Been a long time coming

From the Neapolitan side of the family  

Not all of my heritage is Sicilian, despite what I may have said elsewhere. There are ancestors from Caserta, the town near Naples most famous for having the jail where Sophia Loren was kept. One of those relatives was my great-uncle Aldo, of whom I have written. Aldo was not Mafia, he was just mob. Italian, not Sicilian. One has to be Sicilian to be Mafia, although perhaps they have relaxed the standards. He operated out of Boston, robbing trains and bootlegging, regular stuff. He was the one who supplied his sister with the gun she used to shoot at her husband. She emptied it in his direction at fairly close range but missed. Six times. Maybe she didn't really want to kill him although I doubt that. I think she was unpracticed.

Finally Aldo did something (I never learned what) that got him thrown out of New England. He left his wife behind and went to Chicago where he thrived.  This was about the time our family moved from New York to Indiana so we got to know him better.  I know I somewhere told the story of Uncle Aldo arriving at our house with a beautiful woman. She had blonde hair, bright red lips and nails and a luscious fur coat. Almost as soon as they walked in the door there was a terrible fight. I didn't understand any of it and Italian children know enough to go to their rooms when the adults are fighting. At any rate, the fight would have been in Italian (actually Neapolitan dialect), and very loud. When it settled down, Aldo and the woman I thought was as lovely as a fairy princess were both gone. Quietly I asked my mother why they had left and she said they weren't hungry.

As I said, Aldo thrived in Chicago. His visits to our house were occasional and, with that one exception, without accompaniment. My father, for the most part, showed him great deference. For the most part. When Aldo brought a paper sack full of watches for us to pick from and keep, my father would not let us. Aldo said they fell off a truck. I thought my father was angry that Aldo hadn't run after the truck to tell the driver something fell off.

After dinner, Aldo and my dad would go in the family room to smoke and talk. Aldo liked to brag about what he had done. I liked to listen, quietly, on the other side of the door. One time he talked about managing a nightclub in Chicago. He was the third or fourth manager of the place; all the others had been quickly fired. As soon as he was hired, he noticed that the prior managers were skimming off the top. Of course they were, that was to be expected. Along with bribes to police and ward bosses. What surprised Aldo was the sheer amounts that were being taken. Some was to be expected but these guys were taking as much as they could. Thus they were discovered, thus they were fired. Or worse.

"Minchia", Aldo said, "they were taking it all." He described devising a system whereby he could take enough to enrich himself but not so much that it would attract attention. "You gotta take a little, leave a little. You can't take it all."

This fairly simple statement made an impression on me. My father was an absolutist. Nothing but the whole cake would do. Nothing but one's total best, nothing but a total conquest; nothing else was acceptable. My dad would never engage in illegal activities, but he did strive for total victory and total surrender from an opponent. In an argument, he would continue until he heard that he was right, totally right. If he did the lawn, he did the whole lawn, every blade. Every speck on the garage floor cleaned. Every report card filled with A's. Anything less than all was failure. It was the principle of the thing.

Hearing those words "You can't take it all" took the huge weight of his perfectionism off my shoulders. It was more than a strategy to not get caught, it was a relaxed philosophy of life. "Ya win some, ya lose some." And that's ok. I'm a perfectionist enough; it's great to have permission to leave a little. Not every weed pulled, not every game won, not every task completed. It's ok.

I always have problems with finishing my stories. I'm at that spot now. So I will stop. Might come back to do more editing.

Oh, you want to know what happened to Aldo. So do we. He disappeared several decades ago. The body was later found in the Chicago river. His wife claimed it and brought it back to New England.

My Sicilian Grandfather

A lot of this is true. Maybe most.

The man below came to America because of the Italian salt tax. He was the youngest son of a wealthy man, who had sons and daughters who were educated by private tutors in a manor overlooking the Adriatic Sea and shadowed by Mount Etna. The family grew lemons and olives and the sons were sent to Paris in the summer to become cultured. They ate food from the sea: calamari, shellfish, and eels, as well as lamb and dishes cooked with fruits, pignoli and African spices. Mostly their meals were made for them, but my grandfather enjoyed lounging in the kitchen and learned the art of cooking and, of course, wine-making.  

Like all Sicilians, the family did not consider themselves Italian. The language is different, not even a dialect, but a different language. Sicily then, and Sicily now, is contemptuous of Italian rule, resentful. But my grandfather was drafted by Italy and had to go into the Italian army.  I'm not sure about my great uncles. I know several had come to the US to make money to buy more land in Sicily and return. Maybe they escaped the draft, I don't know.

The story I remember is that my grandfather was a good marksman, good at taking down faggiani, pheasants. If you shoot one, the others fly away, but the story is that my grandfather was so good he could get others in flight. So the army set him up on a hillside.  

People need salt and the Italian government taxed it, perhaps still taxes it. Maybe not. The farmers who lived on the coast would go down to the sea at night to gather salt water and thus evade the tax. The government put soldiers up on the hillsides to fire over their heads and scare them. I don't know, maybe even to shoot them. Whichever, it was intolerable for my grandfather, who despite his privileged upbringing had a fine sense for injustice. This he saw as unjust. So he went to join his brothers in America.  

My grandfather met my grandmother, who was from Naples, and they fell in love. Her family did not approve of the match because he wasn't Italian. They did not attend the wedding. He wanted to take his bride back to Sicily, the Sicily he loved with fragrant orchards and sun warmed villas, but she had only known grinding poverty and would not go. And so, rather than lose her, he stayed. The picture up top is him on his wedding day. 

My grandfather made out ok, he was athletic and worked as a skilled craftsman. My grandmother worked in a clothing store that catered to Italians, but she had worked in the textile mills as a girl.

A big problem for the Italians was the Black Hand, or Mafia. Not the jovial guys seen on the US TV series "The Sopranos", these were evil men who stood outside the gates of the factories and strong-armed men for part of their paycheck. People paid them or there would be a handprint in black ink on their door and someone would come and bloody them. Some people paid Mafiosi for special favors. They had knives, stilettos, and if a daughter had been dishonored by a man, her family would pay the Mafia to slit his nose and make him so ugly no other woman would want him. 

This was the early to mid 1900's. Guns were not very common. A skilled man could do what he needed to do with a knife. If he had a gun, so much the better. But they were rare.

Back to the Mafia and men's paychecks. My grandfather told the men not to give their money to the Mafia. He was an anarchist and did not believe in government, nor religion, did not believe in one person having power over another, and despised the Mafia. One day, when my father was about 7 or 8, the family returned to their apartment and a paper with a black hand was nailed to the door as a warning. 

I do not believe my grandfather was frightened. 

Time went by and nothing happened.  My grandfather continued to urge men not to give their money to the Mafia. One night two men came to the door. Graciously my grandfather let them in, offered them dark red wine, and sent my grandmother and father into the other room. They began to talk when suddenly my father burst in and ran to my grandfather, crying, hugging him. Roughly my grandfather pushed him away. "Bad boy," he said, "go back to your room, this is for men." But it was a ruse. My grandfather had a gun, and my father, as he had been told to do, had brought it and put it in my grandfather's pocket.

So then, with the boy again out of the room, my grandfather drew the gun. Guns, back then, were rare and impressive. "Get out," he said, "and do not come back."  Apparently they did, or so I was told.  And my father ran in and leaped into his father's lap, proud of the part he played. 

My grandfather would have been in his thirties then, here he is in his 60's, with me and my brother.  He was a kind and gentle caretaker who never allowed us to be struck or even scolded while he lived.  He took me in his lap and read the New York Times to me, out loud. All the News That's Fit to Print said a box on the front page. He died a year or 2 after this picture was taken.

I have his wedding ring which I wear on my largest finger with another gold band to keep it in place. 

There are a lot of holes in this story, as there are in stories that are handed down. I'm sure you can find them. 

Sicilian cooking: Bracciole

There are many recipes for these meat rolls called bracciole, but almost all of them are Italian. Sicilian cooking is heavily influenced by west Asian and northern African cooking. Most Sicilians will tell you they are not Italian (and indeed we are not). But I will not get into the politics today, just the cuisine. I am also not going to get into the tomato sauce (which might require several blogs) or the pasta.

There also won't be any exact amounts listed in the recipe, because I don't use them. I learned by watching my mother who learned from my grandfather. He was a true Sicilian who fought the Italian army when he was in Italy and fought the Mafia when he was in the US. Both subjects for future blogs.

Bracciole:
2 lbs. round steak, carefully trimmed of fat and sliced into thin sheets
Handful or more of pignoli (pine nuts)
Handful of golden raisins
Chopped fresh herbs: I like basil, parsley, and marjoram
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
ground black pepper
salt




Lay the slices of meat on a cutting board and cover with the garlic, salt, pepper, herbs, nuts and raisins. Some people like to add more, it's good to experiment.

Italian bracciole emphasizes more cheese and larger amounts of herbs. The African/Mediterranean influence here can be seen in the nuts and raisins.




The tricky part comes next and that is rolling up the meat and tying it with kitchen string. Then take the bracciole and put them in a cast iron frying pan that has been coated with good olive oil. Using medium heat brown the bracciole on all sides. If the heat is too high, the oil will smoke; if too low, the juices will come out of the meat. You don't need to cook them all the way through, just enough to brown the meat and sear in the juices. Turn them so they are browned on all sides.




Your next step is to add a very good quality tomato sauce and simmer for 2-3 hours. You want the meat to be very tender, but not so tender that it is falling away from the string.


Gently remove each bracciola from the sauce, let it cool a bit, and carefully remove the string. Return to the sauce. Serve with pasta.

 A good red wine is always welcome.

On children and guns

I had a child once who moved to my small city from Detroit. I asked him what he liked best about his new home. He said he got to sleep in a bed, not the bathtub. In Detroit his mother put him and his sisters to bed in the bathtub, the better to protect them from stray bullets which periodically crashed into their ground floor flat. 

She had also put plywood over the windows. 

There were no night lights as lights attract attention. 

He told me he no longer worried about his mother and sisters. 

He played chess very well.

When somebody breaks your heart

I walk everyday for my health, my doctor tells me to, sometimes I take my camera, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I end up thinking of small moments that I have saved in my mind very clearly and sharply and I don't even know why.

When I was in the 7th and 8th grade I had a science teacher, his name was Ken Williams, that is his real name. He was a great teacher. This was one of the questions on his test (and you had to explain your answer):  is the Earth heavier, lighter, or about the same as it was when the dinosaurs were on earth? Ok, that sounds pretty simple, except we had just had a unit on how very heavy dinosaurs were and how big, the size of buildings and 1959 Cadillac Sedan DeVilles.  So it was a stumper for me until I gave it a bit of thought.

Not as much of a stumper though as when his friend, my math teacher, told us to (for extra credit) draw a triangle with two 90º angles. I did not get that one.  No one did.  But at least we were thinking.

So anyway, back to the point of this blog. I was sick (as in I could convince my mother I was sick) a lot and missed a fair amount of school.  The moments of real learning and stimulation were far outnumbered by the hours of sheer tedium.  I would rather stay home and read.

One afternoon, sometime on a warm Indiana May day, I was staying after school to make up a test I had missed in Mr. Williams' class. I was the only kid in the room and was working away.  Mr. Williams had opened the windows and was watering his many carefully labeled plants. I guess he forgot I was there and he started to softly sing to himself.  This is the song, maybe some of you remember it. "I want to be around, to pick up the pieces, when somebody breaks your heart. Somebody twice as smart, as me..."

He had a great voice, that was a little surprising. It was silky and clear and carried the melody over the plants and desks, the chalk and papers. I stopped writing and just listened to him. And here I am now, 50 years later, and I can still hear that voice. Tony Bennett sang the song and Frank Sinatra, but nobody sang it as sweetly as Ken Williams did that day.

My Mom and the Tornado

 

I think one of the hardest things about being a mother are the choices you have to make when your children are in danger.

This is a picture from 1961, a few weeks before or after the tornado. I'm on the left, my brother Joe on the right, the baby in the middle. Actually she was a bit older than 2 but we called her the baby.  The tiger was the tiger.

And I look older than 11, so I'm not sure. Anyway. My brother and I went to the same school and walked home the same route with all the other baby boomer kids. But never together. How uncool would that have been?

That day the wind was kicking up and it was raining; nowadays kids are held at school while there is a storm or tornado watch or warning. But that day someone made the decision to let us out and we all walked home. It was no longer raining nor even windy. It was dead calm in fact. I was carrying a wooden checkerboard, can't remember why.  Everything was normal until I heard some screaming and looked back behind me.

None of us saw the twister, we never did. We just saw a huge black cloud. The tornado picked up the freshly tilled black midwest dirt and churned it around.  Just like that day turned to night, calm turned to chaos.

I don't know how my brother and I found each other. We grabbed hold and ran for home.  Part of our path went through "the woods" where the trees were slashing back and forth. When we came out of the woods, nothing looked familiar and the other kids were gone. The wind was still blowing and it was raining very hard. I looked at myself - I was black, covered in dirt. I thought an atomic bomb had gone off. We kept running. Like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods, we held hands and kept running.

It was so dark. At home my Mom had a terrible choice. She could go out and search for us, but she'd have to take the baby out in the storm. Or she could leave the baby alone. Or she could huddle in the middle of the house and cry and pray. I don't know what must have been going through her mind.

When we saw the house, we recognized it. Outside of branches down it was there and unharmed. We ran through the door and my mother started screaming in agony and joy.  It was a cry I can still hear today, as she clutched us and said, "Are you ok?" "You're not hurt?" and "I love you, I love you". "I wanted to look for you." We said, "We're ok, we love you, Mom". We cried and hugged.

Eventually things quieted, both weather-wise and in the house. Tornadoes are fast moving storms and it was over with little harm done in our neighborhood. The sun even came out. My Dad came home and absurdly we went looking for the checkerboard and found it unscathed.

So Happy Mother's Day, Mom, wherever you are. You went through a lot of anguish that day and I am just realizing that. I'd like to think you are somewhere nice, maybe on a beach, with a glass of champagne. God knows you deserve it. I know you do.

Tramp the Dirt Down

Not a blog about Margaret Thatcher.

My mother, about 45 years ago. An old polaroid. When this was taken she had just been given permission to drive.  Before that my father did all the driving which gave him a certain amount of control.

My reaction upon hearing of his death this morning was roughly the same as that of many Britons upon hearing of the death of Thatcher.  You may be thinking to write that you are sorry, but it's ok. I'm not sorry. I'm not running around singing, but I am not sorry. I am at peace; I have been at peace for a long time.

The last time my mother recognized me, before Alzheimer's completely took her away, she gave me a gift. She told me to save myself.  From him. And I did.