An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
How deeply, indelibly does a house, a window-view, a room’s configuration sink into us? For the last week, I’ve been caring for Sick Daughter Numero Uno, numero only. Too weak and bleery-eyed to drive, she asked me to accompany her … Continued
Resistance, that powerful guard of the status quo, of the loved prejudice and favored ignorance, stands guard like an upside down angel over our writing. I’m watching an osprey hover over the surface of a lagoon between the coast of … Continued
My oldest living relative Eleanora links me to her grandmother, also named Eleanora, who came from Sicily to New York, then Scranton, then Pittsburgh to marry the husband left with a small boy when her older sister died. Of course … Continued
In our house we dislike war. My husband Fran spent seventeen months in federal prison during the Vietnam War for refusing to accept even alternate service. A thorough-going pacifist, he virtually insisted that his Iowa draft board send him to … Continued
We hardly ever received messages on Isla. We had no cell phones then; nothing ever collapsed at home, except once, during our late February vacation, 2003. Then I returned from strolling to town and found that the “Office” at Posada … Continued
Sounds like a shipwreck, but in fact, the last survivor of my parents’ generation, Eleanora, rides comfortably in assisted living, Dover, Delaware. She’s 93, the only one in her generation with blue eyes, a rarety in Southern Italian stock, though … Continued
Cape Cod juts off the coast of Massachusetts like a huge hook, which used to snatch sailing ships from any hope of reaching the Atlantic. May still do. When I visited Cape Cod last spring, I headed off Cape Cod’s … Continued
Out of the darkness of dreams rises my sensation of dialing. I’m trying to form my parents’ last phone number in Charleston. Area Code: 843, then 766… That’s as far as I get. During my mother’s last fifteen years, living … Continued
Think of a family as a pyramid: I’m on the phone with my oldest relative, Eleanora, 93, who lives in Dover, Delaware. She bought her first car in her late 30s, “after the war,” as the family saying goes. We … Continued
Usually I like to arrive solo. Fran, my husband, and I are terrible auto-companions–I clench as he sashays, speeds ahead, breaks for sudden red lights. No wonder I make him nervous. For air travel, we do ok, but usually only … Continued