leaving for america

i found myself not part of american culture ... well part of it and then told i wasn't and believing it

i grew up with my mother....father....aunt mary...grandmother.....two sisters and my aunts gerry, and Frieda ..who would visit with their combined 15 kids ..... my uncle came for coffee every morning.... after my father left for work at 6am he would smoke and have coffee with my mother ..... then go off to work at the same time as my aunt would go to her job at the hospital and my grandmother to assemble toys for milton bradley...

i usually got up with my grandmother too and aunt... i would have coffee and a drag on my aunts cigarette ....and dunk buttered royal crackers in my coffee then go back to bed and be woken up by my mother who always gave me a bowl of rice crispies.....


my mother was the only mother who stayed home in my extended family.... all the other women worked;;;and usually were making more than the men..... I came from a group of italian women...... i wonder if the women work and made more in italy in the 1960s?????????

i thought everyone lived with their whole entire mother's family around...... later i discovered that wasn't true... and felt bad for the rest of the united states......

my family appeared quite modern and had beautiful clothes and cars and everything one could imagine having in the united states in the 60s... but we lived in a very tiny home...it was called a cape cod house and had just 4 very small bedrooms..and housed seven people with lots of visitors.....it was communal living at its best.... my mother and grandmother cooked magnificent italian food ...and my mother tried to make an american meal every sunday ...roast beef and potatoes... the roast beef would always be very over cooked... and my aunt would complain Phyllis why do you have to make the roast like leather????
but she never listened and would continue to make leather and every one would eat it ..... and besides she got a new thing called an electric knife....... we would have coca cola and leather beef and iceberg lettuce
very american my mother would think....... the rest of the week was filled with unbelievable italian food and i would wait for holidays that would encompass weekends so we would still have the home made feasts.................

strange and terrible things happened to my family as we live our lives separate from the Americans as my mother would sometimes call other people... but she never thought of herself as not american... only when speaking of they....................................... growing up this blond,,, blond boy with a german last name in a household of women from a neapolitan background ..... who lived as if they were still in naples was odd and a little confusing ...... the rules they generated i couldn't really understand but i did live by them....
when i was 16 my father decide to bail and then returned when i was 17....
and said come with me
and that was when we had to leave to live like the rest of america........... i cried
and cried and was beside myself as we drove away from the small cape cod house
i ended up liking the freedom that the new america gave me
but still mourned the old country which was only a few miles away
my grandmother died the following year
i felt pain... but i lived in a new country now and life was different

paul