I was a pretty normal kid, just like the other chiquillos in Barrio Lawton, as far as I remember, though my grandparents always insisted I was different. They told me I had been born in a place called Pig's Foot - Pata de Puerco - in the deep south of Cuba on the far side of El Cobre. According to them, I slid down my mother's legs into the mud like a slug. Can you imagine? Like a slug. And that as soon as my mother picked me up out of the muck, I started howling like I'd been stuck with a fistful of needles. Pig's Foot sounds to me like one of the weird recipes Grandma used to concoct, but from what I was told both my grandparents and the parents I never knew were born there and one day I would have to go back.