Jules, as he was known, made the U.S. his home. He married a woman from Philadelphia and got a good corporate job that provided he, Jenny, and their four children a comfortable life.
As a young child, I knew my grandfather as a warm and loving man who was larger than life. I remember fondly, him sitting in the breezeway of his home in Connecticut, smoking a pipe, or perhaps it was a cigar, lost in the opera performed in his native tongue, Italian.
Jules was from the other side of the Atlantic. My father’s father, Alfred, lived in Detroit and was from the “other side of the tracks.” On his draft card, his previous residence is listed as the Ohio State Reformatory. He never spoke to his siblings. Their relationship so strained he even changed the spelling of our name, adding an E to the end, in an attempt to prune the family tree from our branch.
Alfred and his wife Edith were born more than 120 years ago. It was a time when, if you had a hard life, it was hard! Then, they lost their oldest son Herbert at 19, when his ship sunk in the war.
My father, also named Alfred, or perhaps he was still known as Bud those days, met Julie in 1944. I imagine she saw him as a quick witted, handsome “man’s man” who knew how to take care of himself, and his woman. He would have been attracted to her strength of character, her heart, and perhaps the more cultured air about her. Like her father, she loved the Italian opera. He would have enjoyed swing music like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. They both loved to dance. She was the type of woman that a young man from the other side of the tracks dreams of meeting. He may have been the guy you hope your daughter never meets.
They had known each other for only a couple of weeks before he was deployed for another two years at sea. They wrote to each other constantly and when he returned they got married on July 6, 1946. It was love at first sight and it lasted a lifetime; just shy of 60 years when she passed away in Jan 2005.
I have written here about what a hard man my father could be, yet as hard as he was, Dad was no match for my mother. He used to say proudly, “I’ve got your mother right where she wants me.” Truer words have never been spoken.
He wasn’t very expressive about his love but there was no doubt where Julie stood in his priorities. I remember his exact words to me when I made the mistake of complaining to him once about something she told me to do. “Your mother has been with me for more than 30 years and she will be here long after you move on. You don’t want to ask me to chose between the two of you!” There was never any doubt in my mind of his love, for her.
Yet, as can happen over 60 years together, there was a difficult time in their marriage. It was sometime between when Mike was born and I was born. I don’t know if it was the dozen miscarriages my mother said she had as they tried in vain to have a second child, the pressures of a young Navy family trying to make ends meet or an “indiscretion” by my father that he alluded to many years later. Whatever the cause, by the time I arrived, seven years after my brother, my mother clung to me perhaps more tightly than my brother. Perhaps that was because as the first born son, my brother had a special connection with Dad.
While I have no doubt they loved us both, I was hers. He was Dad’s.
I have countless stories about my father. Mostly because he was, without question, a colorful man. The stores about my mother are far harder for me to tell without choking up, even today, 14 years after she died. To this day I can’t make it through the song Always by Patsy Cline without crying. I can still hear her squeaky voice singing along. To say I loved my mother is unquestionably the biggest understatement a guy can make. Even now, when something big happens in my life I have a fleeting thought that I have to tell Mom about it. I miss her so much.
In the summer of 2004, my mother had a stroke and they moved to Oregon to live with us while they were having a small home built nearby. They never got that house.
Another, far more devastating, stroke in October of that year sent my mother to a nursing home. Every day for three months, my father got up in the morning and drove there to sit next to her, to read the paper to her, and watch the news with her, even though she was totally unresponsive. What else could he do? He knew no other life than the one with her.
On the afternoon of January 20, 2005, she suddenly smiled, reached up, and patted my father on the cheek as if to tell him she loved him and everything was going to be okay.
She died in her sleep that night.
My father was devastated. At times he could barely function. I had never seen him so vulnerable. So raw. I remember him telling me once, “I don’t want to live.” I knew he meant it.
He lived with me for the next six months before he moved to Texas. Almost every night I would come home and sit with him to watch TV or just talk.
After 46 years, I finally got to know my father; to understand what an amazing man he was. He lived his entire life with what seemed to be only one objective, to provide a better life for his wife and two children than what he had known. He joined my mother two years later, after more than delivering on that commitment.
I have often wonder if that time spent getting to know my father was, in some way, my mother’s plan all along. And that when she smiled and said goodbye to him that day, was it because she knew that her work was finally done?
I wish she was here to help my brother and me now.
