Famiglia

Famiglia

My grandmother, the one I adored and who loved me for being me, died when I was fourteen. I rode to the cemetery with my father crying on one shoulder and my grandfather crying on the other. My mother rode in the front seat next to the limo driver. I had never seen either my dad or my grandfather cry before. A year or so later my grandfather said he needed to talk to my mom and dad, and I. We all sat down very seriously in my parents’ living room.My grandfather looked really nervous. If his hands had been holding a hat he would have been turning in around and around with his fingertips. Nonno wasn’t tall but he was a big barrel-chested man who had worked as a blacksmith shoeing the donkeys who brought the coal up out of the mines.

My dad grew up in a very small mining town. He went to school in a one-room schoolhouse from grades one to eight. He knew how to hunt and fish, and he could fix just about anything. His childhood was spent jumping off the local bridge to swim in the river, using slingshots with his friends, and learning not to take any crap from random organized crime guys who wandered into the neighborhood. Most of the people who lived in the houses around him were Italian. Some were Polish. Just a few were Irish and there was one man they called “The Swede”. Dad was a child during the depression. He told me how other kids would open their lunch pails and pull out lard sandwiches on very then slices of bread. His lunch contained a sandwich of breaded rabbit with roasted red peppers on thick slices of homemade bread. My grandfather hunted, fished, and kept a giant garden. Dad was too grateful to feel fully embarrassed about his abundant lunch.

He started going to the Catholic school in the nearby town when he entered ninth-grade. The school was associated with a church that had a predominantly Italian congregation. The early morning mass was said in Italian. But Catholics and Italians were not allowed to join the Sea Scouts, something my dad longed to do. Years later he attend Kings Point and became a Merchant Marine with a degree in Engineering. The local doctor showed him how to stand so he could hide the fact that one of his legs was shorter than the other.

After my grandmother died, my grandfather started talking about his childhood in Italy. It sounded as if things were set up like a feudal system. He said there was snow on the mountains and they picked figs off the trees in the backyard. So much color to their lives. When Grandma died he wanted a new partner. He met a woman unlike my grandmother in many ways. She was who he wanted to talk to us about that day in the living room. He was asking our permission to remarry. He said he was an old man but that every man needed a woman (I don’t think he realized some men need men). “She’s not much to look at,” he said. “Her cooking is only okay, but she’s a clean woman, and a good woman.” They got married. She made him happy. So did her children and their children and their children’s children that she had had with the four men, now dead, to whom she had previously been married. When my grandfather died, she married again. She raked in a lot of widow’s pension money. None of that mattered because her family made my grandfather and the rest of us feel welcome.

Family is what we create it to be, whether it’s based on blood or not, but it always matters.