From Notes To Poetry: My Mom’s Writing

Imperative verbs.

That’s what I remember most about my mother’s writing – at least from my years growing up. Before and after school, her kitchen-table notes delivered instructions:

> Don’t forget your lunch

> Working late tonight – make dinner for James

> The dog got into the trash outside – please clean up the mess!

When I was in college and living in Ireland, my mother’s writing was more expansive, but still prosaic. Her letters brought news of family gatherings, Rhode Island weather, how business was going at her clothing store on Federal Hill… The notes were comforting to me, but I never sensed that my mom liked to write. Her handwriting appeared rushed. Between the lines, she seemed to be saying, Oh, if we could just sit and talk, that would be better.

And then, at age 71, my mom asked me to read something she was working on. “I guess it’s a poem,” she said. “A memory, really.”

William Zinsser calls memoir “a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition.” The Blanket is my mom’s word snapshot of her life circa 1965, when our family lived in a double-decker on River Avenue in Providence, downstairs from her dying mother.

My mom wasn’t great at spelling. She worried that she had never mastered verb tenses and punctuation and syntax. I told her that was the easy stuff – we’d figure it out, no problem. “Lots of people know how to write,” I said. “But not everyone has something to say. That’s what’s hard.”

Though clearly not for her.

*     *     *

The Blanket

I have been sleeping under my

mother’s deathbed blanket

for thirty-six years.

 

It is white with delicate pink flowers

that grow from bottom to top

along the fold that drops

over the edge of the bed.

 

It was my blanket, a gift from Nana.

Guests, calling to visit, led me to lay

its newness on my mother’s sickbed.

 

The newness would certainly warn

the transporter being sent to take

my mother away

that she wasn’t ready yet!

 

Without her, who was to discover

the shoe-box cradle made

by a pre-school wizard?

 

Whose eyes would watch from the

second-floor window as the four-year-old

football hero ran for the touchdown pass?

 

Where would I find the approval she

gave me when, in the midst of my own

chaos, I pressed my new baby

into her arms?

 

The blanket, now thinning, with flowers

faded and ribbon missing, still covers

me as I journey into sleep each night.

 

I think I will lie beneath it until

the day I die.

 

– Norma Pantalone Walsh

March 22, 1933 – May 5, 2013

 

What My Parents Didn’t Know Didn’t Hurt Them

But what about my brother and me?

With summer nearing, there was work to be done at the gray beach house – grass to mow, hedges to trim, walls to paint. My parents gave my older brother Rob and me our chores one bright Saturday morning – clipping the edges of the lawn and sweeping the porch. But tedium soon gave way to goofing around – Rob was eight years old and I was five – and we were relieved of our duties.

“Go play – just don’t get into any trouble!”

The gray house was bounded out back by a stone wall. Woods stood beyond. “C’mon!” my brother said. The two of us climbed over the wall and Rob beelined for the first flat rock. When he flipped it over, two snakes squiggled away. Rob grabbed one right behind its head and thrust it in my face. “Aren’t they cool?” he said.

Bullfrogs croaked from a nearby swamp. Rob tiptoed toward the muck, motioning me to stay put. He squatted at the water’s edge, frog-like and frozen. Then, with a start and a splash, he snared his prey, mid-leap. The capture was temporary. Rob loved anything with four legs or wings or fins or fur or, in this case, webbed feet. He returned the frog to the edge of the swamp.

We found some old boards and plywood half-buried in leaves and dirt – perfect for building a tree fort, my brother said. I ran to the shed to get a hammer and some nails. When I returned, we hoisted the boards and plywood twelve or so feet up a tree and laid them across two forking limbs. Rob started hammering, and soon we needed more nails. I climbed down the tree to run back to the shed, but I didn’t get very far. Just as Rob’s shout registered in my brain – “WATCH OUT!” – the plummeting hammer conked me on the head – “OW!OW!OW!” – and I was belly to the dirt like one of those snakes my brother loved.

Now Rob was on the ground and in my ear: “DON’TCRYDON’TCRY DON’TCRY! Mom and Dad will kill us!” I fought back tears and rubbed my head – no blood, just an emerging egg.

Rob grabbed the hammer and climbed back up the tree as I blinked to my senses. His pounding echoed in the morning air – until I heard wood cracking and branches snapping. I looked up. The plywood had given way and Rob was backwards-somersaulting to the ground.

WHOOMMPPP! Rob lay on his back in a clump. Now it was me in his ear: “DON’TCRYDON’TCRYDON’TCRY! Mom and Dad will kill us!”

It was a close call – Rob had missed a big jagged rock by a few inches. When he got his breath back, we decided to leave the woods, before we could inflict further harm on ourselves.

My mom saw us trudging back to the gray house. “What have you guys been up to?”

“Nothing,” Rob said.

It wasn’t exactly a lie; more like an omission of details… OK, call it passive lying, the kind practiced by generations of kids before us, and certain to be practiced by generations to come. If Mom and Dad ever knew…

I felt the bump hidden beneath my hair. Rob rubbed his ribs. As our mom turned away, we shared a conspiratorial smile.

What I Learned When I Went Back To College

It was Accepted Students Day at the University of Miami. My daughter Juliana and I had been on the campus for all of fifteen minutes, but the decision was a no-brainer: yes, I would enroll for the upcoming fall semester.

Earth to John… (Crackle)… Earth to John…

Oh, right. Julie had been invited to become a Miami Hurricane, not me. Forgive my flight of fancy. But do you blame me? The Miami campus is an oasis, especially for sun-deprived Rhode Islanders on the heels of a long winter. Fountains splash, palm trees sway, skateboarders glide by. There’s an Olympic-size pool near the main green – an outdoor pool with a towering diving platform.

And that’s just the beginning of the seduction. Zip cars are available to U Miami students for quick jaunts off campus. The fitness center is like a Gold’s Gym on steroids. The football team plays at Sun Life Stadium, which is also home to the Miami Dolphins; students get free tickets and are shuttled to and from games in coach buses. Dining services in no way resemble the Ratty of my college days. Multiple food options beckon: Asian? Vegan? An omelette cooked to order, perhaps? Count me in, director of enrollment. I’m hungry for more than knowledge.

The student guide for our campus tour was a neuroscience major. Pleasant and peppy, she covered all the bases – departmental buildings, dorm security, internship opportunities, Greek life, how kids do their laundry. And then she sprinkled in this gem: during finals week, the president of the college strings hammocks from the palm trees on campus for supine cramming. Beats the library!

Speaking of the president, she is none other than Donna Shalala, former Secretary of Health and Human Services for the Clinton administration. In her welcome remarks at the BankUnited Center, President Shalala called attention to a student wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt in a slide show photo. “He’s dressed for winter,” she noted. Ah, playing the weather card. That’s smart. Not going to see that when we visit Syracuse.

President Shalala had a couple more cards to play: a slide of her former boss Bill, sitting in on a class, and photos of candidates Barack and Mitt during campus visits last year. Throughout the arena, parents of political science majors wrote their deposit checks, breathlessly.

You don’t need an MBA to know that higher education is a high-stakes business; just look at a tuition bill. Schools cast fancy brochures into our mailboxes, luring us with rankings from Peterson’s and The Princeton Review; amenities that rival a luxury resort; sparkling testimonials from current students; lists of notable alumni. And we get hooked. Our teens submit numerous applications and wear acceptances like badges. We travel to campuses in search of the “right” school.

But choosing is more art than science – there is no single right answer. While a college may mold our kids, it won’t make them. That is in their own hands, no matter where they go.

Thank You 5,000 Times Over

On April 2, my blog reached 5,000 views. I’ve published 59 posts since November 2011. The first one discussed billboard copy; my most recent post recounts how I lost a wheelchair one weekend. To date, the three most popular posts are Why We Love Oxymorons, In Praise Of The Oxford Comma, and On Fences And Letting Go.

Readers have come from all over the world. The largest contingents hail from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Lone readers have clicked in from Belize, Estonia, Papua New Guinea, and Zimbabwe.

What started as a forum about writing, grammar, and words has evolved into something more personal. On a good day, I hope the blog comes close to William Zinsser’s description of memoir: “a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition.”

The only thing better than writing the pieces is having you read them. Thanks.

What I Forgot On A Weekend To Remember

We needed a wheelchair if my mother was going to make it to the show. My daughter Juliana was performing in the East Greenwich High School production of Fiddler On The Roof, cast as Golde. My mom knew the role better than any of us and said, with a grandmother’s certainty, that Julie was perfect for the part.

My mom was less sure of whether she’d be able to attend. Two weeks before the play, a virus had slowed her down – an unwelcome add-on to the macular degeneration and COPD that she normally deals with. But when I called her on the Wednesday before Julie’s Saturday matinee, her voice was strong and her spirits high. She was coming to the play.

So we needed a wheelchair. There was no way my mom could make the trek from the drop-off circle at the high school to the auditorium. And forget about any stairs. My brother Rob mentioned that there was a wheelchair in the coat alcove at St. Luke’s, our church. Sure enough, there was and when I called the office, they said we could borrow it. I told my mom the good news – we were all set for Saturday. Julie was thrilled. Not only were her grandparents from Connecticut coming in for the show; now Nonnie would be there, too.

On Saturday, I went over to St. Luke’s to retrieve the chair. But when I looked in the coat alcove, it wasn’t there. I checked the other coat closet. Nothing. I looked in the office, the entrance foyer, the back of the church, the auditorium – no luck. I needed to pick up my mom in half an hour.

And then an angel appeared: Ken MacDonald was working with the youth group, making pizzas in the dining room as part of a mission trip fundraiser. Turns out he had a wheelchair at home that his father-in-law had used for years. He’d be right back with it. Thank God! Thank Ken! When he returned with the chair, I folded it up and slid it into the trunk of my car.

The show was outstanding and, thanks to the wheelchair, my mom was right there in the front row to take it all in. When Julie sang “Do You Love Me?” in the second act, my mom fished a tissue out of her bag. I felt my eyes sting, too.

After the show, I drove my car around to the high school entrance and ran inside to get my mom. I wheeled her out to the car, helped her get in, jumped in myself, and sped away.

*        *        *

Growing up, my best friend’s phone number was 331-5495…

My son Peter was born at 8:39 p.m. on the first day of spring in 1991…

In 1973, my Kennedy Rec basketball team beat CLCF in the quarterfinals of the 5^th Annual Serran Basketball Tournament in Providence by a score of 30-26…

Such minutia fills my brain, available for immediate retrieval: the birth dates of cousins, the song sequences of pop albums, the amount I paid monthly for my student loans ($67.93)….

I remember that Walt Frazier scored 36 points in the Knicks’ 113-99 victory over the Lakers in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals.

And then I hear my brother: “You know the middle names of kids we grew up with, but you can’t remember where you left your gloves or keys.”

*      *     *

Or the wheelchair, for that matter.

I returned to the high school on Saturday night to see the final performance of the play. As I was leaving, I saw a wheelchair at the curb by the road. Funny, I thought – that looks just like the chair I borrowed from Ken. What a coincidence.

The following day, I stopped by my office on Main Street to grab two boxes filled with files. I threw them in my trunk and brought them home. An hour later, my son Evan needed a ride to the train station to head back to Boston. No problem, I said. Just toss your bags in the trunk. At the station, I popped the trunk hood and helped him get the bags out.

As I drove back home down Route 95, I thought of the wheelchair and how I needed to return it to Ken. And then it occurred to me: how did the boxes fit in the trunk with the wheelchair in there? How did Evan’s bags fit? Oh, no – where the hell was the wheelchair?

I thought again of that forlorn wheelchair at the curb outside the high school the night before – the one that looked exactly like the one I had borrowed from Ken. I hit the accelerator.

*        *        *

I have raced down Avenger Drive to get to teacher conferences and talent shows and basketball games…

I have raced down Avenger Drive to tell a friend his in-laws’ house was flooded…

And now the wheelchair had me racing down Avenger Drive again. Would it still be there? No way. John, you’re such an idiot…

But when I barreled over the speed bump, I saw the chair: an orphan on the grass between the road and the parking lot, a good seventy-five yards from where I had left it. I wished the chair could speak so I could learn of its travels in the last twenty-four hours. I imagined teenagers popping wheelies or hurtling down Avenger Drive…

As I folded the wheelchair and humped it back into my trunk, I was thankful – for the love and presence of grandparents, for the sweetness of young voices, for the wheelchair itself, found and lost and found again.

It was a weekend I’ll never forget.

With renewed thanks to Ken and Susan MacDonald.

Reflections On An 80th Birthday

We grew up on River Avenue, with the sounds of the city all around us: the hum of traffic, the wail of sirens, dogs barking, kids yelling…

And when we did something particularly noteworthy – say, like smoking Papa’s pipe and throwing the matches behind his chair… or smashing windows with line drives and bad jump shots… or chucking acorns at oncoming traffic – we heard something else:

– Do you have rocks in your head?

– What are you, numb?

– If you ever do that again, I’ll brain you!

– If you ever do that again, I’ll break every bone in your body!

But just as often, probably more, we heard you say:

– Look after your brother.

Four words to live by. We grew up knowing that our family was our rock.

So today, we celebrate your birthday and the family you started, now three generations strong. Your fingerprints are on us all.

Happy birthday, Mom.

Finding Meaning In Macaroni

When I was growing up, I loved macaroni and hated spaghetti. But it’s all pasta, right? Not to me – not back then. The word pasta wasn’t even part of my vocabulary. At our table, it was either macaroni or spaghetti.

Macaroni meant tubes or shells or twisting ribbons that, coated lightly with my mother’s gravy, made up the first course of Sunday dinner or Wednesday supper. I can hear my mom’s voice across the decades: “Have some more ‘ronis.”

Rhode Island-native Nancy Verde Barr’s first cookbook was titled We Called It Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking. That made sense to me. My grandparents emigrated from southern Italy. They called it macaroni, too.

So did Thomas Jefferson. He was introduced to pasta in Paris in the 1780s and even had a “maccaroni machine” shipped to Monticello. But according to James and Kay Salter, in their book Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days, pasta’s real introduction in America “came with the great Italian immigration wave in the late 1800s, when it was known as macaroni, still the word Italian-Americans use for pasta.”

With its many shapes and sizes, macaroni serves up a feast of melodic words and colorful etymologies:

> Farfalle, which means butterfly, though in our house, we call this shape bow ties

> Orecchiette, which means little ears; we call them pope’s hats because they resemble the pontiff’s zucchetto

> Penne means quill pen, as the pasta is cut on the diagonal at both ends

> Mostaccioli translates as little mustaches; it is the staple macaroni in our house today

> Cavatappi means corkscrews; this pasta is a twirling tube

> Rigatoni means large lined ones; a favorite of mine growing up

With age, my aversion to spaghetti – little strings – has abated. I have even come to love spaghetti’s thinner (in the U.S.) cousin: vermicelli. It means little worms.

Buon appetito!

An Ending I Didn’t Have To Change

I’m a writer, so I spend most of my time rewriting. In his great book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser says that “very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.” How true.

Paul Simon writes great pop tunes. On his last album, there’s a song called Rewrite. The title caught my eye, and the melody pulled me in to the lyric. That’s where I discovered the song’s wisdom. Sometimes, we’d like to rewrite our past, just as we rewrite sentences.

One night after listening to a Celtics game, my father told my older brother and me that he and my mother were separating; the following morning, he would be leaving. I was nine years old. The news filled me with dread. I loved to spend time with my dad, listening to games and talking about music or school. What would happen to us now?

There was a rocking chair in our living room. When no one else was in the house, I rocked in the chair and rewrote my parents’ separation. Things were better in the rewrite.

The Vietnam vet in Paul Simon’s song takes refuge in the same escape. In the final verse, the vet plans to eliminate the pages about the father who has to leave his family, though “he really meant no harm…”

         Gonna substitute a car chase

         And a race across the rooftops

         When the father saves the children

         And he holds them in his arms

*          *          *

Two months after moving out, my father is driving me home. It’s a Saturday – that’s when we see each other now. Gray clouds scud across the sky. We stop at Giro’s in Peace Dale for a quick bite. My father has a couple of beers, but no whiskey. That’s good.

It’s pouring rain when we leave. On Route 95, gusts of wind slam our car, pushing us out of our lane. My father turns off the radio. The wipers beat like frantic metronomes, but they are no match for the deluge. Blurred brake lights report an accident up ahead. Cars pull over, flashers flickering. “I’m going to get off the highway,” my father says. We splash down the next exit ramp.

We’re in Warwick. I’m not familiar with the area, but my dad is; he lives there now. Rain still pounds our car as we creep along, but my dad is in control. I see a sign for Route 1. My father lights a cigarette. “Don’t worry, Big John,” he says. He puts the radio back on and asks me about school.

It’s still raining when we get to my house in Providence. I run up the driveway and dash through the back door. As my father pulls away, I head for the rocking chair. I’m relieved, and not simply because I’m out of the storm. My dad got us home. He is happy, and so am I.

No rewrites today.

On Fences And Letting Go

Good fences make good neighbors. Those words from Mending Wall by Robert Frost came to me seventeen years ago when we had a fence put up around the perimeter of our backyard at 112 Peirce Street. But the fence was less about neighbors and more about children. We had two young boys, and a third child was on the way. We needed to make sure the kids didn’t wander down to Main Street when they went out back. Good fences make good barricades.

Putting up the fence wasn’t easy. Our lot sits on a hill and our backyard slopes precipitously. The two side runs of the fence had to be stepped down before connecting with the long run of sections across the back. But when it was done, the fence was a thing of beauty. It gathered the boys in a cedar embrace.

The fence marked time with its color, going from toddler blond to adolescent brown. Within its walls, the kids ran through sprinklers and built snow forts, played with our dog and tossed Wiffle balls. At the same time, squirrels gnawed at the posts and moss crept up the flat boards. Wisteria strangled the arbor, lifting its posts from the ground. In random places, the fence lurched from frost heaves below.

As the kids grew older, the backyard gave way to the front door. Out they bounded to music lessons, basketball games, play rehearsals, or to just hang with friends. The fence’s containment services were no longer needed.

The first break came in August 2011. As Hurricane Irene whipped through Rhode Island, two sections of the back run listed awkwardly, wooden sails in the storm. I rushed down to secure them by wrapping a rope around the post they shared and tethering it to a nearby tree trunk. No luck. Afraid they would hurtle onto the cars parked nearby, I laid the breakaway sections on the ground, weighing them down with cobblestones.

After the storm, the back run – minus the two fallen sections – wobbled from end to end. I called the guys who had done the original installation. When they told me the price to replace the run, I hired them for a fraction of the cost to simply take it away.

The two side runs remained… until last October and Hurricane Sandy. More sections fell, and those that didn’t were now more vulnerable – even storms without names posed a threat.

It’s early Saturday morning. Sipping coffee, I look out my kitchen window and notice a new gap in the fence – another section breaking ranks. I grab my drill and head outside. I pull the straying section back in line with its post-mate; a fifty-cent brace from Benny’s will reunite them. But when I lean into my churning drill, I push the screw right through the rotted wood. Grabbing nothing, it falls to the ground and the fence resumes its tilting.

As I search for the screw in the snow-covered leaves, I think of my children. Peter is in Los Angeles, chasing big music dreams. Evan is on a train to New York, trying to kick-start a business career. Juliana sleeps upstairs, perhaps having REM visions of a college far away from the backyard of her childhood. Soon she will leave, the last one.

Frost speaks to me once more, seventeen years after the fence first went up. It’s the same poem that I remember, but now a different line resonates: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.

I abandon my mending and go back inside.

The Wonder Of Italian Bread

Deb and I had known each other for two months when she asked me a serious question: “Do you really eat bread with every meal?”

The look of astonishment on my face hinted at the mix of cultures that our marriage would bring. “Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”

Deb was raised in Canton, Connecticut, up in the hills northwest of Hartford. Lots of pine trees and farms and country roads. The nearest Italian bakery was forty-five minutes away.

I grew up in Providence. There were bakeries everywhere, and Italian bread was a staple at our supper table. When I learned the Our Father at catechism, give us this day our daily bread made total sense to me.

On Sunday afternoons, with her gravy simmering on the stove, my mother would ask me to run up to La Salle Bakery to grab a loaf of bread. “And don’t eat it all on the way back,” she’d say. As I walked the eight blocks home with the fresh loaf tucked under my arm, Pavlov’s Theory was proven once more. Salivating, I’d tear off the end of the bread and bite into its crust.

Up on Federal Hill, where I worked at my grandfather’s baby clothes store, my aunts would send me to Scialo’s for bread. Driving home from the Hill, I’d sometimes stop at Amore’s on Valley Street if we needed a loaf. And if I didn’t get to a bakery in time – bread sold out! – I’d head to a neighborhood market where I might find a loaf of Crugnale’s (perfect crust).

After college, I lived in a tenement near Holy Ghost Church on Federal Hill, right next door to a bakery. Each morning, I’d awake to the smell of bread baking in the ovens. Heaven.

When Deb took her first job out of college, she worked in East Hartford – in a building that was right next door to a Wonder Bread factory. (You can’t make this stuff up.)

It’s Sunday afternoon. My gravy’s simmering on the stove, but I need macaroni. I run to Dave’s Marketplace. As I deliberate over which pasta shape to buy, my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s a text from Deb: Don’t forget the bread.

Amen.