A Moment in Time with Rubella

Recently, I told my mother how I had accidentally fallen asleep next to my son's crib waiting for him to fall asleep, and had a stiff neck in the morning as a result. Convinced that we are overindulging him, she replied, "The only time anyone ever slept next to my crib was when I had German measles! Grandpa slept on the floor next to my crib because I was so sick!"

I asked how old she was when this happened, and she said she was really young - obviously still in a crib - and that she thinks it's her earliest memory. 

As a parent, I'm not terribly concerned that she thinks we're Doing It Wrong (TM). As an historian, I am very interested in the historical moment that this memory represents, one that probably couldn't be repeated today.

It was probably around 1961, assuming my mother was around 2. A vaccine for rubella (German measles) wouldn't come out until 1969. My grandfather was not exactly a modern man, in the sense of doing much of the care-giving work of parenting. My first instinct was an "Awww . . ." at the thought of my tough-as-nails grandfather being so concerned about his sick toddler that he'd sleep on the floor. But then I remembered something about rubella; it's not typically very dangerous for the kids who have it; it's dangerous for pregnant women and their unborn babies. According to the CDC,

Rubella is a contagious disease caused by a virus. Most people who get rubella usually have a mild illness, with symptoms that can include a low-grade fever, sore throat, and a rash that starts on the face and spreads to the rest of the body. Rubella can cause a miscarriage or serious birth defects in an developing baby if a woman is infected while she is pregnant. 

Grandpa was sleeping on the floor because Grandma couldn't. She was likely either pregnant with my uncle, or was keeping away out of an abundance of caution in case she was pregnant. Perhaps limiting contact with women of child-bearing age was just a general recommendation for kids with German measles.

That was 1961.

This is 2016. Old-fashioned men like my grandfather are a vanishing breed. Rubella is a vanishing disease. Men sleeping on the floor next to their toddlers' crib provoke fewer "Awwws" and more "You're Doing It Wrongs." Even pregnant mothers don't have to worry about getting rubella from their sick kids, when both mother and child have been vaccinated against it.

The moment has passed.

Labeling Photographs: Memory and Mourning

Have you ever wondered why some of your inherited family photographs are impeccably labelled, and others are unfortunate blank canvases?

My maternal grandfather recently passed away, and I inherited a handful of photographs. Not the real old kind, just a few pictures from my parents' wedding through approximately my 8th grade graduation. Almost all were unlabeled, and the ones my grandmother had labeled were vague or incomplete. "Gail's wedding" or "July 16, 1997."

Luckily, I was able to identify the people and places in almost all of them, and could give at least an educated guess as to approximate dates. So when I got home from my mom's house the other night, I set right to labeling the pictures.

I found myself being more specific than usual, with places in particular. I realized that the impending sale of my grandparents' home, the home where my mother grew up and where my cousins and I spent so much of our childhood, was driving me. Scribbling the street address, over and over, on the backs of 4x6 prints, somehow made me feel like I was doing my part to keep the memory of Grandma and Grandpa's house alive. (I was there only days earlier. The race to "keep memories alive" can be premature or even irrational.)

But this influenced my labeling throughout the collection. I added street addresses to pictures taken in my current house, in my parents' house, anywhere I recognized. I was aiming for consistency, yes, but I was also imagining a future where we've moved out of the home we love and have only pictures to remember it by. A future where I've passed away and my children struggle to remember the address of the apartment in NYC where we spent the first years of our marriage. Or where my kids - who will only ever know the apartment my in-laws downsized to - can't picture them living in the big house in the suburbs where my husband spent his happy childhood. Will addresses on the back of photographs change any of that? Not by much. They can't bring back a grandfather, unsell a house, or give my son any real memories of the apartment where he spent the first 10 weeks of his life. But they can make me feel like I tried.

I wonder what my kids, my descendants, the strangers who find my albums in a thrift store will think when they see how well-labelled some - but not all - of my pictures are. I can't imagine that they will even begin to follow my thought processes.

Have you ever though about what motivated the people creating the records you use?

Family History through Song: Abbatte i manine

My grandfather, Frank Gatto, passed away on October 7, 2015. He was 88. My son was 17 months old. I'll be forever grateful that they had the chance to know each other.

Grandpa was a bit of a one-trick pony when it came to babies. He sang the same Italian clapping song, to every baby, every time he saw them.

These days, whenever my son sees a picture of his "Pop," he starts clapping his hands. I love that there's such a physical way for my not-quite-verbal toddler to tell us he remembers. (Of course, I had to run out of the wake in tears the first time he did it at the funeral home.)

As far as we could tell, the song was mostly nonsense. After spending 8 years studying Italian and a semester abroad, I could pick out a few words here or there, but couldn't make sense of the whole thing. Neither could any of my other relatives, no matter how much Italian they'd studied. (Grandpa was the last native speaker in our family, but spoke a Brooklyn-ized dialect.) Grandpa translated the lyrics as "Clap your hands/Daddy's coming home/He's going to bring you candy."

As best I could pick out, Grandpa's song went like this:

Abbate i manine
Cadame ne tata
Annuzhe a lica bette
A do e da li da!

Clearly, that translates to:

Clap your little hands
Something Something [papa?]
Something Something Something
Something Something Something

But in the past month, as we've spent a lot of time clapping hands in memory of Grandpa, I finally googled, and learned that there are apparently dozens of variations on this song sung in Italy. They typically mean pretty much what Grandpa claimed: "Clap your hands/Daddy's coming home/He's bringing candy/And [Baby's name] is going to eat it all!"

The last line, where you sub in the child's name, appeared consistently in the versions I found online but is missing from Grandpa's. This may explain why the last line of Grandpa's song sounds so particularly nonsensical.

The online version that I liked the best came from Yahoo Answers user Antony96, who says that he is from Bari (as is my family) and gives the lyrics to the song he knows as:

abbatte i manine
ka vène papé
annushe i bonbon
è tutte è tutte è tutte ( u nome d'a menénne) l'ò mangé!!

It's the closest version I've found to my grandfather's version. The second line starts with "ka," which isn't, to my knowledge, an Italian word, but which is what I always heard when Grandpa sang. Same goes for "annushe," a word I'm not familiar with but which my grandfather clearly sang. It is, somehow, incredibly validating to know that all these years, we were wrong when we thought Grandpa was making up or mangling the words.

A few of my cousins have talked about trying to learn how the song "really" goes, but I will proudly sing it the way I always knew it, and I will teach it to any future kids and grandkids I have that way, too.

Grandpa wasn't singing nonsense, he was singing dialect.

September 11, 2001

[A version of this post originally appeared on September 11, 2011.]

I've struggled with whether to blog about my memories of September 11, 2001, as suggested at Geneabloggers. It seems trite, somehow, a superficial way to treat the scariest, most vividly horrific day of my life. But I've been thinking about that day all weekend, and I want to write about it. So I'll write, and I think I may even hit "publish" when I'm done.

The night of September 11, 2001, and the afternoon of the next day, I wrote down my experiences, because I thought I'd want to remember them. I didn't realize at the time that I wouldn't be able to forget if I tried. I've never had to refer back to what I wrote when writing or telling someone how I experienced the day. The memories are too vivid, and too detailed. This will be long, I must warn you. I've tried to edit it before, and I can only revisit the memories in minute detail. They don't make any sense to me when I try to cover just the important points.

I was a sophomore in HS, in Chemistry class, when an announcement was made over the PA system. The assistant principal got on, and announced that the principal was going to make an announcement. Then the principal came on, and announced that two planes had been "purposefully" flown into the Twin Towers. My first reaction was a flash forward, to some time in the future, as I told my yet-unborn children how their grandfather had been killed the day the World Trade Center was bombed.

I specifically remember thinking "bombed," though I knew quite well that the announcement had not said that the towers had been bombed. But what word does the English language have for when you fly passenger planes into skyscrapers full of people? "Bombing" was how we conceived of terrorism at the time. It wasn't immediate that we were actually able to settle on using the word "attack" to describe what had happened that day. If you read other people's accounts of their memories, they are often full of terrified phone calls telling them to turn on the TV because "something happened in New York!" And so I thought "bombed," though I knew the word was inaccurate. But mostly, I just thought my dad was dead.

But only for a split second. Immediately thereafter, I went into what I suppose you would call "denial." It was simply inconceivable that my dad could be dead. I wouldn't be able to handle that. He just couldn't be. And so, I went about my day. "If anything's really wrong," I thought, "they'd tell me." (By "really wrong," I, in my adolescent self-centeredness, thought only of things that would affect my own life.) I had two close friends in that class who, I later found out, didn't know what at all to do with me. They knew my dad worked in the Twin Towers, but I was not at all acknowledging  the fact. I simply did my chem lab. I burned my finger on some hot glass. But I didn't talk about my dad. (My sister, a floor below me, I would later learn, was crying and leaving class repeatedly to call my mom. I, meanwhile, was acting as if everything would be okay, because, well, it just had to be.)

When my first of two periods of Chemistry was over, an unusually large number of people were called down to the office. I took comfort in the fact that Laura and I weren't among them. If anything were really wrong, they'd be calling us down to the office. All those kids who got called down, those must be the kids whose parents were injured or killed. Our dad must have been okay. It didn't occur to me that it might be hours, if not days, before some people were accounted for, and that there was no way that anyone had heard from or about my father  - or anyone else's - yet.

During our second period of Chemistry, there was another announcement: a plane had hit the Pentagon. And another: all after-school activities were cancelled. And then, after that period - we were called down to the office. I went to my locker first. I took the long way to get there. I just didn't want to hear what they might be about to tell me. I ran into a friend. She said she'd been looking for me, she wanted to talk to me. I - not at all realizing the scope of what was happening, not realizing that it must be first on everyone's mind, not just my own - thought she was going to tell me what the drama with her boyfriend at the football game Friday night had been about. Instead, she asked how I was. "I don't know," I answered. "I'm going to find out." How I was depended entirely on what they told me in the office  - and again, at this point, I assumed that "they" (the office staff? my mother? the  authorities?) would know whether Dad was okay.

Outside the office was a large crowd of students. One gave me a pinky-swear that my dad would be okay. I thought that was inane, but didn't say so. Another told me that my sister had been crying, really hard. I don't remember who that was, and I'm glad, because it made me think that Dad was dead and Laura had already been told. (She was probably just trying to let me know that my sister needed me.) Another told me to go talk to the woman wearing the red sweater. I went to talk to her. All she told me - this was supposed to be the big moment of truth - was that Virginia Ward was coming to pick me up. "I don't know who that is." But that was the name she had. A friend suggested that it might be Virginia R*****. She was the only Virginia we knew. Of course it was her. But I wasn't thinking clearly.

She came to pick us up, and then we had to go get my youngest sister at elementary school. Virginia asked me to come inside with her, since I was the oldest. In the front hall - there was a desk set up, anticipating the high demand for pulling kids out of school - a teacher told us that the kids hadn't been told yet. Virginia told me that I'd have to tell Anna, because she should hear it from family. I was lost. I felt like just a kid myself. I didn't know what was going on. How could this be my job?

As Anna left her classroom, she put her chair on her desk, just like everyone always had to do in elementary school. I seemed like such a normal, everyday, childhood movement. I couldn't believe it could coexist with what I was about to tell her. As we walked down the hall, she asked "Why are we getting picked up?" and I had to tell her. "A plane hit Daddy's office building." She reached out and held my hand. And then Virginia added, reassuringly, "But the plane hit very high up, and your Daddy's office was very low down, so I'm sure he'll be okay," or something to that effect. I only remember the beginning of the sentence, because it was new information to me. I hadn't known where the plane had hit, or remembered what floor Dad's office was on, and I hadn't thought to ask.

When we got to the house, there were lots of cars outside, and all I could think of was the scene in Cheaper by the Dozen where (spoiler alert) the kids come home after school, and they know something's wrong because of all the cars lined up outside the house, and it turns out that their father has died of a heart attack. If there are lots of cars outside, then Dad must be dead!

We went inside, where a number of my aunts and one uncle were, with my mom. Everyone was crying, and everyone hugged us. I saw Mom crying; it was to be expected. I saw several of her sisters crying; to be expected. But then I saw my dad's sister's crying face, and I knew he was dead. And then someone said something along the lines of "there's nothing we can do but wait," and I realized for the first time that no one knew anything yet. They were all just as clueless as I was. We were all waiting for news.

I remember seeing a tower fall for the first time as I walked into the TV room to greet my uncle, but I had no conscious awareness of what I was seeing. My mom went upstairs, and Virginia came over and whispered to me that maybe I should go up and check on her. This seemed uncharacteristic of me (you'll recall that I've already mentioned my adolescent self-centeredness), but I did it anyway. Mom said she just wanted to shower. I came back down. Virginia left, but soon returned with several pizzas and a few bottles of soda before leaving us to wait and watch with family. No one was hungry.

Most of my detailed recollection ends here. All the waiting was kind of a blur. I don't really know what we did with ourselves, and what I do remember, I don't remember in order. My aunt arrived, bringing with her my cousin Grace, who was not quite 2 at the time. She was, for me, literally a saving Grace. She prattled happily in baby talk, and let us occupy ourselves with something other than the news and the worry. We colored. She was just learning her colors, and that day, everything was "lello." I thought that was ironic. Or symbolic. Something. I noticed, as we stood around coloring, the outfit I was wearing - new clothes, because it was the beginning of the school year. I had on a green three-quarter sleeve shirt, with light blue jeans and a black belt. I made a mental note not to ever wear that exact outfit again - whether out of respect or superstition, I'm not quite sure, but I know I never did it.

At one point, Grace and I were alone in the play room, coloring. The phone rang. There was a bit of a commotion. I couldn't tell whether it was a good commotion or a bad commotion, and I couldn't make out anyone's words. I was terrified. For a minute, I couldn't bring myself to go into the other room. I wanted to stay where I was, pretend I hadn't heard anything, and not have to hear whatever they had learned. I forced myself to pick Grace up and go into the living room, where my mom said, "That was Lester's wife Leann. Dad and Lester are walking uptown together."

We didn't have any details - Dad and all of his friends had been trying to get in touch with their wives, but the cell phone service was overcome by demand, and most of them couldn't get through. When Lester finally reached his wife, I guess, she was given a list of numbers to call to let everyone's family know that they were alive. My family is probably not the only one that thinks fondly and gratefully of Leann, though most of us have never met her. On such a terrible day, she was the one tasked with the telling of good news, and we who received that good news have never forgotten her.

It occurs to me now that I had spent the entire day assuming any news would be bad news. It's not a hard assumption to make, when planes are crashing and buildings are falling. It's only in retrospect that I'm able to see that on that day, no news was almost always worse. For my family, and I'm sure for many others, the phone ringing was heart-stopping, but it brought good news. It was when the phone didn't ring, undoubtedly, that the worst news slowly dawned.

The rest of our afternoon became about logistics. Locating Dad, and other relatives at work in the city, and trying to get them home. No one could drive into the city, Dad's car was stuck in a parking garage near Ground Zero (though we had yet to hear the phrase) and mass transit was suspended. Who could get the closest to a bridge or tunnel, to pick them up as soon as they got onto the New Jersey side? How could we organize it? We got one phone call from Dad, from a restaurant he had stopped at, but after that he was difficult to reach.

We played soccer on the front lawn at one point. We might have watched a movie? My aunt brought my cousin by after picking her up from school, "because of Uncle Kevin." I hadn't even been sure that I would be picked up from school, and Uncle Kevin was my dad. I was only beginning to comprehend how much bigger this was than just how it affected me.

People were stopping by the house, some of them not even knowing that Dad had been in the World Trade Center. The best man at his wedding happened to be in town - I was reminded that it was my parents' anniversary. A coworker of his, who had mercifully taken a vacation day, dropped something off. Neighbors, friends, everyone wanted to see how we were.

Late that afternoon, two of my friends came by the front door. I stood on the step and talked to them for a while. They asked about my dad; they told me how school had gone after I left. They told me that Samantha D*** had been crying in gym class. "Why?" I asked. They looked at me like I was crazy. "Because of your dad." I was still so focused on how I was being affected that I wasn't aware of what the attack meant to other people, those who knew my family and those who didn't, those who were in the towers and those who weren't.

Then we saw someone walking up the road, his shoes in his hand. I assumed it was some dumb teenager. Who else would carry his shoes in his hand for no good reason? "Who is that?" I asked. My friend faltered. "I . . . I think it's your dad." It hadn't occurred to me that he would be walking home, and so it hadn't registered that it could be him. I stayed on the step, unsure of what to do. Should I run to him, or run inside to tell everyone else that he's home?

Suddenly, my mom burst out of the side gate, somehow having seen him coming from the backyard. She was followed by my sisters, my grandmother, and everyone else at my house. I'm still not sure why, but I stayed put for a minute, until my aunt came to the door and urged me to join them, at which point I did. We had our reunion near the top of our next door neighbor's driveway.

There's more, of course: the church service that night; doing my math homework before bed, since I was pretty sure my new math teacher was so strict she wouldn't find even a national and personal tragedy to be a reasonable excuse for not handing in your homework; crying on the soccer field the first day that after school activities returned, as the physical exertion finally caused my emotions to overflow; the dreams I had in the weeks after, where I watched my dad die in various televised scenarios; gathering at my grandmother's on Friday, with a "God Bless Kevin" cake, so that everyone who had worried about my dad could see him. My experience of September 11 extended well past the hours of the actual day. There are things that happened months or even years later that I consider part of my memories of that day.

"So This is Christmas" Geneameme

So I go most of the last six months without posting at all, and decide on the holidays as the perfect time to start writing again. It's not like I have anything else going on, right? I'm not busy these days, right? In the spirit of "Why not write 4 posts in 1 week, when I couldn't write 1 post in 4 months?" I'm participating in Sharn White's "So This is Christmas" Geneameme.

SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS - GENEMEME 2014

1.WHAT KIND OF CHRISTMAS DID YOU HAVE AS A CHILD?
Our Christmases were religious - we always went to Mass on Christmas morning - but primarily they were family-oriented. We always spent Christmas Eve with my mother's family, having a big Italian fish dinner with 30-50 people, and Christmas Day with my father's family, which was much smaller at only 16-20 people.

2. WHERE DID YOU SPEND  CHRISTMAS?
Because we were lucky enough to have both sides of our family close living nearby, we always woke up in our own beds on Christmas morning, and yet were still able to see all of our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who we visited either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.

3. A LETTER AND SOMETHING YUMMY FOR SANTA
We always wrote letters to Santa. Once, several months after Christmas, I found them hidden in a cabinet above the fridge. When I showed them to my Dad, he assured me that he had made copies to mail to Santa, even though he'd held on to the originals.

4. THE CHRISTMAS TREE
We always had a live Christmas tree, usually from a small local farm. (They only grew vegetables, but sold trees in the winter anyway.) Sometimes the whole family would go pick it out, but more often my mom would stay home to get ready for dinner and decorating while my dad took my sisters and I. We always listened to Christmas music on the way, sometimes for the first time that year. I distinctly remember the year someone quickly grabbed a Christmas cassette out of storage on the way out the door and it turned out to be my mom's Joni Mitchell tape. We ended up listening to "River" - not exactly an upbeat carol - on the way to get the tree and were not happy about it.

5. DECORATING THE CHRISTMAS TREE
We all helped decorate the tree. My mom would usually make appetizers - particularly those little mini quiches and pigs in a blanket - which we would eat while we decorated and listened to Christmas music (most often "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and Stevie Wonder's Christmas album).

6. DID YOU DECORATE OUTDOORS?
We always decorated outdoors, with lights, wooden soldiers, and a Nativity scene. Dad did most of the work, but we all helped. My major contribution was untangling the strings of lights.

7. CHRISTMAS CARDS
We always sent and received cards, which was mostly my mom's domain. I remember always being very excited to be get to open cards as they arrived, and excitement that lasted until I was really too old for that - at least into college. The cards were always strung on twine and hung around the dining room doorway.

8. CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS
We all had stockings, which hung by the fireplace. I liked my stocking, but it had my name written on it in glitter that was really quite ugly - or maybe it had once been pretty and had gotten icky and worn out over the years. Both of my sisters had their names written on their stockings quite nicely, and I was always jealous.

9. CHRISTMAS PRESENTS
We always got presents from our parents and Santa on Christmas morning, and from other relatives on Christmas Eve or at Christmas dinner. Eventually, the number of kids got too be too much to handle, and the presents from other family members were scaled back considerably.

10. YOUR FAVOURITE CHRISTMAS PRESENT
Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe my bike? Not because I was more excited for it than for anything else at the time, but because I'm still using it on a daily basis 10+ years later!

11. WAS THERE A PRESENT YOU WANTED BUT NEVER RECEIVED?
I wouldn't say I had an unrealistic Christmas present I never received, but I spent several years wanting "young" Barbies - a Skipper, or maybe there were Barbie babies at some point? All I knew was that both of my sisters had Barbie "kids" and I wanted some but never got them. I'm sure there were tons of gifts I asked for but didn't get over the years, and I have no idea why this one tiny thing sticks out in my mind after all this time!

12. DID YOU GIVE GIFTS TO TEACHERS AND FRIENDS AT SCHOOL?
Once I hit about middle school, I remember always giving gifts to friends. Usually they were little trinkety things like small candles, candies, etc. I'm sure we also gave gifts to my teachers (I hope), but I have no real recollection of that.

13. CHRISTMAS FOOD
Oh the food! Our real Christmas feast was always Christmas Eve. Being Italian, we always had fish on Christmas Eve - baked clams, raw clams, fried shrimp (that was my mom's job), spaghetti with squid. And then lobster! It's everyone's favorite night of the year.

14. A SPECIAL CHRISTMAS RECIPE
We're still having the same big Christmas Eve dinners, although most people now buy, rather than make, their contributions. My mom is the one main exception - she always spends Christmas Eve morning up to her elbows in flour-coated shrimp, frying them for the evening's meal. I know that while my grandmother was alive, she appreciated that my mom still took the time to do it by hand.

15. CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS
See the above description of our Christmas Eve feasts. After dinner, there's always dancing!

16. CHRISTMAS MUSIC
We always listened to pretty standard Christmas music. I know that my paternal grandmother, who was Irish, loved the song "Feliz Navidad," and because my mom loves it, the main soundtrack of our Christmas was always Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas." When I was in Kindergarten, I was chosen as 1 of 3 girls to get up on stage at the annual Christmas concert and dance in a bathing suit and grass skirt while an older grade sang "Mele Kalikimaka."


17. YOUR FAVOURITE CHRISTMAS CAROL
There are lots that I love, of course. "Mele Kalikimaka" has fond memories for me because of the aforementioned Christmas concert. I've always loved "Away in a Manger," although now that I'm the parent of a newborn, the line "no crying he makes" makes me laugh. Jesus was human, right? That's the point of the Incarnation. And human babies - trust me on this - they cry. As I got older, I began to really love "We Three Kings," too.


18. CHRISTMAS PARTIES
I don't remember the specifics of many parties, or of parties that were annual traditions when I was a kid, except that for many years my dad's extended family had a party a day or two after Christmas which was great, because I got to know my second cousins pretty well over the years. As a college student, my roommate and I always hosted a Christmas party in which we insisted that our friends behave like grownups for once and at least wear fancy clothes while they got drunk. It was always a roaring success.

19. CHRISTMAS CONCERTS/PLAYS
As mentioned above, I was a dancer in the Christmas concert the year I was in Kindergarten. We had Christmas or holiday concerts every year after that; the only other one that bears mentioning was that in 2nd grade (I was in Catholic school at the time), I was an angel in our Nativity play.

20. CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS
Because it was winter, we were often a bit cooped up inside, unless it happened to be good weather for playing outside in the snow. Since Christmas usually fell towards the beginning of the break, I guess we probably spent most of our time playing with our new toys!

21. WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST CHRISTMAS MEMORY?
My memory is not particularly vivid, but I do remember my sister having chicken pox at Christmas one year. I couldn't have been older than 3.

Don't fuhget the fuhgotz!

I'm trying something new, or rather, something old, for Thanksgiving this year. In addition to my annual whole-berry cranberry sauce, I decided on a whim that I would try to replicate my grandmother's . . . well, her what exactly? If I said focaccia, you'd know what I was talking about, but it wouldn't feel right. We never said "focaccia" in our family.

It was this item that first introduced me to the idea that our family's linguistic heritage was something of an Americanized - maybe "Brooklynized" would be putting it better - non-standard Italian dialect. I was probably in middle school - young enough that I had to write an "About Me" assignment at the beginning of the year, but old enough to know that the word I was typing was decidedly not what I was trying to say.

My favorite food is my grandma's faggots

Well, that can't be right.

My favorite food is my grandma's fagots

That looks way too close to the other one.

"Mom, how do you spell [fuhgotz]?

Her answer, in essence, was that "fuhgotz" was not a real word, that we were just saying "focaccia" wrong. She spelled "focaccia" for me, and I found myself writing in an essay that my favorite food was this thing I'd never heard of before. I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

My grandmother was an excellent cook, and the foods she made are part of her substantial legacy. Fuhgotz were on the table just about every Sunday. (To me, focaccia will always be something you get at a fancy restaurant, not the food I grew up with). They have rarely made an appearance since she passed away, though. Though everyone has recipes for her biscuits, her pizza dolce, her sauce, fuhgotz seem not quite as prominent on our menus these days. Whenever they were forgotten in the oven in the rush of getting dinner for a huge family on the table, my grandfather would say, "You fuhgot the fuhgotz!" I hope we don't.

I asked my mom for the recipe, and she was able to give me a brief outline. It was similar to what I remembered from the time Grandma had shown me herself, years ago, though I hadn't written anything down and so would have forgotten the onions. Mom said she wasn't sure, though: "You'd have to ask Aunt Cathy. She's the only one who really knows the recipe. I just do the biscuits."

I have literally no clue how my first attempt at fuhgotz will turn out. (In retrospect, maybe the first attempt should have been one I tried out at home, not my contribution to Thanksgiving dinner. Oh well.) But this exercise has me thinking. About how fuhgotz is more of a real word to me than focaccia will ever be, even if it doesn't appear in any dictionary. And about the fractionating of legacies. How Grandma crocheted, made biscuits, made fuhgotz, belonged to the Rosary Society. How I crochet. Mom makes biscuits. Aunt Cathy makes fuhgotz. Aunt Sue belongs to the Rosary Society. Grandma could do all of those things, but while we all have treasured memories of these and many more facets of Grandma's life and personality, it seems like we are each the keepers of only some small fraction of her legacy.

Family Reunion Recap

My mother's side of the family recently had a family reunion. I signed up to bring the genealogy (and a side dish).

The broccoli was a hit. The genealogy was more of a mixed bag, so I'll go over what worked and what didn't, what I expected and what I was surprised by.

Family Tree
My mom is one of 20-something first cousins on this side of the family, and I simply can never keep the current generations straight. They look too much alike and all have the same names.* Their kids don't always come to family events. However, I am the recognized expert on generations past. So I got two big sheets of butcher paper, and on one, starting with my grandmother's generation, drew a family tree that went back from her siblings to her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Then I took the other piece of paper and taped it below the first one. I hung this on the wall and brought markers so that attendees could write in themselves and their own families. People were really excited by both the historical family tree and the ability to participate in bringing it to the present day.

What would I do differently? I would have announced the existence of the tree and requested help filling in the younger generations over the microphone so everyone knew it was there. As it is, one entire branch of the family left without filling themselves in, and they may not have noticed the tree even existed.

Genealogical Records
I printed out all of the records I have for this side of the family, put them in sheet protectors in a binder, and left it hanging out for people to peruse at their leisure. It actually got more interest than I anticipated!


What would I do differently? If I had all the time and money in the world, I would have included translations from the Italian, or at least abstracts of what the records showed. And if I was making announcements anyway, I would have mentioned the binder was there, but I was pretty impressed with how much interest was shown anyway!

Scanning
I brought a wand scanner and put out a note weeks earlier on the event's Facebook page that I would scan any photos or documents anyone wanted to bring, but no one did. I wasn't really expecting them to, but figured I'd be prepared, just in case.


What would I do differently? Nothing really. I didn't want to push, just provide a nudge in case anyone would have thought to bring old records if they knew someone was interested!

Memory Album
I bought a photo album and a number of note cards, which I passed out with the instructions to record one family memory and return it so we could compile them all into an album of family memories. I had grand dreams of finding out lots of things I never knew about my great-grandparents. I spent a week of my train commute writing "I Remember . . ." on 200 index cards. I got 12 back. We did not have nearly the buy-in I was hoping for. When I mentioned the project to the party's organizer, she thought it would be more fun to have people stand up and say their memories into the microphone. I couldn't tell if this was better or worse - there was more pressure to participate, so there was more participation, but I think people were attributing that pressure to me, which is exactly what I didn't want. I just handed you a note card and walked away! It was a lot of fun to hear everyone's memories, but most of them didn't get recorded. And when everyone was done sharing memories, they started cleaning up and went home. It seemed to serve as sort of an ending, and I'm not sure the party would have wrapped up so soon if we hadn't done it. 

What would I do differently? I have this stirring narrative in my head that inspires everyone to diligently record all of their memories. But I don't like to get up and speak in front of people, so I don't know if I'd ever say it, much less whether it would be effective. Drawing paralells between the stories that have been told of my great-grandparents and the generations tha came before them, I would do something like this:

[Pointing to family tree hanging on the wall] "There are lots of names on that family tree that are new to us all. Vitomichele Scigliuto. Giacoma Rutigliano. And it's cool that I was able to find out their names, that I can research when they were born and when they died. But what I can't find out, because these things don't get recorded, is whether he loved music. Whether she would cover every surface in the house with homemade macaroni. Whether they had a dog named Beauty. If their grandkids played Bingo with orange peels when they visited. These are the details - the important details - about our family that will be lost to history unless we make an effort to preserve them. Otherwise, in a generation or two, our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents will be nothing more than names on a piece of paper. And so I encourage all of you to write down at least one memory so that it can be preserved for posterity."

Also, I would have recorded the memories that people chose to share out loud.




* Fun fact, that I realized when watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as the father introduces his family, all of whom are names Diane and Nick: Every single one of my mother's female maternal cousins has a name that includes or is a variation of the names Anne and Mary. Examples: Rosemarie, Annie, Anne, Mary Ann, Ann-marie, Joanne, Annette, Mary, Marie, Ann

Mother Malone: Family History through Song

When it comes to music, the two sides of my family couldn't be more different.

On the maternal side, I have a hearing-impaired grandfather who nonetheless taught himself to play the piano by ear; a songwriter for an uncle; and an up-and-coming singer for a cousin.

On the paternal side, I had a tone-deaf grandfather; a father who can't sing; and, well, that's about all that's worth mentioning.

And yet, when I conceived of a blog post talking about music and family history, it was the latter family I was thinking about. (Possibly this is because my musical skills are quite clearly inherited from the from the family that has none.)

Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of my dad singing lullabies to my sister and I each night before bed, and it's through these memories that I find some of the strongest connections to my grandmother, who died when I was too young to remember her well.

My dad's repertoire included standard lullabies, like "Hush, Little Baby." Other songs were show tunes. (I clearly remember that the visual I had for the line "Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun" involved someone with a large stack of money, betting only the bill at the very bottom.) Some were hymns, "Amazing Grace" being a favorite in honor of my sister's middle name. And then there's the song that sticks in my mind most clearly: "Mother Malone."

When I try to look this song up on the internet, every set of lyrics is slightly different, and none exactly match the version my dad sang to me, which his mother had sung to him, and which I will sing to my kids. Additionally, the melody in recordings I've found is a bit different from the one I know. I guess that's part of the beauty of a folk song: it's passed on through the generations. Maybe, sort of like DNA, it mutates a bit along the way, creating a unique signature that can identify your family. The version of the song that I learned growing up went like this:

Some boys when they go a-courtin'
They haven't the spunk of a mouse
They'll stand on the corner and whistle
Afraid to go into the house

But me I walk in with me swagger
As if the old place were me own
And I sit myself down with "Good evenin'"
"How are you, old Mother Malone?"

Then I kiss the old woman
And hug the old man
Give Johnny a shilling and shake hands with Dan
Fight for his sister
And do all I can
Do all I can
Then I walk out with me girl Mary-Ann

Have you ever discovered that a song - or a version of a song - is unique to your family? Where did it come from? How have you passed it on?


Disclosure: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. This means that if you choose to make a purchase from Amazon after clicking one of these links, I will receive a small portion of your purchase price as a commission. I personally make a point of starting my Amazon shopping through the affiliate links of bloggers and friends whenever possible, so that large corporations are not the only beneficiaries of my purchases, and encourage others to do the same, regardless of whether they use my affiliate links or another blogger's. Of course, since the links above are to my family's music, I encourage you even more strongly to support their efforts, and can guarantee that you won't be disappointed in your purchases!

History Hijinx

As it happens, I have always had an interest in history, cool old stuff, historic mysteries, and house history. It just hasn't always manifested itself quite as productively as it does now.

When I was about 9 or 10, my parents renovated the kitchen in our house. This led to us spending some time with a kitchen that led my cousin Matt, then 3 years old, to walk into the room at a party and announce, "Hey Aunt Laurie! You got no walls!"

I'm not sure exactly what my inspiration was, but at some point I decided that it would be funny to take advantage of this situation to play a trick on the contractor who was doing the work on our kitchen. I wrote a note, crumpled it up, and spent a few days soaking it in tea or coffee and aging it in the sun. Then I folded it up and hid it in the wall before the contractor was going to close the walls. The note was dated to 1931, the year the house was built, and, using my best formal and old-fashioned 9-year-old vocabulary, said something along the lines of

To whom it may concern:

Be it known that this is an important and historic house and should always be preserved undisturbed. Ensure that no one damages or changes this important building. By the time you have reached this note, you have already done irreparable damage to this valuable building.

Sincerely,
[Man who built the house]*

(Note to 9-year-old me: buildings are not generally referred to as "historic" the same year they're built.)

I sat back and waited for the contractor to find the note and be horrified that we had made changes to this important historic building! It never happened. I'm sure they just put up the sheet rock without digging around too much behind the studs. (This is about what you'd expect, given my track record of successful pranks as a kid (or an adult, for that matter.)) My note is still behind the wall, if it hasn't disintegrated already, probably attracting bugs with its remnants of coffee and tea. Should some other homeowner ever try to renovate the kitchen in that house, I am confident that they will not fall for my little joke . . . but I'm not exactly sure what they'll make of it, either!



*I can't think of his name at the moment, but I knew it at the time and may be able to look it up next time I'm home.

September 11, 2001

[A version of this post originally appeared on September 11, 2011.]

I've struggled with whether to blog about my memories of September 11, 2001, as suggested at Geneabloggers. It seems trite, somehow, a superficial way to treat the scariest, most vividly horrific day of my life. But I've been thinking about that day all weekend, and I want to write about it. So I'll write, and I think I may even hit "publish" when I'm done.


The night of September 11, 2001, and the afternoon of the next day, I wrote down my experiences, because I thought I'd want to remember them. I didn't realize at the time that I wouldn't be able to forget if I tried. I've never had to refer back to what I wrote when writing or telling someone how I experienced the day. The memories are too vivid, and too detailed. This will be long, I must warn you. I've tried to edit it before, and I can only revisit the memories in minute detail. They don't make any sense to me when I try to cover just the important points.

I was a sophomore in HS, in Chemistry class, when an announcement was made over the PA system. The assistant principal got on, and announced that the principal was going to make an announcement. Then the principal came on, and announced that two planes had been "purposefully" flown into the Twin Towers. My first reaction was a flash forward, to some time in the future, as I told my yet-unborn children how their grandfather had been killed the day the World Trade Center was bombed.

I specifically remember thinking "bombed," though I knew quite well that the announcement had not said that the towers had been bombed. But what word does the English language have for when you fly passenger planes into skyscrapers full of people? "Bombing" was how we conceived of terrorism at the time. It wasn't immediate that we were actually able to settle on using the word "attack" to describe what had happened that day. If you read other people's accounts of their memories, they are often full of terrified phone calls telling them to turn on the TV because "something happened in New York!" And so I thought "bombed," though I knew the word was inaccurate. But mostly, I just thought my dad was dead.

But only for a split second. Immediately thereafter, I went into what I suppose you would call "denial." It was simply inconceivable that my dad could be dead. I wouldn't be able to handle that. He just couldn't be. And so, I went about my day. "If anything's really wrong," I thought, "they'd tell me." (By "really wrong," I, in my adolescent self-centeredness, thought only of things that would affect my own life.) I had two close friends in that class who, I later found out, didn't know what at all to do with me. They knew my dad worked in the Twin Towers, but I was not at all acknowledging the fact. I simply did my chem lab. I burned my finger on some hot glass. But I didn't talk about my dad. (My sister, a floor below me, I would later learn, was crying and leaving class repeatedly to call my mom. I, meanwhile, was acting as if everything would be okay, because, well, it just had to be.)

When my first of two periods of Chemistry was over, an unusually large number of people were called down to the office. I took comfort in the fact that Laura and I weren't among them. If anything were really wrong, they'd be calling us down to the office. All those kids who got called down, those must be the kids whose parents were injured or killed. Our dad must have been okay. It didn't occur to me that it might be hours, if not days, before some people were accounted for, and that there was no way that anyone had heard from or about my father  - or anyone else's - yet.

During our second period of Chemistry, there was another announcement: a plane had hit the Pentagon. And another: all after-school activities were cancelled. And then, after that period - we were called down to the office. I went to my locker first. I took the long way to get there. I just didn't want to hear what they might be about to tell me. I ran into a friend. She said she'd been looking for me, she wanted to talk to me. I - not at all realizing the scope of what was happening, not realizing that it must be first on everyone's mind, not just my own - thought she was going to tell me what the drama with her boyfriend at the football game Friday night had been about. Instead, she asked how I was. "I don't know," I answered. "I'm going to find out." How I was depended entirely on what they told me in the office  - and again, at this point, I assumed that "they" (the office staff? my mother? the authorities?) would know whether Dad was okay.

Outside the office was a large crowd of students. One gave me a pinky-swear that my dad would be okay. I thought that was inane, but didn't say so. Another told me that my sister had been crying, really hard. I don't remember who that was, and I'm glad, because it made me think that Dad was dead and Laura had already been told. (She was probably just trying to let me know that my sister needed me.) Another told me to go talk to the woman wearing the red sweater. I went to talk to her. All she told me - this was supposed to be the big moment of truth - was that Virginia Ward was coming to pick me up. "I don't know who that is." But that was the name she had. A friend suggested that it might be Virginia R*****. She was the only Virginia we knew. Of course it was her. But I wasn't thinking clearly.

She came to pick us up, and then we had to go get my youngest sister at elementary school. Virginia asked me to come inside with her, since I was the oldest. In the front hall - there was a desk set up, anticipating the high demand for pulling kids out of school - a teacher told us that the kids hadn't been told yet. Virginia told me that I'd have to tell Anna, because she should hear it from family. I was lost. I felt like just a kid myself. I didn't know what was going on. How could this be my job?

As Anna left her classroom, she put her chair on her desk, just like everyone always had to do in elementary school. I seemed like such a normal, everyday, childhood movement. I couldn't believe it could coexist with what I was about to tell her. As we walked down the hall, she asked "Why are we getting picked up?" and I had to tell her. "A plane hit Daddy's office building." She reached out and held my hand. And then Virginia added, reassuringly, "But the plane hit very high up, and your Daddy's office was very low down, so I'm sure he'll be okay," or something to that effect. I only remember the beginning of the sentence, because it was new information to me. I hadn't known where the plane had hit, or remembered what floor Dad's office was on, and I hadn't thought to ask.

When we got to the house, there were lots of cars outside, and all I could think of was the scene in Cheaper by the Dozen where (spoiler alert) the kids come home after school, and they know something's wrong because of all the cars lined up outside the house, and it turns out that their father has died of a heart attack. If there are lots of cars outside, then Dad must be dead!

We went inside, where a number of my aunts and one uncle were, with my mom. Everyone was crying, and everyone hugged us. I saw Mom crying; it was to be expected. I saw several of her sisters crying; to be expected. But then I saw my dad's sister's crying face, and I knew he was dead. And then someone said something along the lines of "there's nothing we can do but wait," and I realized for the first time that no one knew anything yet. They were all just as clueless as I was. We were all waiting for news.

I remember seeing a tower fall for the first time as I walked into the TV room to greet my uncle, but I had no conscious awareness of what I was seeing. My mom went upstairs, and Virginia came over and whispered to me that maybe I should go up and check on her. This seemed uncharacteristic of me (you'll recall that I've already mentioned my adolescent self-centeredness), but I did it anyway. Mom said she just wanted to shower. I came back down. Virginia left, but soon returned with several pizzas and a few bottles of soda before leaving us to wait and watch with family. No one was hungry.

Most of my detailed recollection ends here. All the waiting was kind of a blur. I don't really know what we did with ourselves, and what I do remember, I don't remember in order. My aunt arrived, bringing with her my cousin Grace, who was not quite 2 at the time. She was, for me, literally a saving Grace. She prattled happily in baby talk, and let us occupy ourselves with something other than the news and the worry. We colored. She was just learning her colors, and that day, everything was "lello." I thought that was ironic. Or symbolic. Something. I noticed, as we stood around coloring, the outfit I was wearing - new clothes, because it was the beginning of the school year. I had on a green three-quarter sleeve shirt, with light blue jeans and a black belt. I made a mental note not to ever wear that exact outfit again - whether out of respect or superstition, I'm not quite sure, but I know I never did it.

At one point, Grace and I were alone in the play room, coloring. The phone rang. There was a bit of a commotion. I couldn't tell whether it was a good commotion or a bad commotion, and I couldn't make out anyone's words. I was terrified. For a minute, I couldn't bring myself to go into the other room. I wanted to stay where I was, pretend I hadn't heard anything, and not have to hear whatever they had learned. I forced myself to pick Grace up and go into the living room, where my mom said, "That was Lester's wife Leann. Dad and Lester are walking uptown together."

We didn't have any details - Dad and all of his friends had been trying to get in touch with their wives, but the cell phone service was overcome by demand, and most of them couldn't get through. When Lester finally reached his wife, I guess, she was given a list of numbers to call to let everyone's family know that they were alive. My family is probably not the only one that thinks fondly and gratefully of Leann, though most of us have never met her. On such a terrible day, she was the one tasked with the telling of good news, and we who received that good news have never forgotten her.

It occurs to me now that I had spent the entire day assuming any news would be bad news. It's not a hard assumption to make, when planes are crashing and buildings are falling. It's only in retrospect that I'm able to see that on that day, no news was almost always worse. For my family, and I'm sure for many others, the phone ringing was heart-stopping, but it brought good news. It was when the phone didn't ring, undoubtedly, that the worst news slowly dawned. 

The rest of our afternoon became about logistics. Locating Dad, and other relatives at work in the city, and trying to get them home. No one could drive into the city, Dad's car was stuck in a parking garage near Ground Zero (though we had yet to hear the phrase) and mass transit was suspended. Who could get the closest to a bridge or tunnel, to pick them up as soon as they got onto the New Jersey side? How could we organize it? We got one phone call from Dad, from a restaurant he had stopped at, but after that he was difficult to reach.

We played soccer on the front lawn at one point. We might have watched a movie? My aunt brought my cousin by after picking her up from school, "because of Uncle Kevin." I hadn't even been sure that I would be picked up from school, and Uncle Kevin was my dad. I was only beginning to comprehend how much bigger this was than just how it affected me.

People were stopping by the house, some of them not even knowing that Dad had been in the World Trade Center. The best man at his wedding happened to be in town - I was reminded that it was my parents' anniversary. A coworker of his, who had mercifully taken a vacation day, dropped something off. Neighbors, friends, everyone wanted to see how we were.

Late that afternoon, two of my friends came by the front door. I stood on the step and talked to them for a while. They asked about my dad; they told me how school had gone after I left. They told me that Samantha D*** had been crying in gym class. "Why?" I asked. They looked at me like I was crazy. "Because of your dad." I was still so focused on how I was being affected that I wasn't aware of what the attack meant to other people, those who knew my family and those who didn't, those who were in the towers and those who weren't.

Then we saw someone walking up the road, his shoes in his hand. I assumed it was some dumb teenager. Who else would carry his shoes in his hand for no good reason? "Who is that?" I asked. My friend faltered. "I . . . I think it's your dad." It hadn't occurred to me that he would be walking home, and so it hadn't registered that it could be him. I stayed on the step, unsure of what to do. Should I run to him, or run inside to tell everyone else that he's home?

Suddenly, my mom burst out of the side gate, somehow having seen him coming from the backyard. She was followed by my sisters, my grandmother, and everyone else at my house. I'm still not sure why, but I stayed put for a minute, until my aunt came to the door and urged me to join them, at which point I did. We had our reunion near the top of our next door neighbor's driveway.

There's more, of course: the church service that night; doing my math homework before bed, since I was pretty sure my new math teacher was so strict she wouldn't find even a national and personal tragedy to be a reasonable excuse for not handing in your homework; crying on the soccer field the first day that after school activities returned, as the physical exertion finally caused my emotions to overflow; the dreams I had in the weeks after, where I watched my dad die on TV; gathering at my grandmother's on Friday, with a "God Bless Kevin" cake, so that everyone who had worried about my dad could see him. My experience of September 11 extended well past the hours of the actual day. There are things that happened months or even years later that I consider part of my memories of that day.

The unexpected phone call

I remember when I was first told that unexpected phone calls were scary.

I was about 12 years old, and my family was vacationing in Ireland. We were eating lunch at a restaurant attached to the hotel where we were staying in Dingle, and during the meal, our waiter came over, asked for my mom, and told her that she had received a phone call. I thought this was so cool. Here we were, all the way in Ireland, and someone was calling our family! In my mind, it was the equivalent of running into someone you know from on the streets of a foreign country. But my mom did not have a "what a nice surprise!" expression on her face as she got up to take the call, and my dad, remaining at the table, was clearly agitated.

I asked what was wrong, and he explained that unexpected phone calls - calls at the wrong time, calls when you're supposed to be unreachable, calls when someone clearly had to track you down, when the only people with your itinerary have it "just in case" - unexpected phone calls are not generally the bearers of good news. Now I, too, was scared - until my mom came back with news that the relative who'd been watching our house and dog had a question about using the car, or parking regulations, or some similarly mundane automotive matter. Although I accepted the premise that unexpected calls could be scary, the experience was not exactly convincing evidence of that.

I also remember when I really learned how scary an unexpected phone call could be.

I was a Junior in college, living right off of campus, and I generally kept rather later hours than my roommates did. One weekend morning at 2:30 or 3:00am, a few of my friends walked me back to my house after a night out. I often did that walk alone at night - it wasn't far and it wasn't scary - but they were still up and about and flirting with the idea of going out, or maybe staying in to finish up that last 30-pack of Busch Lite, so they came along for the walk when I decided to leave. I went upstairs and sat down at my computer in my darkened bedroom, not wanting to wake my sleeping roommate. I'd only been there 5 minutes or so when my cell phone started vibrating in my back pocket. That I was getting a call wasn't unexpected, and I assumed that the guys were making one last push to go on a nighttime adventure and were trying to entice me to join them. Then I brought my phone up and saw who was calling.

Mom cell.

My heart hit my knees. There were very few reasons why my mother would call me at 3am, none of them good. Trying to stay calm, I quickly and quietly left the room, still not wanting to wake my roommate. In the 15 seconds that it took me to get up and cross the room, every loved one I have died a dozen deaths. My mind raced, trying to figure out who it was. Not Mom, not if she's calling. Dad or Anna? Laura? Probably not Grandma or Grandpa, Dad would call then - or would he? - but maybe Pop . . . Is it Gina or Jamie? At this time of night, another college student, someone who'd be out late, drinking too much or doing dangerous things. If it's Dad's voice on the other end, then it is Mom . . . Car accidents, house fires, alcohol poisoning, could it be more than one person?

I mustered all the strength I had and answered the phone slowly, calmly, quietly.

Hello?
Hi Katie
My sister's voice. Did I wake you up? She was drunk dialing me.
No, but you scared the crap out of me! Why are you using Mom's phone? I thought someone died!

She'd forgotten she had Mom's phone . . . hers was broken, Mom lent her one . . . all sorts of inexcusable excuses that I had no time for as my heart slowly climbed back up towards my chest, my knees went weak, and I started breathing again. Any other day, I'd have relished a drunk phone call from my sister, who I didn't talk to often enough, who I feared wasn't having a good time at college. I'd been drunk myself, 2 minutes ago, but unexpected phone calls are literal buzzkills and I felt sober enough to drive a car, take a test, interview for a job. Anything but talk to the drunk girl on the other end of the phone who was in the mood for a giggly late-night chat.

It wasn't the unexpected phone call my parents warned me about. But it did a pretty solid impression of the real thing.


Note: This post should not be interpreted as meaning that my disappearance from this blog over the past few months was the result of an unexpected tragedy. I've just been busy. And/or lazy.