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Seven years old, I had only to cross the street from my second grade classroom to my grandmother's house. This day I saw the linesnaking into old Don Juan de Dios's livingroom. A giveaway, I thought, remembering the day the old man with a beard that hung down to his huge middle made snow cones for all of us on a swelteringJuly day in Puerto Rico. We had been allowed to run free through a house saturated with old-age smells and filled with treasures from the world before our births. It was a silent queue I joined, in between women in black, I could only follow the current into theflower-packedroom where Don Juan lay as still as I tried to be in hide-and-seek. He seemed to be asleep. When it was my turn to look, I stared at his hands folded on his chest and waited—no one tried to stop me when I ran through the stifling crowd and out to the air-filled world. 3i Respirar: To Breathe ...

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