank you. I appreciated being able to share a little bit of my family and to honor my father, Pedro Pérez.
Anna Martin
Grainne Armstrong talked to me from what she calls her therapy room. It's a small cabin just outside her house in Ireland with a salt lamp and a cat named Pooka. Everything felt calm. But outside this room, things can get hard.
Grania's daughter, Jenny, is autistic. And throughout Jenny's childhood, the two struggled to bond. Grania wrote a Tiny Love Story about a moment when she and her daughter finally connected.
So Grania, you wrote this gorgeous Tiny Love Story called "Music in the Woods" about your daughter, Jenny.
Grianne Armstrong
Mm-hmm.
Anna Martin
Tell me about her. What was Jenny like as a child?
Grianne Armstrong
OK, where do I start? I suppose the minute Jenny was born, I knew. I knew something was not quite right. My career choice at the time was I trained to be a nurse and particularly for special needs. And my expertise was with autism and challenging behavior.
So to be actually told as a parent that you now have a child with physical, sensory, nervous disability, it's just a punch in the gut, you know? And it just hit me, this was going to be seven days a week, 24 hours a day, probably for the rest of our lives.
Anna Martin
So tell me about caring for Jenny. As a young child, what did she like? What did she not like?
Grianne Armstrong
Right. Jenny, her sensory processing was all off. We couldn't really touch her in a comfortable way. She didn't enjoy touch. She didn't like going into places that had rooves on them like banks or post offices or arcades. The noise, it was just too much for her, so she would scream to override the noise that was coming into her brain.
And that went on for a long, long time until we employed this therapy. It was a music therapy that uses headphones. And it helps the sensory processing to dissipate, I suppose, across her body. But Jenny's head was so small, we could get no headphones to fit on her head. So we literally had to sew the headphones into a little bonnet to tie around her chin.
We had to start from literally 10 seconds of her listening to that music and work it up to 20 minutes a day. And her music just seemed to take her to a place that you could reach her in a more productive way. She wasn't screaming.
She would listen to the music, and you could lay a hand on her then to do something constructive with her. She was starting to maybe look at her surroundings outside her house — the beaches, the woods, the lakes. She just seemed to be really calm and present in those kind of situations.
Anna Martin
What is something that you and Jenny like to do together?
Grianne Armstrong
I suppose every single day, nearly, we go for a walk in the woods together. It's a wood that was set back in the 18th century, so it's full of oak and ash and horse chestnut and lime trees and larch. And there is one lovely area which myself and Jenny both feel, I think, is very energetic. It's called the Monterey pine grove.
It was a pine grove that was set back in the 18th century, but the trees are enormous, and they're on top of a hill. And the cones, the pine cones, when they fall in autumn, they're huge. They're absolutely huge.
But Jenny seems to always stop at this spot, and she will look up into the crown of the trees. And she could stand there for ages. For Jenny — I have to explain this. For Jenny to actually stand and tilt her head back and look up to the sky was a skill that took years to develop, balance-wise. And on her walks, that's an opportunity for us to give her the choice of where she wants to go.
Anna Martin
And that's actually where your Tiny Love Story starts. Will you read it for me now?
Grianne Armstrong
I will.
OK.
Jenny plays music from her MP3 player. Christmas carols in July. Operatic voices fill the woods as robins flutter down and surround her. Jenny stops moving and stares.
The robins sing.
No words are spoken. Complete contentment in nature. She turns to me and plants an awkward, resolute kiss on my lips. It is only now in her teenage years that she can tolerate touch. I pull my autistic daughter to my breast and feel her love.