mussolini’s only rival
My grandfather turned 97 last Thursday. I had made plans to drive to Yonkers, NY to attend his birthday party that weekend. Unfortunately, he died that day, so the birthday party morphed into a funeral.
My grandfather and grandmother were the patriarch and matriarch of an absolutely ginormous, Roman-Catholic Italian-American New Yorker family. Rent “Moonstruck“; that is my family to a T. Originally the family dominated several blocks of Yonkers (just north of the Bronx); but, like a Biblical diaspora, has spread across the country, and even as far as Hawaii, Guam and the Phillipines (not to mention the Free State of New Hampshire!).
I never knew my grandfather all that well; he was already an old man in my earliest memories of him, and I only saw him once a year maximum, as I never lived in New York, where he lived his whole life. The word most commonly used to describe him was “bastard”. He was a crotchety sumbitch. But it was stunning to see how many people attended his wake and funeral. I will never in a million years have that many people even aware of my existence, let alone care enough to come out on a snowy frigid day to pay their last respects.
There are lots of amusing things I could say about my visit to Yonkers: how I managed to take a wrong turn every single time I drove anywhere, resulting in such humorous incidents as circling the same Chuck E. Cheese in the Bronx three times late Saturday night with my gas tank on empty; somehow managed to drive all the way from Yonkers to the Bronx, took a wrong turn, and wound up right back where I started on the same street in Yonkers, but took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy a Harold-and-Kumar moment by hitting the White Castle drive-through on South Broadway for a late-night bout of indigestion; how amusing my uncles and cousins are, so that we, morbidly perhaps, were cracking jokes and making each other laugh while poor, dead, stiff Grandpa lay in his coffin in the back of the room; how my one cousin slipped a bottle of champagne and a couple of shot glasses into the coffin, so Grandpa and Grandma could party together in the afterlife; how, of all the members of my very devout Catholic family, they picked ME(?!@) to do a liturgical reading at the funereal Mass, resulting in the comical circumstance of a flaming atheist mounting the marble steps to the ornate speaker’s box of St. Peter’s to read from the book of Revelations (actually, that was my choice; got to exercise a bit of morbid end-times glee there) as the representative of my generation and as proxy for the eldest son (my father); how you couldn’t throw a rock in the funeral home without hitting someone named “Sal”, “Lou”, or “Elvira”; how the priest who gave the funereal Mass, who had known my grandfather for 20-something years, kindly referred to him as “unique”, “a character”, and wisely pointed out that he is probably up in Heaven right now giving God advice on ways to improve Heaven; how I left with a “funeral schwag bag” of stuff from G&G’s house (hey, it’s morbid, but the crap’s gotta go somewhere); how multiple members of my family married relatives, and multiple generations of people married the sisters of their brothers’ wives; how a veritable tribe of Irish immigrant female elder caregivers, all of whom had cared for my grandfather right up to his final moments, were sweet enough to attend the wake and funeral; how my grandfather was buried in a “high-rise” grave, and managed to get the penthouse. But somehow, it doesn’t feel right to make a humorous blog post out of any of that, at least not right now.
Here are things I learned, or was reminded of, about my grandfather and his epic life over the past three days: he had four siblings, five children, 17 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild. He married a fox, who was an intelligent and sweet lady who stood by him for >65 years of marriage, and whom *he* stood by and cared for as she suffered through Alzheimer’s and died a few years before himself; was a member of his city’s Chamber of Commerce, a self-made very wealthy businessman, and a trustee of his church; travelled all over the world; not only raised five children, but offered financial and emotional support to various grandchildren as needed; was described in his high school yearbook as “Mussolini’s only rival”; was a devout Catholic all his life; rented an apartment to a recent immigrant who couldn’t really afford to pay the market rate, telling him he could work off the difference in handyman tasks, and who knows, maybe some day he could own the very mansion my grandfather had built for his family… and now, he does; four generations of people attended his wake and funeral.
As my uncle pointed out in my grandfather’s eulogy, no matter what criteria you choose to go by, he led an enviable life. Here’s to you, Grandpa Sal. I’ll miss you.
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) will serve as an IOU.