- 1937. At the height of the Spanish Civil War, seven-year-old child left Spain as Corsino Fernandez. Seventy years later, he journeyed back from his home in Texas to his birthplace in Asturias, Spain. Today Cole Kivlin brings his children and grandchildren together at Thanksgiving dinner to tell them who he might have been and never was.—Anonymous
- Cole Kivlin, now 80 years old, lives in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, USA. He tells the story of Corsino Fernandez, who because of the Spanish Civil War would be separated from his parents and siblings at age 7 to embark on a journey through the orphanages and foster homes of France, only to later seek refuge once again in The United States at the outbreak of World War II. While telling his life story, a gap in his memory comes to light. When reconstructing his childhood odyssey, how much of it is true, and how much is a figment of his imagination? Cole Kivlin, or Corsino Fernandez, still struggles with who he is some 70 years after the tragic separation from his family. Having preserved some documents from his time in the orphanages, he compiled the information in an autobiographical book written about his indelible misfortune. After his retirement, he travelled back to his birthplace, coming face to face with his childhood, and to the reality of Asturias, Spain, without knowing what he would find with only a single word that had been bouncing around his head his entire life: Moreda. Moreda. Moreda. In 2008, Cole Kivlin travelled to Asturias (Spain) for the fifth time with the knowledge of all he had learned in the last decade about his family home, his surviving siblings, and his neighbors in Castandiello, all of which had been disappearing with the passage of time, or perhaps because of fate itself. And he remembers the lapse in judgement, the fatal error, of what his father had written on a piece of paper about the identity of young Corsino. Is this what triggered his misfortune? A poorly written piece of paper?
Cole Kivlin wishes to remain as Corsino Fernandez. His wife and children in Texas have never fully grasped the idea of this doppelganger that is Corsino. In The United States, he carved out a new life through hard work and adaptation. And now, at 80 years old, he tells the story of his life as if it were a novel. And as the Thanksgiving turkey crumbles away, he attempts to shed some of this weight of trying to feel more like that other person, more like who he should have always been: Corsino.
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