Category: SSW

October 23, 2019

Yesterday we buried Uncle John, age 90, the last of the Bonadonnas, at least his generation.  In the five days since he died, my reactions have run the gamut, so it’s time to take stock:

  1. Every family needs a Genevieve, an archivist, an artist, a family-loving soul. It’s nice to have all these rolled into a single person.
  2. I feel oddly connected to John. He was both inside and outside our insane Bonadonna family.  I don’t take it lightly that he changed his name (to Bonadona).  His identity needed a new name.  I have often felt both inside and outside my own family (i.e., the family I grew up in, not my current family).  Yesterday the topic of smoking came up:  why hadn’t I started when everyone else had?  That’s a simple point of divergence for me, but there are many.  John had his divergences too, but there he was in the thick of it.  I think of John tending bar as a twelve-year-old, carding people older than him, staying up till 4-5 AM (“we had a late license”)—being “a part of” the family, but also being “apart of” the family—always being a team player, going along with it, but also finding ways to run away and be on his own.  He was the younger brother, the “punk” who my father, three years older, told to “go away.”  John’s mixture of greatness, apartness/a partness, of solidarity, resonates with me.  My choice to separate myself from my family, like John’s I imagine, was not a conscious or deliberate decision.  John was handsome and charismatic—more so than me, but I have been handsome in moments, mostly as a baby, but that still counts (as an adult, John was tall, I am not).  His charm and charisma had to give him confidence and effectiveness.  In snatches in my life, maybe more with my education than my physical presence, I’ve felt the kind of confidence that I like to believe was behind much of John’s distinctive approach and demeanor.  But with both of us there was this other side, a self-effacing humility, an honesty about limitations, and an unafraid directness in confronting and talking about those weaknesses.  In the video, John talks about his nature as a student (“I was not studious”).  He says he doesn’t think he graduated high school, and I believe him when he expresses uncertainty.  That tentativeness about his graduation (surely he knew, any onlooker would say) was not done out of self-protection;  he probably was genuinely uncertain.  It didn’t matter all that much to him, but it kinda did too.  He had a way of presenting the truth just as it was, without a lot of packaging.  The truth was enough.
  3. Each one of his stories opened a universe of personality, history, culture, time and place.
  4. His close brush with murder, or attempted murder, shows what a border creature he was. His laughter in saying, “Who’s going to see this?” as he proceeded to tell the story of his adventures or misadventures of being a landlord revealed his openness, his pragmatism, his realness, his connectedness to actual life functions and purposes—and his filter that kept him balanced and out of jail.
  5. His eulogy by his neighbor was a kind of perfection and a sad sign of absence. Others felt a need for a more personal or familial touch here.  But John was loved where he lived, and he lived a lot of his life on that street. We thought so much about why more family were not involved in the funeral, the eulogizing, the whole saying of farewell?  Why hadn’t we as a family been close all those many years—John’s 90, or our 60-plus?  Sarafina hit the nail on the head when she summarized the “I don’t want to put you out” motive.  I don’t want to put you out, so I won’t tell you my wife died and we had a funeral for her.  I don’t want to put you out by inviting you to parties.  I don’t want to put you out by calling you and having a relationship with you.  There was that.  But then there was the time John was with you, and he would talk—about anything, without guile or packaging or spin.  He was with you in the moment, and his life was a kind of unfolding event that, when you participated, you got all of him, but when you weren’t around, you weren’t all that much in existence.  I’ve come to view this approach as genuinely respecting the transient moment of time we all inhabit:  why record, why build, why strive toward this greater thing?  Just be.  Be right now, with the people around you, and when those people change, be with the new people, with just as much of all of you as there was in the prior group.  In a way, the ideal is Dory in Finding Nemo, encountering the world in the moment, and with added benefits of joy, surprise, and all-in-ness as you enter into new moments.
  6. In the car, in the spaces between funeral home and cemetery and restaurant, there were reflections about boys v. girls as children—how the women kept a family together, and surely that was a part of the whole dynamic.  (But the women in his life kept moving on to the other side way too prematurely.)
  7. The neighbor’s eulogy captured moments of John when he was just “being” at home, being a person, being with people. John’s core was one of generosity, and goodness—no agendas, no real push towards self-interested goals.  He was once called the Mayor of Palatine (the street he lived on), and he did own the block.
  8. So many of us need to watch and share reactions to the videos that Gen created. “An afternoon with John Bonadona.”  The conversations started, hinted at, completed, left incomplete.  On that day, I grew to know John as a story-teller, as a rich, complex person, so confident and easy-going.  His willingness to hold forth was generous and kind.  Then there’s Gen’s picture.  I resist the glorification of Mob culture that is inescapable when you’re a fan of the great storytelling of The Godfather, The Sopranos, Good Fellas, and the like.  But I’ll make this exception:  Don John Bonadona on the couch surrounded by his family—that’s a splendid mob boss photo, if ever there was one.
  9. Hearing him talk of his days in the army, in school, on vacation, in Cuba, on the job—all of it, brought me back to the texture and rhythm and way of life of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and more—some of which I had direct contact with and, in a grimy way, welcomed back into living memory. He grew up during the Depression, and all those other things that happened in the 20th century.  Some of the stories, particularly about school, about being a cook in the army, and about avoiding active duty, might invite criticism.  But you listened to these narratives and you couldn’t help feeling you knew the man, you were the man.  Maybe that’s part of my connection to him—his everyman aura.
  10. He suffered unspeakable loss—at every point in his life, losing all the women he loved and lived with—beginning with his sister in her mid-twenties, his daughter at a much younger age, his first wife at too young an age, his mother at an advanced age, and his second wife at too early a time for separation. He smiled and worked hard.  He smoked till the end.  And he was really handsome in the casket.  So what’s wrong here?
  11. His life was full, and by all measures, complete: I should exhale and recognize he did it the right way and was not cheated.  In seeing him go, I can say that I’m not overwhelmed with sadness—other than to think that, in so perfect a life and so correct an approach to time, this long span of 90 years, it still feels wrong that he should have to go away.  He did have more cigarettes to smoke, more stories to tell, more stories to live.

October 3, 2019

Today my mother would have been 90.  For the past few years on October 3rd, I’ve had one strong thought about the date and the remembrance of my mother.  Odd:  When my mother was alive, I never once thought this thought.  She was just my mom (or “Mother” as we kids referred to her—never to her, but only years later when speaking of her;  another oddity.  Could you imagine addressing her as “Mother” to her?  Are we British or East Coast aristocrats?).  But since she died, there’s something about that date, October 3, 1929….  Today I learned it was a Tuesday, as I looked up the more famous date in that October than the third.  It was exactly three weeks later than October 3rd—October 24th—that that Tuesday happened:  Black Tuesday.  A Tuesday with its own epithet.

For the past few years, I’ve been thinking about how my mother was born before the start of the Great Depression.  I wonder what those three weeks were like?  Did she take full advantage of the Roaring Twenties?  Did she, in Vicari, Sicily, bask in the success of the 1929 Cubs?  That’s another new dimension added to my mother’s memory bank, and it comes by way of her grandson, Terry, baseball historian, my son, and lover of the 1929 Cubs, as ill-fated a team as ever in the history of that ill-fated franchise.  So … it seems most unfair for my mom to have had those three weeks but to have been too young to really indulge in the party.  But my mother was not selfish or self-absorbed, and she never complained about that missed time.

When I think of my mother, I think of her caring for me … and I think of every shameful thing I did.  Such guilt … I have to let it go.  I really didn’t do anything shameful in a big way, but it’s those little things, stupid kids’ pranks that haunt me.  I remember a particularly dumb one I did, probably about the age of 12.

“Mom, not everyone can do this.  It’s a test of dexterity and concentration and mental capacity.”

[I probably didn’t use words like “dexterity” and “capacity.”]

“Okay, tell me what to do,” she said.

She was always ready to help.  I recall that whenever I asked her for something, she gave it—and not only for needed things, but for my hobbies and interests.  When I became a model builder and science geek, she helped me with the Visible Body—the painting.  I could do the major organs—the liver, stomach, colon, intestine—but it was the veins and arteries on the plastic, clear skin that required dexterity and precision.  She painted the red and blue along the lines indicated on the inside shell of the skin—and the finished model was a piece of art to me, fit for an anatomy class.

“Take this quarter [I handed her a quarter], and starting at the top of your nose, roll it down—straight—to the bottom of your nose.  That’s it!”

What my mother didn’t know was I had taken a pencil and had coated the edge of the quarter with pencil lead.  So she took the quarter, put it between her two index fingers, and proceeded to roll the quarter down her nose.  She did it easily and readily, and smiled at me.  And it was in that moment that the indelible shame set in.  For the trick worked:  she had a stripe of grey down her nose, and she looked perfectly ridiculous.

It breaks my heart these fifty years later, and my eyes well up with tears as I write this in class with my students, all of us typing away.  I think of the simple goodness of a parent who would do anything for her child.  I think of her smile.  I think of the immediacy of my regret, and I wonder why—why does our sense of humor prevent us from seeing the hurt we cause, even when we see it so clearly in the moment after?  My mother didn’t express any anger or disappointment—she just wiped her nose when I revealed the trick.  I wonder if she saw my regret, my horror at being mean to the kindest person in the world?  Did she worry about me living in regret for years to come?

She made things easy.  Her life was hard—but for us, she was there.  We took her for granted, and that was bad—but really, the story was the absoluteness of her generosity.  I don’t want to say she enjoyed it—but it had that feel.  She was my barber for my first 30 years till she gave up her beautician business.  I remember her always being available for a haircut appointment.  It was always my schedule that mattered.  Her schedule?  She was there ready to be available when I needed her.

As I write these words, I’m feeling like a monster.  I was not … I was good.  But I somehow feel a need to exclaim:  I was not good enough.  I didn’t deserve her.  But of course I did.  I loved her, and she loved me.  She loved all of us, in a way that was easy.  And in my life I’ve seen so many mothers who behave so similarly.  It brings to mind my “no explanation needed” reflection I felt when Angelo died.  I clung to his friends and the family members who knew him and didn’t need me to explain his sense of humor, his gestures, his quirky smile and expressions.  They all knew it, had experienced it—and thus there was no burden on me to convey the reality and depth and feeling of the experience of him.

I feel the same with my mother.  So many mothers in the world have precisely the same kind of selflessness, of generosity, of willingness to be and live for her children that my mother had.  So I feel others can relate—can know—just how deep the feelings go, how deep my shame goes for missed opportunities for kindness back, for saying thank you—and for avoiding mean, gratuitous acts that accomplish nothing but etching a pain in your soul.

But stepping back from my malingering feelings, I hear her voice, and I see her smile and her easy way.  She had been through worse.  Her entry into the world on October 3rd meant she had to partake in the fall the collapse of the economic system, even in so far a place across the world as Vicari.  But she took the hit, and it must have formed her with a resilience and strength that were to help her raise and raise well five privileged brats who all, no explanation needed, grew to love her beyond human limitation.

September 18, 2019: Ella, the Abyss, and Distracted Purpose

Is Ella Fitzgerald singing “You’re the Top” on the way in enough?  The ride was smooth, the traffic light, and the whole prospect of the day regular.  It was Wednesday in its best, most balanced sense—not hump day, a thing to get over, a thing to persevere, a thing to struggle with.  No, it was Wednesday in being ordinary, not too stressful, not too packed—just there in the middle, with some buffer.  Last week I was preparing for and dreading a Board of Trustees presentation on Wednesday.  How different is this week, as I’m relatively caught up, and the only FAC action for today is a union meeting—but one with no presentations or arguments, just listening. So I get to go and just be, not push, not struggle, as everything just is what it is, and let’s all try to come to terms with it.

Ella’s silky-smooth singing typified the promise of the day.  The car did too.  The car has been running so peacefully, still like brand new, its quiet electric motor propelling me across town, as though in other-worldly, pollution-free, effortless gliding.  And then there’s the Cole Porter factor.  How does Indiana produce a Cole Porter?  If ever there is evidence that the world is insane, and potentially delightfully so, it’s in that fact—that a breezy, urbane, sophisticate like Porter could spring out of Indiana.

Amidst all this pleasure and easiness and mild contradictions, I find myself contemplating, yet again … the abyss.  What is the meaning of it?  Existence. Why?  What will save us?  And if we get saved, what’s the point of it all?  Why is there an Oba Chandler?  And how can anyone be happy again, knowing that such a being is a possibility?

[Side note:  Maybe my students will save me.  Here it is 8:37, and so many of them just walked in … late … driving me crazy … distracting me, just as I was peering into that abyss of existence.  They’re annoying … but they’re good too.  They’re here. They will write.  Some will write well, and some will be transformed.  I have to let them find their way a bit.  I have to be patient.  Okay, back to the abyss.]

I should be happy these days.  Besides silky Ella on the smooth ride in, and the joy of Cole Porter emerging out of Indiana, I’m in the best shape I’ve been in in years.  The new lifestyle agrees with me, and it doesn’t feel all that unnatural or difficult.  I should be eyeing a long steady prospect ahead:  years of the new routine, years of living well, years of dodging a bullet, years of repeated pleasures, minor challenges, significant successes, accrued living progressing forward, with happy camaraderie, and a general aura of blessing.

But that abyss weighs heavy. It’s there to the side, or over on top, and it doesn’t seem to allow a moment’s peace.  “The stakes are so high” it seems to say over and over.  The roots of existence and hope are exposed and vulnerable and rotting because of this abyss, which I summarize thus in a bullet list:

      • Donald Trump
      • Laurie Joyner
      • Climate change
      • Death
      • The designated hitter
      • The Faculty Affairs Committee (or its quixotic efforts)
      • The stress of living, which, regardless of the basis for any individual, will always ratchet itself up to wherever it wants to ratchet itself

I keep searching for a rhythm and routine, a purpose and procedure to rest in and exert myself in. But I think I’m looking for a mode of “eternity” in this quest, a “beyond-the-threat-of-danger-and-loss” life that won’t pull the rug from me (just as I was beginning to stand up).  In these days of health and comfort and stability—and really, that’s what I’m experiencing—I find myself unable to relax and settle in because that abyss seems ever ready to pounce.  What is the point of this or that endeavor, when it’s going to end, when you’re going to be hurt, when you’re going to lose something ever-so-needed for basic subsistence?

My prospects are as good as they have ever been (possibly better—but then, with Ang gone, can’t really say that), so maybe I’m just “growing up”—realizing the transience of all these incredible blessings of existence.  Why does it have to be so good … and so temporary?  I wish I could stop dwelling on the darkness, the moment after it ends and then continues on forever on its way.

The thing that helps me is Ella, my students, and so many very little connections with people—family, friends, colleagues.  We touch each other in trivialities, and we take one another out of our spirals, be those spirals an abyss, an obsession, a mistake, a bad habit, a distraction.  We need the distractions of one another to stay properly distracted.  A distracted, purposeful life (please note the irony: one must be distracted to be purposeful, for if you aren’t distracted, the power of abyss thinking would take over your whole being)—a distracted purposeful life can be highly pleasurable, rewarding, and beneficial to the common good. Is that a rock of certainty enough to build a life on?  Ella?