IF I COULD DO IT AGAIN

Something has been bothering me the last few years. Strange as it may sound: it is the need to thank people who’ve made sacrifices in the past that I never acknowledged until recently.

I read where all the immigrants have come to this country, and unless they are Irish or English in heritage, they had or have a language barrier. When I think of my grandparents, I wonder how that played out for them.

I often wonder about my grandmother, coming to America at the tender age of 15! My grandmother was a young girl, still a child, coming to a foreign country alone, where the language was not understandable. I think she probably had a sponsor of some sort, but still, that had to be a frightening experience.

In all my years that she was alive, not once did I ever say: “Thanks, Grandma, you did something wonderful!”

And how she prospered! She lost her husband, my grandfather to Spanish Influenza, early in their marriage, and with three small children, raised them in a small shack in Rockville Center! She married my grandfather’s best friend, and then went on a rampage for a little Italian woman, who built herself an empire right in the middle of the great depression! She owned a fruit and vegetable store, a restaurant/pizzeria, and many tenement buildings! Often with the depression, she lent out money and forgave the loans, suspending rents when people lost jobs!

Dad told me that she was the forerunner of the godfather. Not violent, but if you needed help in the neighborhood, you went to Zia Francesca, and she would make things right!

I asked Dad: “How?” and he never would tell me.

While she did all this, she also held a job sewing buttons on coats, and would bring home: work at night.

There was very little she could say in English, and that astounds me.

There was one other thing about her that she was most famous for. She would organize bus trips to shrines in upstate New York, and plane trips to Italy for an orphanage that was named after her. The money she raised built the place! She never bragged about, just got busy and did it.

If you sat in her kitchen, or were lucky enough to, you would feast of the best food in the true Italian tradition. All of it was cooked by instinct, never had a recipe, yet: could remember countless dishes and all the ingredients they took! She couldn’t read! She was never educated.

On Sundays when the total family gathered, there would be a countless stream of visitors coming to pay respect to Zia Francesca, and untold countless phone calls because of a bus ride or plane trip.

She died at the age of 97, still the matriarch and still relevant to everyone’s lives.

Today, her family is large, too large to figure out, and it all started from a little 15-year old girl with courage.

La ringrazio, la nonna