I was raised in a family of Italians who were "just off the boat," meaning they arrived on the shores of Manhattan in 1946 without much but hope. And a work ethic sound as the masonry the men knew, so that all over the island and radiating like spokes of a wheel throughout the boroughs, my father's and uncles' brickwork arose.
Then there was their ceaseless drive for status. So they worked. They worked scared, they worked through humiliation and failures and exhaustion. They worked without knowing the native language until, in the diligent way they layered stone, they built up their English a word at a time. And they never, at least that I can remember, dwelled endlessly on the past or pitied themselves. Life was about moving forward and up. Up to where? I remember wondering. A child's life is so literal.
It was a different era. My aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents made up our social circle. Together we forged into the American Dream as many immigrants still define it: home ownership, savings accounts, college for the kids, and the end-all status symbol every man in my family aspired to - a Cadillac.
So it was alien to me, when I went to college, that there was this concept of "time off." In our home there was no such luxury as weekends. Saturday meant chores. Ditto for Sunday, a daylong procession of paying respect at the cemetery, mass and communion, and preparing a feast-like meal because no matter how far we strayed from certain customs, there was little wavering from food tradition.
And I can still be more panicked than elated if faced with too much free time. Nobody but my husband knows the true scale of my task-free anxiety. I have an immigrant's work-hardened soul. I suppose I'll always live under the weight of it, its residue echoing off the walls of my home.
Today I look back and marvel at the way my family built their life up from tenements to living in those grand houses they later came to own in places like Long Island, Queens, Connecticut and Martha's Vineyard.
And, every time I need a reminder of my real life rags-to-riches past, I leave my minute-old block of Belltown - where our homes are so close together that, protectively, we live farther apart than in neighborhoods with a little greenery around them - to hike up Denny and weave through the eclectic mix of funky-meets-charming to reach the old "streetcar suburbs" of Capitol Hill or what was, until the 1950s, referred to as Catholic Hill due to its onetime-large Roman Catholic population.
"Really?" I said when I heard this history fact-of-Seattle. Call me perceptive, but also call me right on, because the first time I walked the sidewalks around 14th Avenue and Aloha Street, I felt an odd but familiar feeling, a grounding surety that helps me metamorphose my newness of living in Seattle into something more personal.
Such dazzling mansions. I like to walk by them just as daylight withers into dusk. When they take on a softer glow, rearing up from the manicured lawns and gardens with more comfortableness than prominence in the fading light.
To be amidst this aristocracy of houses, this wealth that displays itself grandly, well, it's hard to know exactly what it stands for in this day and age, but I do know I'd be lying if I said the thought of my dad planting grape arbors over a driveway here doesn't escape me.
"I bet the people living in this neighborhood," I say to my husband as we walk the blocks just west of Volunteer Park, "like to take vacations in Italy, but here in Seattle, the real thing (meaning me) can make them a little nervous."
I don't know why I say this other than I'm feeling a little nostalgia for the working class currently unrepresented on this block. And melancholy can make me say heartless things if I don't keep it under wraps.
Silence.
"I know you know what I'm talking about," I go on, a little too flinty. "People who step backward when I wave my hands around and tell me to calm down when it's fervor I'm feeling, who describe people like me as artsy or ... or ... marvelous. I think your life is just marvelous."
Marvelous is a word no one in my family would ever use.
My husband is a bone fide fourth-generation Californian, white-collar W.A.S.P. He loves me sincerely, and hates when I describe "my people" as separate from his. There is a huge, brimming reservoir of unease creeping up his spine.
I pull an innate sense of emotionalism back inside my proletarian soul and smooth it down. Otherwise I'll force something far too small - sentimentality- into something too largely important: my marriage.
The sight of The Space Needle rises on the horizon. It is a beacon drawing me back down the hill to my street, which is really grimy com-pared to these blocks-of-elegance. Two hours ago, longing for something past, I never thought I'd hear myself say I miss the grime.
So little time away from home can go such a long way.
[[In-content Ad]]
