{"id":221,"date":"2019-10-24T07:05:54","date_gmt":"2019-10-24T12:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/?p=221"},"modified":"2021-04-07T16:17:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-07T22:17:06","slug":"october-23-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/221","title":{"rendered":"October 23, 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s time to take stock:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Every family needs a Genevieve, an archivist, an artist, a family-loving soul. It\u2019s nice to have all these rolled into a single person.<\/li>\n
  2. I feel oddly connected to John. He was both inside and outside our insane Bonadonna family.  I don\u2019t 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\u2019t I started when everyone else had?  That\u2019s 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 (\u201cwe had a late license\u201d)\u2014being “a part of\u201d<\/em> the family, but also being “apart<\/em> of<\/em>” the family\u2014always 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 \u201cpunk\u201d who my father, three years older, told to \u201cgo away.\u201d  John\u2019s mixture of greatness, apartness\/a partness, of solidarity, resonates with me.  My choice to separate myself from my family, like John\u2019s I imagine, was not a conscious or deliberate decision.  John was handsome and charismatic\u2014more 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\u2019ve felt the kind of confidence that I like to believe was behind much of John\u2019s 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 (\u201cI was not studious\u201d).  He says he doesn\u2019t think he graduated high school, and I believe him when he expresses uncertainty.  That tentativeness about his graduation (surely he knew<\/em>, any onlooker would say) was not done out of self-protection;  he probably was genuinely uncertain.  It didn\u2019t 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.<\/li>\n
  3. Each one of his stories opened a universe of personality, history, culture, time and place.<\/li>\n
  4. His close brush with murder, or attempted murder, shows what a border creature he was. His laughter in saying, \u201cWho\u2019s going to see this?\u201d 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\u2014and his filter that kept him balanced and out of jail.<\/li>\n
  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\u2019t we as a family been close all those many years\u2014John\u2019s 90, or our 60-plus?  Sarafina hit the nail on the head when she summarized the \u201cI don\u2019t want to put you out\u201d motive.  I don\u2019t want to put you out, so I won\u2019t tell you my wife died and we had a funeral for her.  I don\u2019t want to put you out by inviting you to parties.  I don\u2019t 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\u2014about 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\u2019t around, you weren\u2019t all that much in existence.  I\u2019ve 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<\/em>, encountering the world in the moment, and with added benefits of joy, surprise, and all-in-ness as you enter into new moments.<\/li>\n
  6. In the car, in the spaces between funeral home and cemetery and restaurant, there were reflections about boys v. girls as children\u2014how 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.)<\/li>\n
  7. The neighbor\u2019s eulogy captured moments of John when he was just \u201cbeing\u201d at home, being a person, being with people. John\u2019s core was one of generosity, and goodness\u2014no 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.<\/li>\n
  8. So many of us need to watch and share reactions to the videos that Gen created. \u201cAn afternoon with John Bonadona.\u201d  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\u2019s Gen\u2019s 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<\/em>, and the like.  But I\u2019ll make this exception:  Don John Bonadona on the couch surrounded by his family\u2014that\u2019s a splendid mob boss photo, if ever there was one.<\/li>\n
  9. Hearing him talk of his days in the army, in school, on vacation, in Cuba, on the job\u2014all of it, brought me back to the texture and rhythm and way of life of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and more\u2014some 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<\/sup> 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\u2019t help feeling you knew the man, you were<\/em> the man.  Maybe that\u2019s part of my connection to him\u2014his everyman aura.<\/li>\n
  10. He suffered unspeakable loss\u2014at every point in his life, losing all the women he loved and lived with\u2014beginning 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\u2019s wrong here?<\/li>\n
  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\u2019m not overwhelmed with sadness\u2014other 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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\u2019s time to take stock: Every family needs a Genevieve, an archivist, an artist, a family-loving soul. It\u2019s nice to have all these rolled into … Continue reading October 23, 2019<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-life-in-general","category-ssw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}