Last Saturday my Aunt Fran succumbed to an illness. So this week’s blog is dedicated to her memory. I have been working on chapters to a book called Cosmic Flux or Boomer Retirement. This particular chapter was written last summer after a family visit to New York when Aunt Fran was still alive and struttin’.
*********************************************************************
Well before Von D’Lucci was Rienzo. Marie Josepina to be exact. East 138th street in the Bronx was her milieu. Her mother, Angelina, played the immigrant game. A child of Angelina’s would be born here in the United States to obtain citizenship and then she would pack up and go back to the Neopolitan part of Italy. When it became Marie’s turn they either forgot to go back or had disembarked to Plan B.
471 East 138th street would have to suffice as place d’etre as well as point of origin.
My own raison d’etre arose when Marie enjoined Christy Doo-gan for a lifelong safari wending from that concrete jungle. He was an Irish lad dressed in plus-fours whose saga with Marie led to ’I do’, me and my siblings.
Family and entourage soon became quickly interchangeable. Somehow my father had arrived from Limerick as an only child and stayed that way. Thereafter he traveled in an ethnic bubble with Italians in abundance.
Angelina’s brood of nine had suffered early attrition to six. Marie grew up with a sister (my godmother) who was the oldest and four brothers (my uncles) whose families would shape my world view in a most Skinnerian fashion. My cousins are still lifelong friends and fellow travelers with each decade a series of oar strokes along Siddhartha’s river.
Mom’s brothers left us first even before Angelina made her exit. Aunt Mickey and Mom too eventually shuffled off this mortal coil. Only one brother is left and he is a bit of a stranger. This is seemingly impossible in all the comings and goings. The wives of the brothers have had to reinvent their future. Each has done this in their own way. They are very dear to me and for them I am not comfortable with their loneliness when it emerges.
Not seeing any of them as often made us anxious that we might not get more chances. So retirement screamed for a road trip. Phone calls were becoming too infrequent and the annual Rienzo reunion was not really happening like before. We needed to go to Long Island to make this happen. Cousin Angela hosted us and arranged for her sisters, the oldest cousins and the aunts to come together at Aunt Ginny’s nursing home. We looked like a tour group as we eventually found the reserved lounge for our pizza party.
Aunt Fran could still pull off an entrance even in her eighties. Aunt Rose, the oldest of all of us, was bright eyed and cheery. The room buzzed for hours and we combined and recombined in an anecdotal waltz of relative activity. Some of it to be used later for gossip, depending on who was configured. Some of it to reach out and renew emotional bonds whose resilience was beyond question and to be marveled. Some of it to create hints at what each was doing since we didn’t really know all that our closeness assumed.
Later, the cousins retreated to Phil and Angela per mangiare (to eat!).
There is something very wonderful and very Italian about everyone having
dinner together. You get to vent, indulge epicurean urges, entertain and
sublimate at some point during the experience. A friend of ours is selling
small pillows with quotes on them. The one I had chosen was from Virginia
Woolf: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined
well." So true.
Not enough can be said about how Von D’Lucci has been informed by Rienzo. Food, family and friends are life’s 401k. This becomes more meaningful and delusional as the current economy evaporates around us. One can only hope that the food part stays intact along with our ability to digest it.
A personal highlight of our visit to Phil and Angela was a commiseration about education and retirement. The three of us have evolved differently. Phil and Angela each have over thirty years of elementary teaching experience. Phil is currently reinventing himself as a math tutor for slow learners and is full of juice. Angela feels the years and wishes she liked the kids more. Neither are retired but Angela could probably indulge a New York minute to do so. I am retired … as we all know.
Sooo…. this all led to some heartfelt discussion about retirement and education. My early struggle with ‘calling it quits’ has been misgivings that have included the fact that I do not deserve to be successfully retired especially since I did not change the world as originally advertised. Whether based in evidence or not this uneasiness is associated with a severe loss in momentum. Similar to a performer (inappropriately I think of Dirk Diggler in the mirror) there is an element of gearing up and being a proponent of passion, authority and largesse. A huge internal flywheel gets ‘practiced’. Retirement initially releases the clutch and after that I am not sure of the physics.
So in a ‘bread and butter’ email to Phil and Angela after our visit, I closed with:
“…I hope, Angela, that you find some joy in teaching. I struggled with it the last two years. However you decide to handle it I hope you feel that you have invested in many a child's future and that there is a nobility to the pursuit of being an educator.”
Perhaps I was trying to speak to myself at the same time. But let’s take that nobility testament on a shakedown strut.
After thirty five years in education I am totally convinced that the Pubertyometer needs invention. It would replace any metal detector currently screening for weapons at your local schoolhouse. Any onslaught of puberty would produce a loud ‘Ding!’. That student would then be removed from class and put to work. The work could be to ride shotgun on the local oil delivery truck. All billing slips would be handled by our young budding adult and added up at the end of the day, correctly by the way. Or they could show up at a local nursing association for myriad possible assignments. Any and all adults willing to employ these tyros would be eligible for some kind of tax benefit.
The kids themselves would have to report to some educational location a couple of times of week to report orally and literally as to their occupational endeavors. Parents would charge some form of room and board no matter how nominal. This would balance privilege and loss of critical adolescent items both virtual and material.
During their return to the educational location they would, of course, have to pass through the Pubertyometer. Another kind of ‘Ding!’ would signal closing phases of puberty. The young things could then decide if they would like to continue working at whatever trade they have frequented or whether they would suffer returning to Academia for full time pursuit.
In fact, while they were in school, their mission would be to inventory their community for BTUs, kilowatt hours and gallons of water. They should know what their house, community and region require for energy units and the sooner the better. This would be real data that would be curriculimated and then baked at 350.
This solution made for great ‘hangin’ around the kitchen in the mornin’’ conversation with my oldest friend (Angela). We have known each other all our lives.
So let the Von D’Lucci apostrophe ring and the echoes resonate with Rienzo.
During retirement there is a crucial responsibility concerning free time. If you start watching movies that end with Hollywood’s optimistic crescendo of affirming life and love, you may need to affix a veil of Kleenex so as to keep your hands free to change the channel for the next one. Then there are these thoughts…
So which diminishes first? Depth? Breadth? Height? If only Elizabeth Barrett Browning were still with us to give us a clue. There must be some prescription for the kaleidoscope eyes needed to view our partner in a splendiferous eternal fashion that soporifically deludes while preserving harmony and longevity.
Maybe it is true that no one or no thing is perfect and that the blindness of love evolves into an efficient myopia. You know, sort of a cross between Pollyanna and Mr. Magoo. Maybe the truth and beauty of love are a factoid not to be confused with the constancy of 186,000 miles per second. After all we know the speed of light works relative to any speed. How can love compete with that? Its measurement is an oxymoron when penned by Byron or Keats and statistically betrayed by divorce rates.
So perhaps you will have to forgive my eternally nascent adolescent attitude that I aspire to the grail of Cinderella and Quasimodo (wrap your head around that!). Living happily ever after is not a goal. It is, at worst, a delusional condition but at best it is how we serendipitously are. For cripe’s sake, somebody’s gotta live happily after, might as well be me!
