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Italians to get their apartment in Ozone Park in Queens. Or when my cousin Mayrah lived in the urban war zone known as Alphabet City in the East Village, before it gentrified with bistros and cupcake shops. New York was a nicer city than the one my relatives survived—with the added benefit that it came with my Titi Lucy, Tío Luis, and my cousin Mayrah!
    I needed an apartment, but the search was painful. I couldn’t tell prewar from postwar, and the massive brick buildings all looked equally ugly. But once inside the buildings, the trade-offs were more obvious. I held out for good light and a kitchen that could accommodate a normal-size refrigerator. In the buyer’s market of the late 1980s, there were good choices at prices I could afford. After months of looking and indecision, I moved into a bright and spacious rental on the Upper West Side two blocks from Central Park. I was doomed to hearing sirens and honking day and night, but I could at least see sky from the windows and jog around the reservoir.
    I missed the Bay Area terribly, but I eventually found mini–New Yorks that were manageable, wonderful, and friendly. I remember the exact moment I realized I had ceased missing San Francisco and became a New Yorker. I was in the back of a cab on my way home, a little tipsy from a night out with friends, when we stopped at a light, right in front of the most beautiful produce and flower display on a sidewalk market. The oranges and reds, greens and yellows just popped, and in my daze, perhaps because the fruits and veggies reminded me of California, I thought, “I love New York.”
    Then I moved.
    I was happy in New York, had a boyfriend and close colleague friends and my Latina women’s group (LIPS) and the theater and Central Park and a gig as adjunct professor at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism. But the
Times
offered me the job of Miami bureau chief, and my mentor at the paper, Gerald Boyd, urged me to take it, wanting me to be strategic about my career. I couldn’t pass this assignment up, he told me. I was reluctant to move to Florida barely five years after settling in New York and adjusting to its craziness, but Miami had two big draws aside from the promotion: my sister, her husband, and their two boys lived there; and Puerto Rico would be part of my beat. Not only would I get to travel to the island frequently for stories, but I’d also live close to my family again, so close that I had the chance to hold my third nephew, Alexander, as a newborn, a joy I missed with the first two.
    Florida was big and busy and meant constant travel. Who knew the state is big enough to have two time zones? Hurricanes. Fidel and the Cuban exiles. Cuba and Guantánamo. The ValuJet crash. Versace’s murder. The declawed lion that escaped from a zoo in Orlando. At some point my hair started falling out in clumps and I got shingles. When my Florida assignment drew to a close on the fifth year, I got to spend seven months covering Central America and the Caribbean for the foreign desk while they looked for a replacement for that beat. As I wrapped up, I was grateful for an amazing run. What a memorable five years of reporting. But when I was offered San Francisco next, a dream job had it come a decade earlier, all I wanted was to go back home—to New York. I didn’t want to live so far from my family again—a full day of travel from San Francisco to San Juan. I wanted to travel for work, but just occasionally. After I moved back to New York, I soon was headed for Houston for a six-month detour to follow three businessmen—black, white, and Latino—for the “How Race Is Lived in America” series, a collaboration by a team of writers that won a Pulitzer. I then decamped to Washington Heights at the upper tip of Manhattan, to a cozy apartment by the Hudson River, for good.
    Then I met Jim.

Three
    9/11: Taking Stock

    J im and I said good-bye in