A new year begins with hope and praise for new beginnings. New year’s resolutions? I still wonder what I shall be when I grow up. It becomes harder with age to grow up. Angela and Angelo who brought me into world, parented me through life, showing me the way to be better and stronger, have been dead many years. The aunts and uncles who shepherded me through trials and struggles are also gone from the sight of those of my family still alive. Even my older brother Angelo and several lovable cousins have died. Childhood friends, too, have accepted their mortality and left me behind.
Who is left to help me grow up? To remind me how to behave myself, and direct my steps of exploration? Too few for one as strong-willed as I. I find myself more child-like and childish than ever. Perhaps I do it deliberately so that I may hear my Mother’s chiding tone in my head as she shares her exasperation over my antics,. Her words have taken up permanent residence in my brain. She comments on everything I do, still. It is a mystery to me, one I endure willingly, now.
I fought that constant harangue and meddlesome interference while she lived. All the older Italian women, family and friends, had no qualms about meddling in my life. I laugh now, at their efforts, with some stirring of guilt. It was a hopeless task, and I made certain they knew it as I laughed in their faces. Who is laughing now? I hope they are. I hope I can still make them smile. I only wanted to watch their determined faces break into smiles as they hit me with a rolled-up newspaper and shook their heads. Oh, yes, they operated as a gang. When my mother’s singular efforts seemed to get nowhere, she called in the troops. They would descend on my latest apartment, in the latest city I had moved to, to take the latest job. I was supposed to remain at home, or live next door with a husband, or at least within a few blocks of Mom. I never did. When I was about 35 years old she asked her sister, “ She is not coming home, is she?” Aunt Millie disclosed this to me long after Mom had died. Aunt Millie kept Mom with me all those years after her death. Now, Aunt Millie is also dead to this world. But, she and mom, and all those other Italian women who mothered me will always be alive in my head and my heart. One day, I will be grown up enough to join them. I dread that newspaper. My guess is they still keep it at-the-ready.
Dad lives in my head and heart, too; along with uncles, brothers and older male cousins who formed a protective barrier around me sight unseen. I seldom hear their words. What I hear is their laughter. I see their smiles and watch them quietly hand me a baseball, fishing pole, chocolate milk shake, deck of cards, rake, electrical tape, cement tool. And best of all, their grins. They stood behind the women who were intent on “setting me straight” with grins on their faces and laughter in their eyes. They redirected my thoughts from my transgressions, as I watched them with great delight. Probably, they smiled and smirked because I had taken the focus of the women off their own antics, temporarily relieving them of the women’s attention.
I felt more kinship with them. I wanted their freedom. The women were content to stay in their place. I wanted to go find my place, separate and apart. I wanted the right to control every choice. I did not want to “ask my husband” before I took a step. I wanted to go farther and wider than our insular neighborhood of people and ideas, which seemed enough to satisfy those I knew. I am still searching for that place. I seek a place where freedom of thought and affection expand rather than contract. Often, but not always, like E.T. and all travelers, I simply want to “go home.” So, I do.
I travel through memories tough and sweet back to the South side, just beyond the railroad tracks where Italian immigrant families had settled down. Eventually, most of the children of those families left the neighborhood, as did I. But, I truly still live there no matter my current address. There are no dead parents, no dead aunts and uncles, no dead cousins, no dead brother or dead friends there. All those I love still live there.
Aging brains do not become forgetful. Aging brains simply choose to remember all that once was alive, all those whom they loved. Aging brains hold memory alive with a strength no young brain can comprehend. We do it out of love, not loss. We have lost no ability to remember. We simply choose to remember what we chose to love.
So, here is my New Year’s resolution; I shall love all that is new, and all I can remember from what is old. I shall continue trying to grow up. I shall look for new paths, new journeys of discovery. I may appear to move more slowly than I did last year. I am carrying more baggage with me. I am carrying more of those who died and can no longer physically walk beside me. I love this journey. I am in no hurry to end it. However, I may have to take more stops along the way. The journey of life may seem slower when young. But, it is not. The young simply have fewer bags to carry. They only imagine they go faster, because they go lighter. I may be old now, but I feel light, too. Those whom I carry share their lightness of spirit with me. Someday, I shall become as light a spirit as they.
Conspiracy theories are nothing new. I remember the first one told to me. I was 5 years old and riding my new bicycle up and down the sidewalk in front of my house, allowed to go on my own only from the corner to the first alley and back again. There had been a flurry of children’s voices for the past few days talking about a monster who had moved into the neighborhood. It sounded so creepy to my five year old mind. I tried to avoid those conversations.
We lived on the Southside, surrounded by former German/Irish and new Italian immigrants. The Southside of any factory town always means the latest to arrive, or the poorest unable to move on, live there. The Southside of any town is where the river flows, and train tracks are laid out. The downwind side where the smog of factories collects in the air and flows down from their smoke towers, while the effluent chemicals left over from production drain into the river. In our neighborhood the Tectum factory dump lay near the river surrounded by an earthen bank hiding most of it from the street. But, the rejected sheets of shredded wood fiber held together by cementitious binder had piled so high it was visible. The air was filled with grey dust throughout the neighborhood. Playing on the dusty, unstable pile was forbidden. A true incentive to explore was unleashed by Mom’s warnings. That forbidden dump was a mystery to solve. Bored children, not yet solely rational thinkers, were drawn there like flies to…a word a five year old girl was not allowed to say.
The day I first found myself captured by a conspiracy theory is one I have never forgotten. The children noticed I had no interest in their gleeful one-ups-manship stories of the monster. The latest version was that he stole into homes at night. I asked why no one ever actually saw this monster. They responded “because it was night and everyone was asleep!” The monster was stealing jewels, candlesticks, and silverware. I raised an eyebrow at that comment! No one in my neighborhood had jewels or silver and gold anything. There was little worth stealing in our homes. With each disbelieving question I asked the children became more incensed by my disbelief. They considered how to “get me,” as bullies are eager to do. The only thing to be done was to issue a challenge and defeat me somehow.
The challenge was this: Ride to the end of this street, turn left and ride to the river. Climb the embankment into the Tectum Dump. Climb the pile. That is where the monster sleeps during the day. If you do not think he is real, you will do this. Uh oh. There were so many things wrong with this I shook my head “no” at first. If the monster did not kill me and eat me as the children avowed he would, my mother would kill me when she found out. But, proving that there was no monster, and stopping lies which were scaring innocent children like me, seemed worth the risk.
The children followed me all the way up the street. I pedaled as fast as I could, which was so slow they easily kept up with me, chanting scary threats all the way. I stopped at the corner, reassessing the plan. The river seemed so far away, the longest block I would ever traverse alone.
My delay simply fueled the bullying chants. So I turned left and started up the street, pedaling faster than I ever had before. My feet were flying, my hands sweating. So wet, it made it hard to hold onto the handlebars. None of the children left the corner. They remained silent and watched. There could be no retreat.
I made it to the embankment by the river, praying Hail Mary’s all the way. I dropped my bike and ran up the embankment with my eyes closed, saying the Guardian Angel prayer. My knees shook. I felt nauseous. I stood at the top, opened my eyes and looked down into the dump. It looked threatening but I saw no monster. I heard shouting and turned to see children gathered still on the corner saying I had to go in to the dump. So, I did. I climbed that pile and smiled a smile as wide as my smile had ever been, or will ever be. There was not monster. It was all a lie.
I stayed awhile and picked some wild flowers. Long enough so that the children might think I had been eaten alive and was never coming out. I waded in the river awhile. Finally, I gathered my flowers and climbed back out and onto the street, climbed onto my bike and pedaled slowly back to the corner offering the flowers to the children silently riding home.
I had no supper that night. Penance for disobeying my Mother, and for allowing tall tales told by idiot children who cared nothing for my safety to lead me into danger. Mom warned me that I would be told a lot of tall tales (1950s description of conspiracy theories) in my life; and, I would be a fool to believe any of them. She was right.
annarino writes 
2024 NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
A new year begins with hope and praise for new beginnings. New year’s resolutions? I still wonder what I shall be when I grow up. It becomes harder with age to grow up. Angela and Angelo who brought me into world, parented me through life, showing me the way to be better and stronger, have been dead many years. The aunts and uncles who shepherded me through trials and struggles are also gone from the sight of those of my family still alive. Even my older brother Angelo and several lovable cousins have died. Childhood friends, too, have accepted their mortality and left me behind.
Who is left to help me grow up? To remind me how to behave myself, and direct my steps of exploration? Too few for one as strong-willed as I. I find myself more child-like and childish than ever. Perhaps I do it deliberately so that I may hear my Mother’s chiding tone in my head as she shares her exasperation over my antics,. Her words have taken up permanent residence in my brain. She comments on everything I do, still. It is a mystery to me, one I endure willingly, now.
I fought that constant harangue and meddlesome interference while she lived. All the older Italian women, family and friends, had no qualms about meddling in my life. I laugh now, at their efforts, with some stirring of guilt. It was a hopeless task, and I made certain they knew it as I laughed in their faces. Who is laughing now? I hope they are. I hope I can still make them smile. I only wanted to watch their determined faces break into smiles as they hit me with a rolled-up newspaper and shook their heads. Oh, yes, they operated as a gang. When my mother’s singular efforts seemed to get nowhere, she called in the troops. They would descend on my latest apartment, in the latest city I had moved to, to take the latest job. I was supposed to remain at home, or live next door with a husband, or at least within a few blocks of Mom. I never did. When I was about 35 years old she asked her sister, “ She is not coming home, is she?” Aunt Millie disclosed this to me long after Mom had died. Aunt Millie kept Mom with me all those years after her death. Now, Aunt Millie is also dead to this world. But, she and mom, and all those other Italian women who mothered me will always be alive in my head and my heart. One day, I will be grown up enough to join them. I dread that newspaper. My guess is they still keep it at-the-ready.
Dad lives in my head and heart, too; along with uncles, brothers and older male cousins who formed a protective barrier around me sight unseen. I seldom hear their words. What I hear is their laughter. I see their smiles and watch them quietly hand me a baseball, fishing pole, chocolate milk shake, deck of cards, rake, electrical tape, cement tool. And best of all, their grins. They stood behind the women who were intent on “setting me straight” with grins on their faces and laughter in their eyes. They redirected my thoughts from my transgressions, as I watched them with great delight. Probably, they smiled and smirked because I had taken the focus of the women off their own antics, temporarily relieving them of the women’s attention.
I felt more kinship with them. I wanted their freedom. The women were content to stay in their place. I wanted to go find my place, separate and apart. I wanted the right to control every choice. I did not want to “ask my husband” before I took a step. I wanted to go farther and wider than our insular neighborhood of people and ideas, which seemed enough to satisfy those I knew. I am still searching for that place. I seek a place where freedom of thought and affection expand rather than contract. Often, but not always, like E.T. and all travelers, I simply want to “go home.” So, I do.
I travel through memories tough and sweet back to the South side, just beyond the railroad tracks where Italian immigrant families had settled down. Eventually, most of the children of those families left the neighborhood, as did I. But, I truly still live there no matter my current address. There are no dead parents, no dead aunts and uncles, no dead cousins, no dead brother or dead friends there. All those I love still live there.
Aging brains do not become forgetful. Aging brains simply choose to remember all that once was alive, all those whom they loved. Aging brains hold memory alive with a strength no young brain can comprehend. We do it out of love, not loss. We have lost no ability to remember. We simply choose to remember what we chose to love.
So, here is my New Year’s resolution; I shall love all that is new, and all I can remember from what is old. I shall continue trying to grow up. I shall look for new paths, new journeys of discovery. I may appear to move more slowly than I did last year. I am carrying more baggage with me. I am carrying more of those who died and can no longer physically walk beside me. I love this journey. I am in no hurry to end it. However, I may have to take more stops along the way. The journey of life may seem slower when young. But, it is not. The young simply have fewer bags to carry. They only imagine they go faster, because they go lighter. I may be old now, but I feel light, too. Those whom I carry share their lightness of spirit with me. Someday, I shall become as light a spirit as they.
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Tagged as aging, childhood, Death, growing up, happy new year, Italian family, journeys, love, memory, Memory loss, new year resolutions