Riding In A Pontiac After A Storm

The thought that my father wasn't in the Mafia didn't matter although I knew that at sometime it would come up & I would think he would come up with money about his honesty & so forth & there would be no cause for an apology by the man who died at eighty years old and who didn't get to experience the twenty-first century. I meant it
when I said I'd had enough of telling all my father's secrets about things like cufflinks, you know? The cufflinks he wore were expensive ones & he used them after he came back from WWII & probably dreamed about novelties that money would allow him to buy like that since he was an ambitious son of a working-class Italian. He became a mail clerk & so then carried on a life of wearing white shirts, business ties and expensive shoes. God loves him. I guess he does because he had a worldly smell to him but believed in God and the Pope. I learned from him that money isn't everything & bad money isn't always a two-word harbinger for corruption & sometimes the bad thing to talk about is totally easy to talk about later on. My father would remark to me that "If an Italian is honest, somebody has to tell you about it in a newspaper article. Everybody else is dreaming about Puzo books and what to do with a tomato." I think that the word Capitalism isn't so bad a word as it once sounded either. It's just the source of our incomes. A passage of time will give you an easy chamber room to sit in and discuss things with your father, like I did & it does just sound like I'm a sentimental woman who loves her father as much as she loves flowers.

It wasn't just a family business that made my father tick, he was a sax player who prayed for a long life & never once wanted to commit an illegal gamble over grabbing too much money. Me? I've experienced the shock of rejection at all sorts of modes of writing things down. If you go to school for more than twelve years of your life you might feel like studying to be a writer. That way you can become an artist & not have just a desk job.

Becoming artistic at the age of fourteen year is such a rage & I've come across these types of writers who are prodigal writers & it's a struggle to show up without the best material before the age of nineteen without a fight & getting hurt over experiences you talk about & losing it all over a mid-stream crisis during the writing of a novel & this is what writers even die for, trying to explain. If I don't deal so much with how father loves me as much as asking myself how I'm going to forget him since his death, then I guess I'm human. All I can say is father loved his business dealings & loved to make money & even loved to deny that he did & even threw away clothing when it felt ridiculous to have it all & it claimed it never got him anywhere telling somebody like you that Hughes & Hatcher was a favorite store of his in the Fiftie's.

The time I swore I'd slap a woman writer in the face someday was the day I remembered thinking that the word 'bastard' had as becoming a flavor as garlic and was getting to be a sellout at the bookstores when it was mentioned with "dago" in raw material. You have as much family in a word like lineage as you do in one like vineyard, with me. That's how divinely easy it is for me to like discussing father. Why I look over my shoulder, shouldering suspicions for holding a grudge against the American view of Italians is understandable, of course. So there you are! Certain bad dealings with living with memoirs about a father's life crops up & having written a bad piece that was destroyed in the years when I was too young to know autobiographical solutions that stem from searching for the loose ends of typing up all the things you think you want to say made me anxious for the time when I would be able to write a good piece.

I could care less that Maggio mean't the month of dreary May in Italian. I lean toward realizing that Dante's Divine Comedy was as much a tragedy as a Romeo & Juliet & as I leaned over a notepad, this evening, I tried to find a way to express the difficulty I see in how we are taught to write about ourselves and our loved ones. Life is usually too difficult to figure out before you write it all down & then rewrite it all down ten years later.

So my father ended up in the printing business, that's all I want to say. If he'd been as engaging at the game of golf, before my mother married him, she might not have been in the right place at the right time & he could have been in New Orleans, selling pianos. He was a singles man until he was in his late twenties. I think, if he would have married an Italian, it would have still been the same way--he would have still wanted the life of an American who made honest money at something & been happy to work at making it all his life.

I haven't told you a long enough story about what made my father tick, I think. I was blessed with the sacrament of communion only because this is what many Italians feel they have become healed by participating in & it is only an inch behind confusing Latin terms that are no longer used & I am just admitting to you that I can feel no apology to the church for giving up with what it really meant & I'd rather guess that it still hasn't been figured out yet & tell you that my father printed all of the church material for them at one time just before they took a picture of father & mother & me in a communion dress & I did actually feel blessed with the god-sent gift of loving a savior, but it was as embarrassing as it was inspirational. I felt good enough about sending a poem into the church bulletin about Easter time, I was about thirteen years old & this was after I'd already received an award of some sort for an essay at an even younger age & it was probably published in hopes that I loved to go to church, which I did & still believe that it is the Rock Of Ages for us to sing about & it's as difficult for me now to decide whether or not I would have been better at writing if I'd been an atheist, or if what my life was destined for was actually built on the church's teachings & my own personal philosophy that going to church and writing through my father's experiences with wanting to be a good Christian was a good way to write. I mean, a church finds its greatest glory in having those who go to pray in such a temple, with all of the heart-felt sympathies in learning how to live a good life, become protected by God's word & healed of feeling like a sinner.

Why a rosary should come up is probably the most discretionary symbol ever to be used since they are a fragile string of magical messianic messages & not at all superstituous to first generation Italians. Why become rude about it. It's a prize that gives a historical accent to the rituals of the Roman Catholic faith.

I think I've got to fold in another prize into the fantasies I dream up because I don't think cooking recipes are anything but what a woman who might be called Diane Gigi meant when she felt fame after cooking with cuisinary fantasies & although I know what she meant when she said, San Georgio, San Georgio, what noodes of noodles can do for you, I still feel my money was made with out the finishing touches of bombast cooking artistry & I'll have to be honest & say it has really been the money that all came pouring out of the pockets of women who read recipes off the backs of Campbell Soup labels that feeds America. Yes, I'd say it's that kind of money. Yes, I digress.

Now, my grandather loved photographs. We have the best photographs ever! I must promise to call him a reverent Papa even thought all the family had called him Gramps, I guess because he was just a real McCoy.

Who would want to brag about father to such an extreme that he begins to become a daggerotype for a man of books in a bookstore might be going just a little too far. However, finding the real plate of good antipasto is probably like making people who read you, think like you. Then, of course, father becomes a god. It might be suggested that he didn't always sound good enough to have been who he was. I believe he was just as good as anybody else who was an honest, working good-guy.

If father had married an Italian girl, it wouldn't have been any worse, it would have been just as funny as feeling like another good expensive perfume.

So. My father cooked like a barbeque chef on an outdoor gas grill by his older years & skewed lamb sometimes--very juicy, very marinated. His penchant for restaurants like any other man who looked out for a night of ad-lib entertainment was only following his private destiny when he searched for the right evening to tell his friends that he was going to eat at a restaurant with his wife, would they join him? He did dishes, at home. But if you ask me doing dishs doesn't mean anything but he was a homebody & if he told me he liked his trousers with the cuffs rolled up he'd probably be just another Italian homebody that lived liked everybody else's father, in the money, out on the porch with the evening paper.

In the end, my father was a writer's short story dream, likened to a guy who walked into a hunting lodge claiming to be someone, when he was someone else. A script readytogo with all the excitement thrown in. I'm not psychology's tool, so I'll not give him a complex and call him a sexist, I'll not murder him, and I won't examine his bodily excrement. My father knew Italy from what my grandfather told him about it. He could timidly tell you about nuns but it might come by way of a standard dirty catch of these things, like the traveling salesman jokes. If you are overwhelmed by superstitions about this piece, you shouldn't give me anything but a haughty sigh that I've got Peter Blatty in mind for a karate chop but that's a whole other story. I'll even tell you that if I was dreaming about a Pontiac he'd bought me I was also dreaming about my father driving too far into a rain storm in a Buick headed down south for sunny weather, later tonight. The English Toffee he had in a box in his comfortable car was the kind that they sell at the YMCA. Glory be, that man golfed into retirement! If I ever ride in that Pontiac again,I'll think about how I'm going to write more short sentences to stop the blood flow on how much I could write on father. To say goodbye to his life, was as difficult as the thought that he will never be standing there in front of me again, getting a shoe shine in an airport, with his cash on hand to give me a good time.