The Sun is Shining in my Eyes

Excerpt from "Macaroni Boy: The Son of an Unwed Mother"

In a few days, I will turn 70. Perhaps that's why I have become so preoccupied thinking about my great grandfather, Pasquale Orzo, my father's grandfather. Pasquale died when he was 70, in 1940, 12 years before I was born in November of 1952.

What also draws me to my great grandfather are the circumstances of his birth. Pasquale Orzo was born in a tiny town in the southern province of Cosenza, Italy, on November 3, 1870.

He was illegitimate. My great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, was an unwed mother.

To be born illegitimate at that time and place in history was very dangerous. A researcher at Brown University who has studied illegitimacy in Italy in the late 19th century estimates that 93 percent of infants born at that time in Cosenza perished in horrible foundling homes, where babies died of malnutrition and disease.

Miraculously, my great grandfather managed to survive.

One hundred years after he was born, in 1970, I entered Brown University as a freshman. What a privilege it was to go to that prestigious college. I knew that when I went there but I really had no appreciation for just what a miracle it was that my family had, in 100 years, risen from the depths of poverty to the privileged world of an Ivy League school.

Until a couple of years ago, I wasn't the least bit interested in Pasquale Orzo (or any of my other Italian ancestors for that matter.) It all seemed like ancient history to me. What was the point of digging into the past? Who cared about all those old yellowed photos hanging in oval glass frames in my grandparents' hallways, photos of dead people I would never know?

But this all changed about two years ago, during the pandemic. I had the sense I was frozen inside. I spent weeks and weeks -- that turned into months -- trying to find a way out of that feeling.

I started to study Italian, and then I started writing in Italian, and lo and behold, stories about my ancestors -- on both sides of my family -- started pouring out of me. So too did stories about my upbringing as a second generation Italian American girl. There were stories about the shame I felt growing up. Shame about my heritage. Shame about my body. As I wrote about the shame, I wanted to understand where it came from.

And then, the Covid vaccines finally arrived and people started travelling again and my husband and I went abroad and visited Italy. One day, sitting on a hillside overlooking lush vineyards and row after row of pale green olive trees, I was overcome with the feeling -- it was a physical sensation -- that I needed to tell the story of my great grandfather. I felt like I needed to know how he grew up, and how ashamed he must have felt being "the macaroni boy." The name Orzo -- a type of pasta -- was given to my great grandfather by the municipal officials of Paola.

In the 1800s in Italy (and many other Catholic countries) it was considered profoundly sinful to have a child without first marrying.

In my great grandfather's case, I believe he was intentionally given a name that was silly and humiliating. The name ensured that Pasquale would be laughed at by villagers -- all of whom knew his shameful birth history.

Pasquale's birth situation was the source of great shame in my father's family for decades. My grandmother, Albina, and her five sisters never spoke openly about their father being illegitimate. It wasn't until my grandmother's generation had passed that the family finally started piecing together Pasquale's history.

Thank heaven for my first cousin, Donna Ricci (her father and mine were brothers.) The family genealogist, Donna has spent years assembling information about the Orzo clan from birth, death, marriage and census records. In 2012, she and her husband visited Pasquale's birthplace, Paola, only to be told that she wasn't allowed to see his birth record. And incredibly, the women working in the municipal office laughed at and made fun of my great grandfather's name. I can only imagine the shame he endured throughout his life as the butt of so many jokes.

The other day, I started feeling particularly frustrated that I have written hundreds of pages about my ancestors, but still, I'm not at all sure that I have written a coherent book. So in desperation, I decided to write to Great Grandpa Pasquale!

Caro bisnonno,

Dear Great Grandpa,

I am sitting in the living room, in the corner of the grey sofa where I always sit, for comfort. I have the sun shining in my eyes,

the sun shining between the tall pines outside the window, and suddenly I realize that I am thinking of you again, bisnonno, wondering what it was like to look out at the world through your eyes.

I have written so much about you. I have written as if I am you. I have written as if I am your mother, my great great grandmother, bis bisnonna, Filomena Scrivano. And yet, I still don't know you at all.

Last night I woke up at 4:30 in the morning with a wicked neck and headache. Who knows why? But after heating up the gel pad in the microwave and wrapping it around my neck, I lay in bed looking up through the window at the stars. And I thought about all the things I have done in my life, all the blessings I've had, and I thought it isn't terrible to die. Not that I want to! But I felt a kind of acceptance that I know my father had at the end. He told me on one of the many visits I paid to his apartment in assisted living in Holyoke. He said, "you find yourself getting used to the idea that you are going to die at some point."

And here I am two weeks away from my 70th birthday, thinking of you, bisnonno -- my father's grandfather -- once again. Maybe I'm thinking of you because you died at age 70. I am thinking about the only photo I have of you. But when I think of that face in the picture

I feel a great deal of love for you and your mother. For what you endured. For your courage leaving your home and coming to a strange new land where you had to start at the very bottom. What job did you have when you first landed in America? I'm sad to say I don't know.

I know that my grandfather, Angelo Ricci, worked on the railroads, as a water boy. He was your son-in-law. He married my grandmother, Albina Orzo, your daughter.

They eloped.

They eloped because my grandfather's mother, whose last name was Baldini, didn't think your daughter, my grandmother -- Albina Orzo -- was worthy of her son, Angelo Ricci. Was that because Albina Orzo was your daughter, bisnonno Pasquale? Because you were illegitimate? Did Great Grandmother Baldini think you were an unworthy person because your mother was unmarried when you were born?

If so, how terribly terribly sad.

But what love my grandparents had for each other. I get choked up thinking about their house at 218 Crown Street in Bristol, Connecticut. The house I spent so much time in as a child. The house with gardens overflowing with vegetables, and roses, and figs and apples and peaches and pears and grapes. The house where Grandma Albina made so many pans full of tomato sauce and "minestra" and so many loaves of scrumptious bread and Easter cookies and white frosted Lamb cakes (with coconut flakes) and sticky Italian honey cookies and so many many other delicious foods. The house where my brother Rich and my sisters Karen and Holly and my cousins Eileen and Lorry and Donna and Cynthia and Lisa spent time playing wild games, running up and down the staircase, up to the attic where the dry smell of old things was so strong. Up to the bedroom where the wall paper, a dingy brown, had pictures of fighter airplanes on it. I guess because my grandmother Albina had two sons in World War II. Two sons, my dad and my Uncle Bob. Two sons in Germany at one time. How did she do it?

She just. Did it. She wrote them letters every day. Letters that my sister Holly so wisely put into plastic jackets in the last few years.

Why are tears streaming down my cheeks? I'm sad but I am so happy and grateful too. That I have had so much love in my life.

You, bisnonno, and your dear wife, Caterina. Bisnonna. I have a very vague memory of her. Is it a memory?

I get up from the grey sofa. I walk to the other end of the house to my study. There on the desk is the orange folder called "Orzo Family History." On the front of the folder I have written:

"Pasquale Orzo, born November 3, 1870, Paola, Cosenza, Italy." Out of the folder falls a faded Polaroid photo of Grandma and Grandpa Angelo and Albina Ricci. Dated September 1967.

And inside the folder is the seven page, single-spaced typed history of the Orzo family written by my first cousin, Donna Ricci, one of Uncle Bob's daughters. And in the history, on which I have relied for so much of my writing, is this statement:

"[Great Grandma] Caterina [Pasquale's wife] died on November 23, 1951."

Which means I never met my dear bisnonna because I was born November 29, 1952.

And it was November 3, 1870 you were born.

And it is November 15, 2022 as I write.

As my writing buddy Peg says, time keeps collapsing in this book I'm writing. Time is fluid. Time keeps washing back and forth on itself like the emerald green waves of the ocean. Which leaves me again with this craving. This wanting to know my ancestors. This realization that I will only "know" you if I create you out of my imagination.

However, I do know this about your wife, bisnonno: everyone says Caterina -- my great grandmother -- was the sweetest woman in the world. Her face is soft and pillowy in photos. Her eyes are mild and kind. And from the Orzo family tree, I see that like her husband, she too, died when she was 70!

From my cousin Donna's writing, I know that in 1898 you and Caterina were married in the Chiesa San Giovanni Battista (the Church of Saint John the Baptist), overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea in the town of San Lucido, the town bordering Paola. My cousin and her husband visited the church in 2012, and as she writes, "it was indeed a stunning sight." Thanks to Donna's description, I can imagine the glistening green ocean water, and the sunlight playing on the crashing waves! What is amazing to me now in the sunlight of this morning is how quickly a person grows from a child into an adult woman to become, if one is very fortunate (or "fortunada" as my mother Dena Ricci used to say), a mother and then, a grandmother.

As I approach 70, I know in a way that I have never known before, in a bodily way from head to toe, that I will someday become an ancestor! A great grandmother, even if I'm not alive. A great great, and beyond. And that makes me smile and cry, all at once, and feel a kind of lightness and happiness I've never experienced before.

I know, as my dear therapist Mary has said over and over and over again, that no one ever dies, that love lives on and on and on. I am so fortunate -- "tu se fortunada," as my dear Dee used to say to me over and over -- to have had so many wonderful, loving ancestors.

I am so fortunate to have had such loving parents. Grandparents. Aunts and uncles and cousins. First cousins. Second cousins. The Orzo family tree -- compiled by my dad, Ric Ricci in 2002, is thick with a myriad of branches. I am so fortunate to have such a loving family now.

I am so fortunate to know so deeply that life is short. So short. And to realize that all that matters, in the end, is the love you share with your family. And your friends. And even the people who come into your life now and then as acquaintances.

As the Beatles sang, "The love you take is equal to the love you make."

And so, I know, as I sit here, crying tears of joy, that I want to make every day for the rest of my life, no matter how long it is, filled with love. I want to make every day filled with gratitude and joy for all of my blessings.

For my ancestors.

For my husband and sisters and brother and in-laws and nieces and nephew. For my children and grandchildren.

For the sun shining between the pine trees.

I want to try to be present to enjoy and appreciate every moment.

The sun has now passed out from between the tall pine trees.

The first snow of the season is expected tonight.

I am going to meditate now. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will figure out how to go forward with this book!