Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire

from our house, on Fifth Avenue— Quinta Avenida —the nicest street in Miramar.
    It was a grand old park that stretched across both sides of the avenue and it was full of ancient ficus trees that had trunks as big as houses. Ficus trees have these tendrils that grow from their branches, and when they reach the ground, they take root and swell, ever so slowly, and another trunk begins to form. Trunk upon trunk, ficus trees build themselves out. Sometimes a single tree is a forest of trunks, some bundled together, others standing at various distances from the center. They were so much fun to climb and to fill with firecrackers. So many nooks and crannies. So many lizards to blow up.
    This park also had some sort of enormous marble gazebo, or band shell, held up by thick Corinthian columns. We loved to explode firecrackers in the glorieta, as we called the giant gazebo. The acoustics of the dome made it sound as if we’d set off an atomic bomb, or so we thought. It thundered and reverberated, and filled us with undiluted joy.
    Then there was the smell of the gunpowder. The petardos gave off the most intoxicating fumes. But even the smallest firecrackers were worth smelling. We would all run over to the spot where our firecrackers had exploded and inhale deeply.
    How I wished I could smell the gunpowder when real bombs went off at night. Imagine what a punch a bundle of dynamite can pack! More often than not, they were far off in the distance, but every now and then we got lucky and one would be close enough to rattle our window shutters.
    Quite a few bombs went off in Havana those last few years of Batista’s regime.
    To this day, as I am drifting to sleep I often expect to hear a bomb or two going off in the distance. It was an almost comforting sound, a lullaby of sorts. And if it was a bomb followed by a shoot-out, then it was even more oddly soothing.
    You knew, at least, that the world hadn’t changed.
    Sometimes you would learn later where the bomb had gone off, what damage had been done, or whether any people had died. The papers made sure to get photographs of those killed or maimed. Sometimes you never found out anything at all. When so many bombs are going off all the time, it’s hard to keep track. Hard to care, too, unless one happens to go off next to you.
    Nothing like that ever happened to us, however. Tough to say this, but I was kind of disappointed that I was never near one of these bombs, or that we didn’t know anyone who had been blown up by one.
    I loved explosions. I loved them in war movies. I loved them off in the distance as I went to sleep. I loved them even more close up when we set off firecrackers.
    I loved the sound of the match head on the rough side of the matchbox, the flare: so suddenly there. I loved the sight and the phosphorus smell of the burning match as it approached the fuse on the firecracker, as it transferred that living flame to it. And I loved the sight and smell of the fuse as it came alive and was consumed, eaten by time and fire.
    Such a perfect way of thinking about those fuses, and also life. You begin at one end, and as you make your way forward, point by infinitesimal point, you give off sparks. And what you leave behind is charred, consumed, transformed. But that glorious voyage towards the end: poets never grow weary of trying to describe it. The end, or telos, as Aristotle or Aquinas would tell you, is the very reason for existence, the purpose of anything that exists. Our telos as humans, yours and mine, is to abide with God for eternity. The sparks on our way there, large and small, call them love. The telos of a fuse on a firecracker is a nice explosion. The sparks on the way there, call them love too.
    On a really good day, I will fight to the death with anyone who tries to tell me that those sparks are not also love, fight with my bare hands or the jawbone of an ass or a broken stump of a sword. Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect