Eric Velasquez: When my grandmother listened to her records in the middle of the night

There's so much about my grandmother. There were so many kind of layers to her love of music, which was so profound and passionate. I remember during the summers that I spent with her, sometimes it would be two o'clock in the morning and I would be asleep and I would wake up and I would find her looking through all her records, and I would say, “Abuela, what are you looking for?” And she's like, “There's this one tune that's stuck in my head and I'm trying to find the record.” And I'm like, “But you need to hear it now?” And she would say, “Well, go look over there and see if you find it.”

And she would, whatever it was, and I would kind of help. And eventually we would find it. And I always remember at the, that hour of the early morning, just she would play it on volume number two, and we would sit right by the speaker of her record player and just listen. And what she would hear, the song as low as it was at that hour, she goes, “Okay, go back to sleep.” And then she would just kind of pack it up for the rest of the night.

So I always remember that, and I kind of go through some of that myself where I'm looking for something and it's late at night, and I always just start to laugh to myself. It's like the fruit has not fallen far from the tree.