CHAPTER FOUR: "More, more, more -- Ancora, ancora, ancora italiano, Per Piacere!"

Over the next few days, whenever I started to feel anxious, I simply turned to the translator.

I typed in whatever I was feeling, and boom, instantly the sentences in English appeared in Italian.

Over and over again I wrote, “Don’t be afraid!”

Non aver paura!

Non aver paura!

Non aver paura!

“Feel the life inside your body.”

Senti la vita dentro il tuo corpo.

One morning, however, something happened when I started typing. Without warning, without my being aware that I was even typing the word, out came:

“BREATHE!”

Respirare!

That word, breathe, stopped me cold. Instantly, it jogged an incredibly vivid memory. I was a little girl again, only about four years old, and I was standing beside my mother’s bed.

I can see her shiny black hair lying in soft curls on her shoulders. My mother

is so beautiful, but today she is hunched over a couple of pillows and she is wheezing and sweating and struggling to breathe, as she so often was when I was a young child. I am watching her with mounting anxiety. I am so terrified that my mother is going to die.

I get up from the computer. I am crying. I put on my emerald jacket and my purple boots and ignoring Poco, I hurry out the door. The temperature has dropped and the wind is wickedly cold. I walk out into the meadow, with no gloves or a hat, heading for the willow trees. Overhead is a cloudy sky. I cannot shake the image of my mother

bent over those soft white pillows. I close my eyes and breathe in and out, forcing myself to slow my breathing way down. Then I go back inside.

I can’t decide whether to go back to the computer. So I make myself a cup of turmeric and tension tamer tea. I add honey and milk and carry the tea to the sofa. I sit there staring out at the meadow. At that moment Poco starts barking furiously.

Curious, I stand up. I gasp! I count SEVEN young deer

prancing and dancing across the meadow. I feel a rush of love and gratitude for the deer. Suddenly I feel overwhelming love rise up inside me!

That's when it hits me: I remember Mom saying how deeply afraid she was during those asthma attacks! I remember Mom telling me that her worst fear in those days was that she would die and we kids would find her, dead, in her bed.

Mom had three young kids and no one to help her. My dad was in school, in another city, training for a better job. He was away most of the time.

My father's mother, who lived nearby, could have helped her, but she was working in the clock factory, and she didn't have time.

Eventually, my mother's mother, Grandma Mish, came to the rescue. She had one of her sons drive her to Bristol, where we lived. Grandma Mish packed us up and moved Mom and the three of us kids to her house in Canton, Connecticut, where we lived for six months or more with her and Grandpa Claude (yes, I was named for him.)

Thinking about Mom now, I can feel just how terrified she was!

Thank God for my blessed

grandparents, who came to her -- and our -- rescue!

As I was only three or four, I'm really vague on how long it was. My older brother Rich*, however, has perfect recall: he remembers attending first grade at the Canton Elementary School, where Grandpa Claude was the custodian. Rich was more than happy to escape Saint Anthony's School, where the nuns were unbelievably mean to us! More on those wicked nuns -- Grandpa Claude called them black "crows!"-- (in his dialect, "cornudi nidi!") later on!

Meanwhile, the deer are gone now.

And somehow, I feel like my own terror has passed. I sit here, glad to be alive.

*****

*My brother Rich recalls with great joy the Canton Elementary School, where he went as a little boy. "All the floors were really shiny and it smelled good, and that was because Grandpa Claude did a good job as a custodian!" Saint Anthony's School, which he refers to as the "prison," didn't smell so good.

"I remember going down the hall to visit Grandpa in his little room, the place where he kept his cleaning supplies. He ate lunch there. I remember that he had a bottle of wine, it was small, like a salad dressing bottle. He had a glass or two of wine at lunch at the school."