Time is Sliding This Way and That
Oh bisnonno, my dear great grandfather Pasquale, please come sit down. I've placed a white rocking chair beside the orange zinnias,
the last of the season. Sit here, next to me, because I am sitting in my own white rocking chair, staring out at the glowing meadow. I have fixed you un tazza di caffe!
And over here on my right is my granddaughter, Dani, your great great great granddaughter (in Italian "grande pronipote.") Dani is only three, but she is a "firecracker" -- un petardro-- as her mother Jocelyn (your great great granddaughter, or "tua pronipote") calls her. What's weird is that in 70 years Dani will be 73, older than I am now. And already she is familiar with her grandmother coming unhinged from time.
A few days after she was born in August of 2019,
I did a little time travel with her and my father, Richard Ricci, who was your grandson.
Did you feel about my dad the way I feel about Dani? That her face and her smile just melt my heart? That everything she does and everything she says are awesome and adorable beyond words? You were 56 years old when my dad was born. I was 66 when Dani was born.
So talk to us bisnonno.
Quindi parla con noi, bisnonno.
You see, I am turning 70 in exactly two months, November 29, 2022, and somehow time has become unhinged again. Suddenly I'm flying back and forth in time and I can't hold on. It really started when I was talking to my writing buddy Peg about you, about the fact that it was a miracle that you survived as an infant. I told her that time suddenly seemed to be bending back on itself. She told me, "Claud I think you should make a timeline." So I did, I took a piece of brown wrapping paper and I made a long time line starting with your birthday, November 3, 1870. I drew the line all the way up to the anticipated birthday of my third grandchild, your great great great grandson, due in early December of this year, 2022.
Somehow I'm finding that time line unnerving. I look at 1870, and I look at 1940, when you died at the age of 70. I am at the age you were when you passed.
Another thing I see: you were born in 1870 in a backward little town in southern Italy. It was a miracle that you even survived, because your mother, Filomena Scrivano, wasn't married.
But one hundred years later, in 1970, I entered Brown University as a freshman. How does a family move from the depths of poverty in southern Italy to the Ivy League in 100 years? In the little town of Paola where you were born, the priests and municipal officials officially gave you the name Orzo -- a type of macaroni -- to mark you forever as a bastard boy. How difficult your life must have been growing up.
Like I said, my head is sliding back and forth in time. I'm 70, and I have children 38, 36 and 33 years old. I have grandchildren who are eight and three.
Seventy years from now, even my children will not be alive! Seventy years ago, my dear Grandma Albina -- your daughter -- was 49 years old. She was still young!
What I'm realizing is that life is short. Time goes so so fast.
And sometimes the past and the future collapse on each other.
It seems as a child that life will last forever. Your parents will last forever. Not so!
Growing up, I thought 1940 was ancient history. After all, it was further back even than the second World War.
But now, I see that 1940 was only 12 years before my birth year, 1952. Growing up in the 1960s, I was part of a generation that thought we would never get old! We turned society upside down, and things have never been quite the same.
But I digress. And I guess that's part of getting old or older. You have so many stories to tell that you can get carried away!
Recently I heard someone say that turning 70 doesn't make you old, but it puts you in the "foothills of old age." As two of my children -- your great great grandchildren Noah Kirsch and Lindsay Kirsch Kaatz -- live in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, I can relate to the idea of foothills.
It's been two or three years since I started writing about my Italian ancestors.
At first I wrote about my mom and my dad. I wrote about my grandparents on both sides.
But it's only in the last few months that I have turned to you, Pasquale Orzo! All of that writing I did in recent years has drawn me here, to your life, especially, to your early years.
I want to know how it felt to be you growing up. So I have started writing in your voice. I call you the Macaroni Boy, because I suspect that people made fun of you, being illegitimate.
Is that true?
And what was life like for your mother, Filomena Scrivano, my "grande grande nonna?" Did she visit you when you were a child? Were those visits painful for you?
Speak to me bisnonno and grande grande nonna. Help me see through your eyes.
Aiutami Pasquale e Filomena, a vedere attraverso i tuoi occhi. Damini visioni e parlami, per favore.
Give me visions and speak to me... please!
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