"I was born in a town where the rivers run free
On a January night when the cold winds freeze..."
OK, I was born forty-five years ago, in a town where only one river runs free, but it is the mighty Hudson and that oughtta count for two as far as I'm concerned, and it wasn't January and cold winds freezing but late May, my mother says the afternoon turned warm and humid and a thunderstorm rolled in sometime in my first hour, which apparently began at six in the p.m.
Ascension Sunday, she sometimes points out, with her own curious mix of sadness and hope; yes, she still holds out some hope that I'll return to the flock one of these days.
Ascension Sunday, who woulda thought you'd grow up to become a pagan, my dad will sometime jab.
I wouldn't describe myself as pagan; gnostic might come as close to my thoughts on the matter, or should I say, matter, but anyway, I don't go to Mass on Sunday so to them, well, gnostic, pagan, whatever, it doesn't really matter. I'm what polite people in these parts used to refer to as fallen. But my folks love me to death and I them, so what's the difference, I figure. Fingers crossed, we'll see each other and have a good time over there on the other side, and if not, well, none of us will ever know the difference.
I got an Irish name and an injury
blessing and a curse cast down on me
My middle name is definitely Irish, which is appropriate, because none of us ever really has a good use for our middle names; only the middle initial, if anything, ever sees the light of day. And while it turns out I am definitely descended in part from Irish immigrants, I never cared to contemplate or even admit this fact until I had moved well into my twenties.
None of my names look very Italian on paper, but believe it, you take one look at my face and you'll say, yeah, that guy has nothing but Italian in his veins.
We never really even bothered learning much about the history of my father's family, growing up. I remember one time on Saint Patrick's Day, me, my folks, and my three siblings were driving around aimlessly in our Dodge Coronet, as we were wont to do, as we didn't even have a television back then and driving around aimlessly provided us with a source of cheap entertainment, and anyway, my dad had the nerve to turn on some A.M. (that's about all you got in a family sedan in these parts in the 1970's) station playing some sort of Irish music in honor of the holiday. He sang along to some crappy-sounding tune featuring accordions, which was bad enough, but then he made some joke about my mother making him corned beef and cabbage for dinner. She looked at him, and well, if looks could kill, I'd be going up to his gravestone for Father's Day next month.
She shot him that look and reached over and jabbed at the radio power button.
"Turn that shit off," she snorted.
He didn't put it back on.
So yeah, I always told people I was Italian.
My mother's parents were both, as they used to say in this town where the Hudson runs free, "straight off the boat."
Her father died when she was three, in the very house where I am writing this diatribe, in an unfortunate precursor to future tragedies that would befall as-yet unborn residents of this seemingly cursed and humble abode, including but not limited to myself and my children, but his wife, my Nana, lives on to this day, a hundred and one years old, and she told us all about life here as the Italians lived it, under the thumb of the Irish, who apparently ruled the place with an iron fist. As she told it, anyway.
She told us about looking for an apartment to live in after she got married, at the ripe old age of seventeen, about approaching houses with vacancy notices in the window with my grandfather, only to have the doors slammed in their faces once "those Irish bastards" took one look at them, before they could even say a word.
No, the fact that my father had several branches of his family tree filled with folks who had also come over on boats, from the Emerald Isle, was not discussed around our family's dinner table. Nana held court most nights, and the only time our Irish lineage got discussed came after one of us had royally fucked up, in which case we were informed that we had behaved like the Irish side of the family. When we did well, she let us know we'd done my grandfather's side proud. And if we did something exceptionally well, she'd beam and tell us we were Micheles, which of course was her maiden name. When I got serious about history and politics and international news in the early 1980's, I was truly shocked to discover that the Irish had been shit upon for most of the preceding fifteen, sixteen centuries, at least. I'd been led to believe that they'd reigned over heaven and earth since the beginning of time or thereabouts.
"It was a blood-red sky on the morning tide
Was a cold wind blowin' when I left that night
And the warning bells rang alright, alright
shoulda stayed home with you that night..."
I felt like I let her down, I suppose. Like there was something I woulda coulda shoulda done to stop it all. That was one of the worst parts of it. Well, it was all worst parts. It was all bad. But I felt like the warning bells had been ringing alright, alright, for awhile. I had a feeling something was wrong for a good half a year, maybe more. This feeling of dis-ease. I actually thought there was something wrong with me, but what the hell, I been a fucking hypochondriac since I was about twelve, so I blew it off. I heard something like warning bells, thought there was something wrong, though, or should I say, I knew. It's always easier to say you knew in retrospect, though, isn't it? I think now that I knew then, but what's to say it was unrelated, just the normal anxiety of modern life. These are crazy times we're living in, after all. Crazy, and getting crazier by the day, with no end in sight.
I got obsessed with things like the impending real estate crash, I mean, I could read, and I did, as often as possible, and basic literacy and a willingness to entertain even modestly uncomfortable notions made the math on that one pretty glaringly obvious. I got obsessed with peak oil, and the math on that one is glaringly obvious, too, but it hasn't played out yet, though it will, and sooner rather than later, I figure.
I used to come home from work some days and talk about and she'd laugh. She didn't dispute the math or anything else, but she used to say, well, dear, you can drive yourself crazy worrying about this stuff that might happen and then you could wind up getting hit by a bus tomorrow.
Turned out she was the one who got hit by the bus, proverbially, and that was some math that definitely did not add up. She'd had this weird thing where her left ear always felt plugged up, but it didn't seem like a big deal. One night in the kitchen while I chopped veggies I was talking to her and I realized she couldn't hear a word I was saying because she was standing to my right.
Why don't you get that checked out, I asked.
Yeah, yeah, she said. Maybe I got a brain tumor.
A few months went by. We kept looking at houses to buy, we'd sold one and were ready to move up to something even bigger, better, newer and improved, the 'Murrican Way. I kept hemming and hawing, pulling away from deals at the last minute. I had that feeling the world was ending, after all. Or something. She got frustrated with me. Eventually, around Labor Day '07, she went to the doctor. Turned out she did have a brain tumor. Benign, ironically enough, but the surgery to remove it turned into a debacle of Biblical proportions. She was gone by that Thanksgiving. I used to spend a lot of time wondering what might have happened had I pushed her to go to the doctor sooner. I'd heard the warning bells, I just never figured out what song they were ringing out, but that's the way the universe crumbles. It has its way with us. It had its way in this house, anyway.
"Things got bad and things got worse
half like blessing, half like curse..."
I wasn't seeing too much of the blessing thing for awhile there. Well, actually I was maybe; I figured I had used up way more of my allotment of blessing, and now the universe was trying to even the score a little. I mean, when you consider the way almost every human being since Lucy has lived, and compared that to the way I had lived, well, it's just ridiculous. I had lived a life of nothing but blessings, and all of them utterly undeserved. I had a little ass-kicking coming, right? But what about the kids? The youngest one was fifteen months old when his mother died. To hell with me, but that just didn't seem right. But it happens. I set about trying to make things right for him, for all of them, though it wasn't easy and I stumbled plenty along the way.
It's a red sky night and I'm doing alright
It's a red sky night and I'm doing just fine...
Last night my wife and I got back from a week in the Florida Keys. We got married on May 6th, so this was a little delayed honeymoon. My parents watched the kids for a week. Talk about blessings. I didn't ask; my mother offered, back when we got engaged, and I took her up on it. My wife wanted to go someplace warm; she's not as amenable to the lower temps as I, and we'd had an especially brutal winter here in upstate New York. Cold winds freezing, indeed. The Hudson turned into a rock of ice.
We had a lovely time in Florida. The idea of getting away from work and home life for an entire week seemed a luxury almost beyond comprehension when our plane started down the runway at LaGuardia a week and change ago, Miami-bound, but we got the hang of it pretty quickly. We're happy together. Madly in love. Another blessing, both of us. Her road here may have been different than mine but it was long and winding and filled with a whole lotta heartache. After what each of us has lived through, we feel like we're getting away with murder. Sometimes it seems like too many of the poets say there's nothing like young love, but let me tell you, it tastes even sweeter in middle age after you've been knocked around in ways you couldn't even have dreamed of when you were staring off at an unrequited crush in junior chemistry lab.
But anyway, as lovely a time as we had last week, as we drove home, heading north on the Taconic Parkway in the sunset last night, we took stock of the lush, green hills surrounding us.
"It really is beautiful around here, isn't it?" she said. "There's really nothing like it."
No, there isn't. I took stock of my blessings. We'd had a lovely time, as I said; it's a week I'll always treasure and remember with fondness beyond words.
But I missed my kids. My family. My friends. My home. I'm a lucky guy.
And now it's way too late. The night's not red, but black. The morning might dawn red, though.
Either way, I plan to be here to see it.