You Say You Want a Revolution

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction

Don't you know that you can count me out

Don't you know it's gonna be all right

all right, all right

You say you got a real solution

Well, you know

We'd all love to see the plan

You ask me for a contribution

Well, you know

We're doing what we can

But when you want money

for people with minds that hate

All I can tell is brother you have to wait

Don't you know it's gonna be all right

all right, all right

~ Revolution by the Beatles, 1968

Mackenzie, who is staying with us while transitioning to a new city, is working as a server while she is here. She needs to work a job that offers flexibility for when she is performing as a dancer and aerialist. She has seven years of experience in upscale New York City restaurants, where a good proportion of wait staff are performers, and both restaurants she contacted down here quickly offered her a job. She chose the one that is closest to us.

Last Saturday night she worked the dinner shift and, generally, at least in NYC, Saturday night dinner shifts reap good tips. She had a table of seven, the tab was over $150, and she thought the customers enjoyed their dining experience. She received a one-dollar tip.  Her base pay is under three dollars per hour. Added together, that’s not even close to being a living wage. Yet the restaurant general manager admonished her for not buying the uniform they’d decided they wanted their servers to wear a week ago. This, after she had already purchased a shirt to their specifications (a shirt that looks exactly like the shirt they decided upon and was actually more expensive) and had been wearing it for the two months she’s worked there.

She said, “I didn’t make any money. How do you think I’m going to pay for the shirt?”

Some of her colleagues commute forty minutes each way, and they can barely afford to fill their gas tanks, let alone buy shirts, and pay rent and utilities. Yet they are expected to give service with a smile.

Low wages are common here in this right-to-work state. So are jobs that don’t offer benefits such as health insurance. There is another reason restaurants on the whole are lacking business and tips are often less than the standard 15 – 20 percent. It is because many people are still suffering economically, and though things are getting better slowly, we could suffer major setbacks if Romney wins the election.

About half of America will disagree with that statement.

Low wages are becoming a trend everywhere in our country, though. Manufacturing jobs, the path to a middle class living in the 1950s through 1970s, have been replaced with low paying service jobs. Even for the few manufacturing jobs left in America, most are paying lower wages after chasing out the unions. I know my own company moved manufacturing out of the Northeast in order to close out the union and operate more cheaply overseas or in right-to-work states.

Executives are making more than ever and creating a class of super rich individuals. Mitt Romney supports them in continuing to make super salaries and receiving super perks, because he believes their wealth will “trickle down” to the rest of us. I don’t believe it. I haven’t seen it.

Some people are talking about a revolution to take back America, but when Ronald and I talk about it, we often say, “It won’t be the revolution people think it’s going to be.”

The reason we say that is because we need to come together, not push apart, and this election cycle is proving just how far apart we are. It isn’t the average American, you and me, who we need to rise up against. It’s all of us, the 99%, who need to rise up against the 1%.

“It’s not the haves versus the have-nots, it’s the have-it-alls versus the rest of Americans,” says Jacob Hacker, co-author of Winner Takes All: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

He and his co-author Paul Pierson talked with Bill Moyers in January 2012 about the premise of their book. Their research has led them to the conclusion that in the last thirty years politics has changed our economy through organized combat funded by the super rich. On issue after issue our politicians cater to the rich and ignore the rest of America.

As I watched the interview a few days ago, I realized that this election clearly illustrates their premise.

As mentioned in an earlier post We Built This, the economy of the 1950s was good for everyone. There was better income distribution, and though the wealthy continued to get wealthy, everyone else was doing well, too. A rising tide lifts all boats, as Pierson and Hacker reminded me during the interview.  Further, they said middle class Americans had a voice through Labor unions, civic organizations, and the government.

After the 1960s the gap in wealth distribution grew as a result of failed domestic policies. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that almost all Americans, the 99%, lose in a shift where rewards are concentrated on a small segment of the society. Lobbying and big money fueled the disparity by getting directly involved in government. This election highlights the disparity. The Koch brothers and other billionaires have funded tens of millions of dollars to support the Romney/Ryan ticket.

Pierson said, “There has been a thirty-year war in which the sound of the voice of ordinary Americans is quieter and quieter in American politics and the voice of business and the wealthy has been louder and louder.”

I’m scared about Tuesday’s outcome. Can money really buy an election? I believe so. Can tapping into people’s fears and prejudices sway votes? I believe so. Can voter suppression work its insidious magic? It worked in 2000.

I suppose many feel that President Obama is part of the machine but I can’t help but believe he has compromised where he needed to in order to move his initiatives forward, like the Affordable Health Care Act which resembles Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan rather than the single-payer plan he originally envisioned. He believes our greatest recovery is in building out from the middle, as in the middle class, as opposed to the GOP trickle down theory.

The closest we came to a revolution in recent years was in 2008 when Obama’s grassroots fundraising helped him win the election. Hatred and fear were running high, and racism had an obvious impact, but he still won.

A little over a year ago the 99% tried to create a revolution, but I think they lacked organization and an agenda. Maybe they had the right idea, but implementation was haphazard at best. Camping out on Wall Street might have sent a message, but it didn’t have any teeth behind it and no way to make change happen.

This time around, unlike in 2008 when I wasn’t using social media, I receive about five emails a day from various liberal groups such as Emily’s List and MoveOn.org that give information and plead for donations. They worked.  I donated often, and I have high hopes for another win for President Obama despite a nagging uneasiness.

But the GOP is organized as well, and I get several phone calls and mailings a week from organizations such as the American Family Association and the National Organization for Marriage. They are trying to jump on the coattails of the super rich to force social issues changes that will impact the civil rights of some Americans.

I worry that people are concentrating on the wrong issues when we argue over a woman’s reproductive rights or the rights of two consenting people to have a legal union that protects them as a couple. When life seems overwhelming, people seek to control what they can.

In this right-to-work, religious, and swing state North Carolina, people’s words and deeds have frightened me. They use strong language in describing how white people feel disenfranchised by minorities  (racial, ethnic, and gender minorities) and how they will fight, violently so if need be, to retain their position of racial majority and the privilege that goes with it. It is their version of a revolution.

I don’t want to see people fight over the single piece of pie that is left to the rest of us after the super rich have taken their share. There is more than enough pie for all to have a hearty slice. A rising tide lifts all boats. So when we all do better, businesses will see more business, and people like Mackenzie will make decent tips because the people they are serving will have more to spend. But we need to do it peacefully, in collaboration and in consensus.

Jacob Hacker said the following during the interview:

“When citizens are organized and when they press their claims forcefully, and there are reformist leaders within government and outside it who work on [citizens’] behalf then we do see reform. This is the story of the American democratic experiment of wave after wave of reform leading to a much broader franchise and a much broader understanding of the American idea.”

I agree. We need to start a revolution.

Martin Luther King once led a revolution for civil rights and racial justice for all Americans. He said this in his commencement address at Oberlin College in June 1965:

“Now there is another problem facing us that we must deal with if we are to remain awake through a social revolution. We must get rid of violence, hatred, and war. Anyone who feels that the problems of mankind can be solved through violence is sleeping through a revolution. I've said this over and over again, and I believe it more than ever today. We know about violence. It's been the inseparable twin of Western materialism, the hallmark of its grandeur. I am convinced that violence ends up creating many more social problems than it solves. This is why I say to my people that if we succumb to the temptation of using violence in our struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness. There is another way - a way as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth and as modern as the techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi. For it is possible to stand up against an unjust system with all of your might, with all of your body, with all of your soul, and yet not stoop to hatred and violence. Something about this approach disarms the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses, weakens his morale, and at the same time, works on his conscience. He doesn't know how to handle it. So it is my great hope that, as we struggle for racial justice, we will follow that philosophy and method of non-violent resistance, realizing that this is the approach that can bring about that better day of racial justice for everyone.”

Here is a photo of Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. sitting in a jail cell at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham, AL (Bettmann/CORBIS).

I feel much the same way Hacker did at the end of his interview with Bill Moyers. He said, “The optimistic message is that politics got us into this mess and, potentially, politics can get us out of it.”

The Beatles ended their song Revolution with the following stanzas:

You say you'll change the constitution

Well you know

We all want to change your head

You tell me it's the institution

Well you know

You better free your mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow

Don't you know know it's gonna be alright

Alright, alright

Vote. Make your voice loud and let it be heard. Start the revolution.

Black Lie, White Hope

The GOP continues its quest for the Great White Hope. What about Herman Cain, you remind me. He was a straw dog. Charismatic? How about that wealthy Mormon, Mitt? Self-righteous Christian? Here’s Perry. How about the man that suggested a cure for obesity? No-more-food-stamps Santorum. Militant conservative? How about Michele “abolish minimum wage” Bachmann? Short-term memory? Here’s Newt “I took the marriage pledge” Gingrich. Best GOP candidate since GW. He cavalierly suggested that poor children ought to work as janitors in their schools.

In many ways it doesn’t matter who the GOP selects as their candidate. They want to ensure the wealthy keep their wealth and grow wealthier. They want to ensure President Obama doesn’t get re-elected. Some call him the worst president in the history of our country.

President Obama saved us from an economic depression. He defeated Osama Bin Laden. He ended the ten-year war in Iraq. He has worked diligently to preserve the middle class. What makes him the worst president in the history of our country? It’s the color of his skin. No one wants to articulate it quite that way. The moral compass of the collective society would balk at such blatant honesty. Most people would rather deny their racist assessment and pin their dislike on anything else that might appear rational. But their arguments aren’t rational. They are lies: lies that protect the liar from having to face his own prejudices; lies that smartly cover up what no one wants to say aloud; lies that make it seem as if we live in a post-racial society; lies that make everyone who harbors racist feelings feel smug and righteous.

I can’t just point fingers at the GOP or Christian conservatives who believe God is on their side and are bonded by hate and moral superiority. The 99%, a predominately white organization, is also bashing our president. I wouldn’t mind, except that their demands are unrealistic. The president can’t force change. If one has not personally experienced the tremendous backlash against everything the President is trying to push through, one cannot imagine the difficulty he is up against. To the 99% who are warming the benches while others are out on the playing field, consider a future in politics if you want to initiate change and learn to work within a system that is not only immovable but also difficult to negotiate. Then you’ll have earned your right to complain.

In the meantime I won’t encourage you to look at a third party solution. You’ll just waste precious votes needed to ensure that the GOP doesn’t get elected to the highest office in the land and take us all down by blurring the lines between church and state, destroying the middle class, and bolstering the power and wealth of the 1%.

We will live in a world where religious zealots create the law of the land based on the Old Testament. Apparently they missed the Good News. In this new world homosexuals are criminals; fetuses have more rights than children; women are submissive; poor people die for lack of basic necessities; whites are armed and dangerous to anyone that threatens their way of life; minorities are assigned non-American status; and slavery is re-instituted. The vision is extreme, yes, but possible given the extreme rhetoric of Tea Partiers and Christian conservatives.

Have you noticed that President Obama’s enemies have not found even one skeleton in his closet? They tried with the birther conspiracy. They tried to tie him to unsavory characters and Illinois political corruption. They tried to deny his Christianity, as if not being Christian would disqualify him from office. They have accused him of the character flaw of humanitarianism, if one can call that a flaw. I don’t. The only truth that no one wants to speak is that his African heritage is a flaw in the eyes of many.

We need President Obama for four more years. We need to fight the good fight right beside him.

(Excerpt from essay Keep Hope Alive: Post-Racialism in America)

Everyone in the bleachers kept craning their necks around to see behind us. We all knew Senator Obama would enter the square from the rear of the bleachers. The number of men in black suits with earphones made it obvious.

Suddenly the men in suits gathered together, and my sight rested on Senator Obama in the middle of them: tall, handsome, a spring in his step despite the grueling schedule he kept. He wore a pressed, bright-white shirt, the sleeves casually rolled up, and a blue, white and silver tie. As he stepped up to the podium amidst the cheers, he appeared confident, smart, and presidential.

“Yes we can! Yes we can!” the crowd chanted. I wanted to believe them.

“Our destiny is not written for us, it is written by us,” Obama told the crowd. We cheered louder.

“We can rewrite our destiny,” I thought. “We can change our destiny in my lifetime.”

“Yes we can! Yes we can!”

Obama stopped in the middle of his speech and asked for people to attend to a woman who was weak from the heat and press of the crowd. Volunteers ripped into plastic flats filled with bottled water and started passing them back through the crowd. From our perch on the bleachers, the thousands of water bottles being handed high above heads from black hand to white hand to brown hand, looked like bubbles floating over the crowd.

Ronald assisted citizens and saved their lives and property for twenty-five years as a firefighter, but sometimes they did not want his help. One man said he would not let Ronald resuscitate his dying wife. Another citizen, his house on fire, said he did not want black people in his house. Disregarding Ronald’s lieutenant stripes and his command over the scene, another citizen called him a nigger. Could hatred be that strong? Yes it can.

Obama finished his speech, and he walked around the circle of people closest to the podium, shaking their hands, speaking to them. I watched him, and I watched them, some of them wiping tears away after he had moved on to the next person. I knew he would exit beside the bleachers just as he had entered. Some people were already standing and headed off the other side of the bleachers, maybe trying to beat the dispersing crowd. I went in the opposite direction and crouched at the edge of the bleachers three or four people back. I could see Obama nearing us. I stuck my hand through the crowd of legs, and he grabbed it and firmly shook it. His hand was dry and warm.

I stood from the crouched position I had taken to reach him and turned around. I was crying.

“You did it,” Cara said. “You shook his hand.”

“Yes, I did.”

What Would Jesus Do?

I read in the paper yesterday that the CEO of Duke Energy made $8.8 million this past year. Duke Energy is applying to increase utility bills in a state that has ten percent unemployment, with many people cycling off the unemployment rolls when they’ve exhausted extensions and have become the chronically unemployed. The Duke Energy’s CEO’s salary is miniscule in comparison to the salary and perks of some of the CEOs at the major financial institutions and fortune 500 companies where the going rate is in the tens of millions.

Alabama is trying to legislate immigrant laws similar to Arizona, a throwback to the slavery days where free people of color navigated through the country carrying their freedom papers. Now anyone who looks like an illegal alien, that will mean anyone with Hispanic heritage, has to produce proof of legal immigration.

Conservatives are pushing to raise college tuition costs and slice financial aid, effectively creating an elite environment where only the wealthy can afford college. Public schools budgets are being slashed and the voucher and privatized schools supporters are pushing their way to the forefront again.

Obama’s health care reform bill has been stagnated by the details, taken to court and deemed unconstitutional, and in the meantime, people are cut off from preventative health care. They can’t afford to be healthy or take care of health issues before they become catastrophic.

All these movements are creating an ever-growing underclass in America, and the conservatives and religious right support these movements, even as our collective quality of life deteriorates, our salaries stagnate and our houses lose value. The 99% are trying to organize and protest, but is it too little, too late?

I’d like to ask the religious conservatives, those people who are more interested in legislating morality than in the equality of our humanity, what would Jesus do? Would he step on the downtrodden because they are not worthy? Would he increase pain and suffering when there is already enough in this life? Would he deny the lowliest human being comfort and compassion? Would he judge certain people more worthy than others? Would he give a hand up to heterosexuals but not homosexuals, or Christians but not Jews or Muslims, or people with white skin and not brown skin, or those who are wealthy not poor? Tell me the answers, because I need to know how Jesus would act in the world you are creating: one in which children go hungry because they have chosen to be poor or they are homeless because they aren’t worthy of shelter; where the poor would stay poor because they aren’t worthy of education and improvement of their circumstances; where people who are different from a very narrow definition of who is worthy would suffer their fallacies; where people are told that if they work hard they will be part of the one percent, but it’s a lie. Would Jesus lie?

I think not a single child should go hungry, without shelter, without the education to reach his potential. Every American should be free of worry about access to proper healthcare. Every American should have a job that pays a living wage, a wage where a family can afford a safe place to live, food, clothing, an education and transportation. And if a person is unable to work due to physical, emotional or mental challenges, he will be provided a living benefit so that he does not live in poverty. Why would Jesus deny anyone that? He wouldn’t.

Stop lying. Stop using Jesus’ name to spread your brand of hatred and your vision of a world of haves and have-nots. And guess what? In my vision of the world, you are just as worthy as the homosexual couple who wants to marry, the atheist who believes there is no after life, the Muslim who prays to Allah several times daily, the young woman who wants to go to college and become a lawyer, the child who aspires to be an artist, the terminally ill patient who wants to spend her last days pain-free and with the people she loves, or the man who was born a woman and wants to make his outside match his inside. You will receive the same compassion they do, no matter your ethnic heritage, the color of your skin or your gender. You will be worthy of all that humans are worthy of, and you will not be judged.

(Excerpt from Chapter 2, Bloody Mick, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

Ma was always ready to tell a good story when I was growing up, about her childhood or her days before and just after marrying Dad. Her words slipped easily into bawdiness and sailor’s curses, her humor biting, tart. 

Her stories were often served as dessert with hot tea – coffee for the men – after a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs or her favorite boiled dinner of ham and cabbage –mashed, fried in butter, and served over toast the following day for breakfast.

“Bloody this and bloody that” they always seemed to go, her cigarette slicing the air for emphasis and her face emotionless except for her gray eyes, crinkled ever so slightly with wry cunning. Ma’s stories made me laugh, and they still play like scenes from an old movie in my head. Perhaps I saw in Ronald a bit of Ma’s storytelling prowess.

Dad, on the other hand, was quiet until his temper exploded, never revealing much, but he worked with his hands: scraping old paint; patching holes; applying new paint with brushes and a roller, fashioning a hat out of newspaper; tinkering under the hood of his car; fixing leaky faucets; mowing the lawn and planting marigolds and petunias; dropping two or three dollars into the collection plate during Mass each Sunday, even when the mortgage was due and we would eat hotdogs, hash and Spam for the week; holding the newspaper up in front of him in both hands to read, or folded in quarters to do the crossword; helping his best friend Harold to renovate the old house Harold inherited out in Middleburg. “Mashooze,” Dad used to say, his hands clasped behind his back when he walked.

“What about your shoes?” I asked him almost every time.

“Mashooze escalappa,” he answered, rocking back on his heels. I never knew if it was an Italian phrase he recalled from childhood or something he made up because he liked the sound of it. I liked the sound of it, too, and the constancy.

Dad, born Francesco Liuzzi, was the second of seven children for Maria Mancini and Rocco Liuzzi.  Rocco arrived at Ellis Island in 1906 and returned to Montemurro, Potenza, Italy in 1909 to bring back Maria and settle in Albany.

Ma said Dad never had a childhood, and I believed her, even when Dad and his siblings argued about how things were when they were little, voices getting louder to drown out the others; even after Aunt Josephine had an old black and white photograph duplicated for everyone – a photo taken before she was born: Grandpa in a dark suit standing behind my seated grandmother in a full length printed skirt, a blouse with a watch pendant pinned over her left breast. He looks defeated; she looks like the Queen of Hearts from the Disney Alice in Wonderland cartoon, her bottom lip drawn in as she bites down on the right side of it. They both stare stoically at the camera; the children – four boys (Rocco also not born yet), hair plastered in olive oil to tame it into a side part, and one girl with a large, white bow in her hair, who would die of pneumonia soon after the photo was taken – all stand solemnly, dark eyes brooding at the camera.

As a child Dad sold newspapers on the downtown corner of Clinton Avenue and Broadway. Each week he turned his earnings over to his mother, but not before he stashed a nickel in his sock to spend at the theater. On a cold day in 1919 while out hawking papers with just a sweater on and no hat or gloves, Dad, seven years old, heard someone behind him.

“Hey, boy, aren’t you cold?”

He turned to see a tall, slender, colored man, early twenties, with a wool scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Yeah, I’m cold.”

“Well, follow me, boy.” The man led him to the kitchen entrance of the Grand Hotel on Broadway. He worked as a short order cook there. He pointed to a chair in the corner and left him. Dad looked around and wondered if he should leave, then the man returned with a cup of hot cocoa.

“Drink this and warm your bones.”

Dad, his eyes intense and dark, his hair shiny from the olive oil, looked up at the man with the kind smile, took the cup from him, and sipped the warm, sweet liquid. Dad and Harold would become friends after that day, the relationship lasting fifty-two years.

Dad attended St. Anthony’s Catholic School. The Italian-Americans called it “St. Ant’nees.” He dropped out after eighth grade. “My mother wouldn’t let me wear long pants, so I dropped out of school and got a job,” he often told us. As soon as he got a license, he secured a union job driving a truck for Hamilton News.

World War II came along after Dad had worked quite a few years. Dad became an older draftee. He legally changed his name from Francesco to Francis after he got drafted. He was stationed at the American base outside Sydney in Ryde, New South Wales, Australia. A Staff Sergeant, Tech 5, he “drove truck.” Dressed in army khakis in Australia, Dad was short of stature, but he had a full head of thick dark brown, almost black, hair, alluring deep brown eyes, and olive toned skin. He spotted my buxom Irish mother standing outside after a church meeting one evening.

“Hey,” Dad said as he swaggered over to her, “I thought they pulled in the sidewalks for little girls like you at this time of night.”

Ma ran away from him, but when she glanced over her shoulder, she always said with a wink, she noticed how short he was and let him catch her.

Ma found his exotic look exciting but was even more excited by his last name – Liuzzi. Just a few months before, an American soldier, Edward Leonski, had been arrested for murdering three “sheilas” –Aussie women – in Melbourne. My mother loved the stir she created by dating an American with a similar name. I felt that same stir when Ronald and I started dating.

Dad picked up Ma, a stacked size twelve (Marilyn Monroe’s size, she told me more than once), in his truck and let her ride around with him while he was on his rounds. If any MP jeeps were spotted, he pushed Ma down into the well of the seat. She was giddy with the secrecy and scandal of it all.

Ma also believed that an American could save her from a life of poverty. Her father fought in World War I at Gallipoli with the other Aussies, many of whom were slain as they ran toward the enemy. In a photo taken by a war correspondent, my 6’4” grandfather Clary Elliott carries a wounded comrade over his left shoulder. He stands colossal on barren rock, a crooked grin on his face, and though the photograph is black and white, I can sense his angry red hair peeking from under the slouch hat crushed down at an angle on his head. This rough-hewn giant returned home to his wife and children. A few years later he died from mustard gas exposure-induced pneumonia when Ma was four, leaving her mother Peg-o to raise five children on her own.

Ma, the fourth of five children like me, was born with crooked feet and had to wear button top shoes for the first seven years of her life. Her hair was too dark to be blond and too light to be brunet, and her eyes were a dreary gray like autumn rain. Next to her sister Joan who had jet-black hair and azure blue eyes, Ma felt plain and dull. She made up for it by taking on dares from the local blokes like the time she bit the three-inch long, fat, white grub in half. She dropped out of school when she was fourteen so she could work in a cut glass factory to help out her mother who made money doing other people’s laundry and taking in boarders. Ma spent many of her work hours being chased around the factory by her lecherous boss.

“Bloody Mick,” she called him, telling him to “Keep your diddle in your trousers.”

She accepted Dad’s marriage proposal just before he shipped back to the states.

Then Dad returned to Australia in 1946 to marry Ma and find work there. The thought of growing up in Australia instead of America makes me wonder how our lives would have differed. But Dad had trouble finding good paying work in Australia, so when the union sent him a letter from the States telling him they had a position waiting for him at Hamilton News, he brought Ma home to Albany, NY. He was thirty-four and she was twenty-four. They stayed at Dad’s parents’ house and Ma studied and converted to Catholicism so they could exchange new vows in the Catholic Church while Dad searched for a home. Peggy was born before he found one.

Dad’s parents called Ma a foreigner, demanded her marriage license every time she entered the house, and only spoke Italian in her presence, not that they ever learned to speak much English. My grandmother said an Italian curse at Ma every time she spoke to her. She offered Ma one thousand dollars to annul the marriage. Ma refused and asked a new friend, Millie, who became my older siblings’ godmother, what the Italian curse meant. The translation was I hope you burst.

Ma never felt comfortable with the Liuzzis who were not very affectionate with one another but who silently demanded loyalty and shunned outsiders. Grandpa had been scammed as a young father. A gypsy woman told him to bury three thousand dollars wrapped in a rag in a designated spot. She promised the money would grow into a fortune. When my grandmother found out what Grandpa had done, she sent him back to dig up the money, but it was already gone, and so was any trust in strangers.

Ma stood at the edge of the parlor one day as my grandmother spoke rapidly and angrily at Dad. Ma never knew what the argument was about; Dad refused to talk about it later, but suddenly my grandmother pounced like a cat on a rodent and slapped Dad across the face. Ma boiled with anger as she watched Dad drop his eyes to the floor.

The next time my 4’10”grandmother looked up at my 5’7” mother, narrowed her eyes, and growled the curse at her, Ma stared down into her eyes and said in her Aussie accent, “And I hope you burst, too, all over your goddamned new carpet.” 

My grandmother passed away in 1952 at the age of sixty-nine after tripping on that carpet and falling to the floor dead. Her death certificate stated cause of death as brain aneurysm.

Ma remarried in the Catholic Church, but she did not step foot in it again except for each of our baptisms and, later, Dad’s funeral. Dad took care of getting us to church.

 “Christians on Sunday; heathens the rest of the week,” Ma said of her in-laws and my father, “My grandfather is spinning in his grave because I married a goddamn Catholic.”