"Cheese."

"Eh?"

"Cheese. I made cheese, Nonna."

"What?" Her voice is so weak, so feeble, that her words trail off at the end, every one. My mind races, what is cheese in Italian? Do they even have one word?

"Mozzarella." I let the 'z' and the 'r' and the 'l' roll richly off my tongue, using all of my meager memory of Italian pronunciation, hoping she will understand so that I do not make her feel foolish. If I pronounced it this way in the country store up here, people would laugh at me, but Nonna does not, the sounds are familiar to her brain. Still, she does not catch the word.

"Muh-?" I can hear the hazy confusion in her voice, with a little edge of frustration. I take a deep breath and try again,

"CHEESE. You know, CHEEEESSSE."

A strangled sound comes from the other end of the telephone, she still does not understand. But I cannot give up now, I have to tell her that I made cheese- mozzarella, from her homeland- I did it, be proud of me, mother of my father!

Finally, it clicks in her mind, after another long drawn out loud word.

"Oh!" She cries, happy now to communicate, "Chiz! You make this?" She laughs at me, the strange granddaughter who writes books and carves jewelry and moves too often and now makes cheese. "You find time to do this, after your work?"

"Yes, somehow, Nonna. Its fun. I made pickles too!"

"Peeguls?"

Oh dear, what have I begun? I should have left it at chiz, but now she must know about the peeguls. "Pickles. Pickles." I repeat, wishing that I had kept my mouth shut.

"Peeguls? Oh! You mean Bugles?"

"No, Nonna, pickles. You know, like with a sandwich? Pickles."

"What is this?" After 53 years in America, she still pronounces her letter 'i' like the Italians do- as a long 'e', also her 's', at the end of a word, is a 'z'. So 'is this' sounds like 'eez theez'. It is forever endearing.

"You know what pickles are, Nonna. Cucumbers, giardineira, pickles!"

Giardiniera is a well-known pickle mix, but it also translates to 'in the garden'.

"You do this in your garden?"

"No," I sigh, ignoring the chuckles of my co-workers. A conversation with my nonna is always plainly evident, as I have to yell slowly. "Pickles. Piccolo." Even as I say that word, I wince, knowing that it was the wrong word. It sounded right to my tongue, but my brain knows piccolo means little. Now the poor woman is even more confused. She continues repeating the sounds while I dash to the computer and pull Babelfish. Pickles. English to Italian, enter. There.

"Sottaceti!" I shout, thinking this will work. But I cannot remember the rule for 'ce'. Is it 'ch', or 's' or just 'ck'? I pronounce it all three ways, but she does not recognize the word. She is northern Italian, part Czech, actually, so the word is just as foreign to her as 'pickle'.

This goes on for a few more minutes before I give up and persuade her to forget it. She is silent for a moment, then asks casually how the children are. My throat tightens, because I know where the next question will go.

"Great!" I shout into the receiver, hoping to divert her next question, "They are enjoying summer! They are good girls!" I mention something about my oldest child, who was named after Nonna's mother. She takes a moment to remember the name. My heart sinks, she is getting so very old, so very, very old...

She takes a breath, her voice frail and weary suddenly. "And your father?" She says it 'fadder'. My stomach clenches.

"I don't know, Nonna. I don't speak to him."

"Oh."

There is silence on the phone. I can picture her, two hundred miles away, her thinning white hair bobbing softly as she nods her head. She nods a lot, ostensibly to make up for the language barrier.

"He is...?" She wants to know more of this renegade son of hers, the son who has broken her heart once and for all. We have almost the same conversation nearly every time we speak, which is why we don't speak more often. "Where is he?"

I tell her. Then, led some more, I tell her the few details of the divorce, how he isn't keeping up his end of the deal, as usual. He owes money, lots of money, to many people, especially my mother. Nonna wants to know what he is going to do about it, if he has sold his store yet, what he plans to do. I know none of this. All that I know is that her son, my father, is a dishonest and broken man who has chosen madness and a young Phillipino Internet bride over his family. I do not want to know about him. I want to forget about him. The memory of him, he who I loved and hated so fiercely, makes me tremble inside.

"It is hard..." she complains to me, "so hard, tesora." Tesora means treasure. All of her granddaughters are tesora and cara (my heart) and mi anima (my soul). The Italians have a neverending supply of beautiful pet names for their loved ones. They also have plenty of curses, many of which I heard as a child in my grandmother's home.

"I know, Nonna." I am in my office now, with the door closed. My co-workers may be amused by the loud repetition, but this is not stuff they need to hear. "Its just as hard for me, he's my dad. I want to have a sane dad, someone I can talk to."

"Who what?" She who was lucid for a few moments is now back to not understanding, not hearing right. I wonder if she does it on purpose, if she deliberately hides from the pain of her profligate son. But maybe this is not a wise deduction, for she asks about him every time.

She asks a few more questions, fishing for any hint that he might be changing his ways, seeing the light, humbling himself. But I truly do not have hope to offer her. Her voice gradually sounds thinner, weaker, and I curse myself for even answering anything. But the curiosity is worse than the knowledge to her. I steer the conversation to other things, wishing that I could grab my father by the shoulders and shake him until the blocks fall out of his head, until he sees how he has wounded his mother and his children and his sisters and his wife and everyone around him. I extricate myself from my conversation with Nonna and go home to cook supper. Pralines and chicken and rice pilaf and steamed vegetables and blueberry glaze from my fresh homemade jam. I cook frantically to drown my anger, burning my tongue to a blister on the hot pralines. The pain feels almost leveling and the salt of the blood starting suddenly in my mouth brings me a bit more to reality.

I look at my children, hovering hungrily near the kitchen counter. I wonder vaguely if any of them will ever break my heart- be it drugs, crime, apathy, or just plain stupidity. Did Nonna ever see it coming? The brave dark-haired woman who came to Detroit so very many years ago with two small children who had taken their Communion early, did she know her grandchildren would attempt unsuccessfully to reassure her one day?

Am I, who is so much like him, going to break my own family's heart some day? I've heard plenty about the sins of the fathers, and I fight off the arrogance and selfishness and paranoia every day. So far, I'm winning, so far I've managed to conquer the demons of my past. If I can keep this up for another forty years, maybe it will be all right.

Maybe then I'll have paid for my father's sins.

Labels: anger, children, curse, family, father, fathers, grandmother, Italian, language barrier, nonna, sin

The James Dean/Marilyn Monroe/Firefly Syndrome



“You have to watch this show!” My husband burbled one day after visiting some coolgeek cousins, “It’s great, it’s essentially a space series, but with cowboy aspects to it, and the captain’s really funny, but he has a sad history, and, there’s this funny girl who fixes the engine, and a guy named Jayne, but he’s really tough, and Fox cancelled it after only a few episodes! But its great, the first episode has this fight, on a train, and, and-“
He doesn’t have the greatest way of making things sound appealing. The last show that I ‘just had to see’ turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment, so I didn’t listen too closely to his praises.
Persistent as ever, Michael brought the series home, and I still didn’t pay much attention, wrapped up as I was in my writing, moving to a new home, trying to homeschool our three children…
Somehow, eventually, he cajoled me into watching one episode. And I fell in love. Firefly is witty, earthy, spacey without feeling like Star Trek (not that there’s anything wrong with Star Trek!), warm, and very, very human. It has depth and dimension, and the possibility for a good long run of storyline.
I inhaled all fourteen episodes over the next few days, in the proper, non-Fox-issue order. I was entertained- I laughed, I sniffled, I hid my face in my husband’s shoulder when anything to do with Reavers came on, and I found, somehow, another little slice of weirdness to identify with.

And then the episodes ran out. And I learned that this show had been cancelled nearly five years ago, never to be produced again. (where I was when this all happened, I have no idea)
“What?!?” I was furious, livid actually, “How could some stupid network execs cancel something as quality as this, and show something as stupid as Trading Spouses? What the hell is the matter with them?!?”
Suddenly, somehow, it became just a little bit more than a television show. The odd little speech quirks of Captain Mal became almost iconic, I smiled at people wearing the tee shirts, my curiosity was piqued by anything to do with Joss Whedon. I even signed some online petition to bring the show back, as if that would ever do anything.
I learned that the show has a sort of cult following, much like the similarly fated, but longer-running Futurama (thanks again, Fox).
Something about my reaction to this seemed a bit familiar, and it was only the other day that I was able to put my finger on it.

I was fifteen, working at our family jewelry store in the Foothills Mall in Tucson. I had lived a pretty sheltered life up until that point, not paying much attention to cultural icons or idols much. An antique show came to the mall one weekend. You’ve seen these before, a mass of booths laden with postcards, posters, comic books, costume jewelry, and pop art, all of questionable vintage. It was at one of these booths that I spied a poster that made my pulse quicken a bit. The man in the shot wore a white tee shirt, dark jeans, and a scowl that can only be described as belligerently sexy. I moved the print aside and found a whole stack of pictures beneath, all of this man. I couldn’t tell exactly what era they were from, but in every one he was more and more handsome. Scowling, smirking, smoking cigarettes, he looked to my sheltered fifteen year old eyes like a ragged god, an indifferent and possibly troubled divinity. In love, I hurriedly bought the (cheaper) postcard version, carrying it close to my heart all the way back to work.
There, I showed it to my mother.
“James Dean.” She said, in her matter-of-fact way, barely glancing at my treasure, “Haven’t you ever seen him? Rebel Without a Cause?”
I shook my head.
“50s movie star.” She shrugged, “Died in a motorcycle crash when he was still young. Only did a couple of movies. Maybe we’ll rent one so you can see him. Not much of an actor.”
I gaped at my picture. How tragic. A life cut short. How romantic. A Romeo, an Icarus. It made the imagination whirl- what would movies have been like if he were still here?
I didn’t become obsessed, per se, but I was very fascinated. I studied his short life and learned that it was a car accident, not motorcycle, that he had been a tiny bit mentally unhinged, and that sultry squint that he showed in his photographs was from poor eyesight more than any profound sexuality. Even today, when I am browsing movies, my pulse quickens a little bit at the sight of him on a cover.
He didn’t have the chance to get old and flaccid and embarrassing, like so many other film stars. Now, we hold onto this romantic memory, exaggerating it in some way, possibly, just like we do for other things that we have lost in our lives.

Do things suddenly become more valuable once they are not available? I propose that they do, at least to some of the more romantic of us humans. Do we often take things for granted when they are right in front of us, simple and common things like our families, our comforts, our very culture?

I don’t have any life-altering thoughts to end this article with. I just felt like challenging you, me- all of us- to enjoy and cherish what we have, while we have it. Before it’s gone, and we’re forced to cling to a memory of what once was.
Thanks, and good night.

Labels: absentia, cherish, family, Firefly, importance, James Dean, loss, obsession