In September 2005 I realized that I had reach my limit. A few family situations pushed me to quit working and quit living in the Northeast, quit for the sake of my family, for the sake of my husband, and for my own sake.
At the end of September 2005, I presented my letter of resignation to the Board of Education, to the supervisors of special education of the boards of Union City and of North Bergen, and to my own school principal. In January 2006, we put the house on the market. And we started to prepare a new move, this time to Florida, to Isla del Sol.
Why Isla del Sol? Probably because I came from one island, or because my best, most hopeful, and most cheerful time was lived at Varadero Beach, or because I love to watch the sea, to spend time at the beach, to follow the sound of the waves with my eyes closed, to enjoy the sunrise and the sunset, and to find God in its majesty in those peaceful scenarios.
A few years after we came to the United States, and because Pepe’s family was living in Florida, we saved a week every year to spend in Florida. Our first summer vacation was in 1986. We went to Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. It was a memorable and happy family vacation. I met and enjoyed the Disney fantasy as if I were six years old. We visited the two parks—Disney World and Epcot Center—we watched, listened, and copied in my mind every single detail. It was a gift from God to us, and I wanted to hold it forever.
The subsequent summers we alternated visiting Miami and Tampa, Orlando and Tampa, Key West and Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, Sanibel Island and Tampa … we always ended or began in Tampa. Every year when I was leaving Florida to go to New York or to New Jersey, I had the same feeling as when I was leaving Central España and going to Colegio Apostolado: the feeling that was leaving home behind.
At the beginning of the year 2000, with sixty-two years of life, I started to think about preparing our retirement. Not because I didn’t like to work as bilingual school psychologist and Hispanic Family Life consultant, but because I felt the need to spend more time with Pepe. I felt also the need of finding peace in the midst of all the stresses of my life. I started to look at the newspapers and the Internet in search of retirement communities, secondhand condos, and townhouses near the beach or on the beach in the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area.
I e-mailed and requested information for all the possible options that I found. Soon the retirement communities were eliminated. Their occupants were mostly English-speaking upper middle-class people who enjoyed playing golf, sharing cards games, attending dances, etc. We didn’t have the social skills or the English-language development to succeed there.
In February 2002 we moved to the next step: I e-mailed real estate agents in the area. The same night that I sent the first twelve e-mails, I received the first phone calls. Most of them discouraged us because the price range that I wrote was too low for what we wanted. Slowly, the e-mails were reduced to only three real estate agents. One of them was Maritza Fernandez, an excellent Realtor. She e-mailed me every Friday with what was in the market at that moment, taking into consideration our requirements. Every Sunday, Pepe and I sat down in front of the computer searching for houses, dreaming with the possibilities or discouraging us with the prices.
Finally, we decided to come to Tampa during the Easter time of 2002. I e-mailed Maritza and we set our first appointment to see each other and to go to visit the five possible apartments/condos that had survived our scrutiny.
There are two ways to come to the beaches in the area: using Route 60/Gulf Boulevard, which goes north-south through all the Florida beaches on the west coast, or to take the 275 south expressway. We decided to take Route 60 to see firsthand the areas where three out of five possible options were.
Maritza is native of Chile and has been living in the United States for approximately fifteen years. She is married to a medical researcher who was working for the veterans hospital and had a daughter married to a classical musician—they were living in Austria. We empathized very easily; she really understood what we wanted. She invited us to visit the two possible options e-mailed by her. When we sat in her car and took Gulf Boulevard south, I thought that she didn’t really understand us, but I didn’t comment. She left Gulf Boulevard at the streetlight of the Caesar Hotel and drove to the toll of the Pinellas Bayway.
As soon as we left the toll there was a small bridge and the splendid view of Isla del Sol. Isla del Sol is comprised of 350 acres of beautifully manicured tropical gardens surrounded by the waters of Boca Ciega Bay. Driving through the Isla means driving through royal palms, queen palms, and oak trees as well as other tropical trees. The island has in the middle an eighteen-hole golf course and nine tennis courts. It has a yacht and country club facility with a marina and a pier, and a shoppers village with a bank, post office, florist, restaurants, clothing shops, gift shops and other offices.
The island community has approximately 3,200 households distributed among high-rise, mid-rise, two-, three-, and four-story buildings, as well as townhouses, all with a Mediterranean flair. All of them were located on boulevards with Latino flavor in their names: Isla Key, La Puerta del Sol, Casa del Mar, Palma del Mar, Bahia del Mar, and Vista de Oro boulevards.
The history of the island began in 1957 when the Florida Department of Transportation decided to build the Pinellas Bayway consisting of an eight-mile roadway system and three bridges. One bridge links Isla del Sol to the Gulf beaches, another bridge links Isla del Sol to Tierra Verde and Fort de Soto, and the third bridge links Isla del Sol to the St. Petersburg mainland.
Maritza was explaining to us the history and its geographical position until we arrived at 6158 B Palma del Mar Boulevard South. We entered it, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and entered unit 505. The number was painted in yellow and decorated in a very discrete and tasteful way. Maritza moved around with us, showing the dining/living room area, the kitchen, the spacious bedroom, the master bathroom, the half bathroom, and the covered porch. We visited the pool area, the gardens, and the small pier to fish in the bay, and we saw the view of the bridge that links St. Petersburg to the Florida mainland. She didn’t push but didn’t hold herself back in details, explaining what would need to be fixed and what would need to be replaced in the future. She also explained the advantages of living in a place like this. The price was $104,090, exactly $4,090 more than the top price range that we were able to afford.
After Isla del Sol, we went to visit the other houses but none could satisfy us. Our eyes were full with the light of Isla del Sol … After that, we could not really like anything else. We finished our visit at Maritza’s office where my husband gave his offer: $100,000. On the trip back, Pepe was doing numbers in his mind. The next day, Maritza called us to the hotel to let us know that another couple, which was interested in the condo, had already offered $103,000 and the owner of the unit was going to close the deal with them. My husband didn’t think twice, spent a few minutes with paper and pencil, and replied that we would accept the market price of $104,090. So in just a fraction of a minute, the 505 unit became ours. I couldn’t believe that. Pepe has always been a very conservative person but something at Isla del Sol changed this pattern and forced him to beat the other’s offer so we didn’t lose our dream.
As I had written before, our house in North Bergen had practically three floors and a furnished garage that we remodeled to have my office. Of those floors, the first one was rented to a Dominican family, we were living on the second floor, and the basement was empty after my sister moved across the street to live with my brother in October 2005.
All those pieces of furniture, all those books, and all those other commodities could not be reduced to one bedroom, a complete bathroom, a kitchen-dinning-living area in one piece, a small closet, a small porch, and a half bathroom at the entrance.
The decisions were made following the same pattern as when we left Cuba. Check all the books. Those strictly necessary to have handy in case I could continue doing work as psychologist or as Family Life consultant were packed in a box while the rest were distributed between North Bergen Public Library and the libraries of Union City schools. Next came the furniture: we contacted the Salvation Army and donated all the pieces of furniture except our bedroom set, which came to our bedroom in Isla del Sol. Finally, all the clothes necessary to survive the winters in the Northeast were also donated to the Salvation Army. In just a paragraph, I have described one of the most painful experiences associated with retiring and leaving our dream house to move to Florida: letting go.
The house was sold on May 26, 2006, five months after being on the market, to the third family that visited it. Economically we were blessed with the sale, as we received the cost of the house, the costs of the investment done to improve, remodel, and reconstruct it, and a little more.
On April 6, 2006, the senate and general assembly of the state of New Jersey and the Union City mayor and its government gave me their recognition as being part of the Annual Women Making Strides for my personal and professional contributions to the children and families of the state and of the city of Union City. It was a very emotional gathering. My fellow peers—teachers, staff of the department of special education and of Washington School, parents and students, surrounded me. In my major speaker presentation, I emphasized the gift of being in America, where you come with nothing and can not only build up your life again, but you are able to become a responsible contributor to your hometown, your state, and your nation. As part of the ending, I praised Union City for being a welcoming town where people had enriched themselves by becoming a bilingual and bicultural city thanks to the migration of people from many places in the world.
On May 20, 2006, was the retirement party, a “real” party full of joy where everybody happily danced and had fun. Pepe, Pepito, and Ana were with me on that day. (In March 2006, Pepito had received a very good work offer from NBC/Telemundo/Universal. He and Ana had returned from Spain to establish in Los Angeles.) I felt very touched with the respect, love, and support that I received from the administration and from all my peers. The farewell parties continued until the last day of school, June 23, 2006.
On June 24, we drove away from North Bergen, New Jersey. Contrary to what I did when I left Central España in 1957, or when I left Cuba in 1980, this time I didn’t turn my head back to get a last glance of fourteen years of my life there. I couldn’t do that because my heart was literally hurting me with its crying. After so much sacrifice to become a psychologist, with just six years of finally having an official title that said that I was a psychologist in the United States, I was quitting and throwing my whole life into a hole—I mean sending my dreams and aspirations into the air—because I was moving to very different circumstances.
I had a lot of time to think: we drove to the Amtrak station outside Washington, DC, and took the car-train that transported us overnight to Sanford, near Orlando, Florida, and there we took our car and continued driving to our new home: 6158 Palma del Mar Boulevard in Isla del Sol. Throughout the trip I prayed very hard, asking God to give me acceptance of the new circumstances that I had and have consciously chosen as the best one for all the circumstances that I cannot change. Near Tampa the DVD of the car gave me another line of thought. We were listening to the lyrics of Spanish author and singer Jon Manuel Serrat, who sang about his uncle “who became old without watching himself in the mirror” (se hizo viejo sin mirarse al espejo). I too became old without realizing that I was becoming old: physically, I was sixty-eight years old and a cancer survivor, but psychologically and spiritually I felt a lot of intellectual and professional possibilities. I still was able to design long-term goals for me and for my future. Why was I going to put aside, and forcefully forget, what I was until that day: a Hispanic Family Life consultant and a bilingual school psychologist—excuse me, a PhD psychologist? I am what I was, I concluded, and I will be what I am today. I definitively will look for new horizons after moving to Florida. I began to feel peace and my energetic character started, again, to guide my life.
Retiring and moving were two more challenges to conquer, challenges that would add to all the other challenges I had had to conquer in my life. Retiring was not the end of the world, but just a different stairwell that I must climb so I can watch life and my surroundings with a different perspective. Retiring and moving were and are part of my final path toward the end, toward the final encounter with God.
After opening the boxes and accommodating the books, the psychological tests, the clothes, and so on, I started to realize that the dreams were larger than the possibilities. Every morning I checked the positions for psychologist that were open: I spread out resumes and letters of recommendations in public and private schools, in public and private hospitals, in mental health institutions, but apparently, it was not enough. I could not find what drawer of the receivers’ desk my resumes and letters were filed in, or even if they were saved or thrown away, because no one answered back to my offer, no one acknowledged the receipt of the mail, and I didn’t have the possibility to follow up by phone because the message of the answering machine didn’t allow me to say a word! So, what was I supposed to do other than go to the beach or to the pool, read a good book, and organize and reorganize my memories?
My husband always wanted to travel. So after writing our will and giving to our children their share of the gains from selling the house, we decided to visit places. But not going to places for the sake of just doing tourism but for learning the culture, the history, the roots, the people’s customs, and the why of everything we found. That initiative had given us a lot of pleasure and using the program Flickr we learned to share our experiences with others through the comments to the photos we uploaded, and also we began to make contacts with people that had visited the same places but had different angles and perspectives.
On the other hand, and as I have related before, during the thirty years that I have been living in the United States, I had been writing articles—in English and in Spanish—for newspapers, magazines, and books about immigrant Hispanic families, parenting, family life minister to Hispanics, and so on. With the help of my son, we created a Web page called Pensando en Ti, and slowly I have been posting those articles that were electronically stored, but also I have been retyping other articles. In addition, I was invited to write a column in the Faith Magazine of the Diocese of Lansing, Michigan. In the monthly column called “What gets my goat,” I give quick tips about how to deal with difficult relationships.
Someone said that your life cycle is not completed until you return to finish what you left unfinished. In February 2009, we attended mass at the Most Holy Name of Jesus Church with the purpose of meeting a former Cuban political prisoner, Father Miguel Angel Loredo. My husband and I were very impressed with the Hispanic faith community there. A week later, Pepe and I went to register in the parish and in just a few days more, I sat down with the pastor to show him my resume (yes, he read it!) and offer to volunteer with the immigrant Hispanic families of his community. In September 2009, I was assigned to organize the Family Life Ministry for both communities—English and Spanish. So, as of today, I am doing voluntary work for the diocese of St. Petersburg as Family Life Minister, for the Most Holy Name parish.
I don’t want to finish this chapter without mentioning a very good friend—moreover, a spiritual sister—who I made throughout my eleven years working in Union City. During the last year at Washington School and after I announced my retirement, she not only gave me her total support but was walking with me every single moment of the painful farewell. On June 23, when I gave her my good-bye hug, she anticipated the difficult time I would have and said, “Please call me when you need to talk to someone, and when you don’t need to but want to.” I did and continue to do so. I have never felt alone—not during the trip and not during these years going through the difficult process of relocating in Florida. Pepe and I have never felt alone because together with us was and is our friend, Eydie.
1. http://www.flickr.com/gelasia
2. http://www.gelasiamarquez.com/pensando/