Aging as an American Immigrant Son
I remember the parakeets
When I was a kid, my Dad and I often visited my grandparents, his mother and father. They lived in a small town about 20 minutes from us. Like most immigrants, they never owned a home. Instead, they lived in a ground floor apartment in a row house. I always loved spending time with my father, and so I would gladly accompany him on these visits.
My grandmother Elena — Grandma to me — always showed off her parakeets which she had in a cage hanging from the ceiling.
She loved these colorful little birds, and sometimes she would let them fly around the apartment claiming that they would always return to the cage. There were three originally, but then one day we visited and there were only two remaining. The third, she explained to my father, had grown old and died, and she found it in the morning on the bottom of the cage. She buried the little bird in the backyard.
I was never able to understand my Grandma, since she and her husband spoke only Italian. My parents wanted us kids to grow up American so we spoke only English at home. It always felt strange that Grandma would speak to me, and my father would translate, and conversations would go back and forth like that. Later I came to understand that children during their formative years can easily pick up two languages at once, and so I could have been bilingual.
I could have been an astronaut too. Well, maybe not.
My two siblings and I were raised in the 1950s and early 1960s when there was quite a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. They did not want us kids speaking Italian or even risking Italian accents, although the latter was not likely. Unlike the rest of our extended family, my parents were especially keen on assimilating.
They met at a USO dance during World War II. My father was an active duty Tech IV serving in the army under General Patton’s command. He saw a lot of combat, but never really wanted to talk about it. Technically, he was trained as a tank mechanic and specialized in keeping the new Hydra-Matic transmissions running while in the field. Why anyone thought it was a good idea to install automatic transmissions in tanks, I have no idea.
My mother was a seamstress working at a women’s lingerie factory that would eventually be retooled to make women’s military uniforms. Many readers may not be aware that there were some 350,000 service women during the war. Many were nurses, some cargo plane pilots and crews, and others, secretaries.
In any case, my mother and father made a very attractive couple. My father was a handsome and somewhat rakish young dude in uniform, and my mother was an attractive young lady with a lovely face. I know this from their wedding photos. I spent much of my childhood trying to reconcile these photographs with the middle aged parents I knew at the time.
My father and grandmother had emigrated to the United States from Italy when he was just seven years old. My grandfather was a merchant mariner and had visited the U.S. several times on routine shore leave before deciding to pick up his family and emigrate. They lived in an Italian-speaking community and never felt the need to learn English.
I remember very little about my grandfather, only that he was a very big and muscular man. From my kid’s point of view, it always seemed like he was too big for their little apartment. He was retired by the time I knew him, and one day when we visited, I noticed that he had grown quite overweight and never seemed to leave his favorite living room chair. He had heart problems and my Dad was always worrying about him. Grandpa died in that chair soon thereafter.
But my Grandma lived on for many years, always dressed in black as is the Italian tradition. She always seemed a bit dour, or perhaps sad, I was never quite sure which. I know she never liked my mother whose family came from another, less desirable part of Italy, and you know, a grudge is a grudge.
Grandma was the next to die. “Old age” they said, and to be sure she was well into her eighties. I remember my Dad trying to find a home for the parakeets, these two a replacement set from the ones I knew as a young boy. Grandma certainly seemed old to me, but then she had always seemed old. I really don’t remember her funeral, but I know she was buried next to my grandfather in the Catholic cemetery.
My Grandma was the first person I knew well to die. But my first personal experience with death was my beloved dog Pepi, a fluffy Pekingese, who passed away when I was ten years old. I was devastated. No one had explained death to me, although the dog had some kind of terminal condition.
My father never seemed to grow old. He and my Mom moved to Florida back when that was fashionable for older retired folks, and I always felt sad that he and I had not spent enough time together as adults. The rare times I was able to visit with them, my Dad and I would go surf fishing along the beach, and we would say very little. It was always my impression that my Dad was unhappy with the way things had turned out. Few of the family were able to visit him and my Mom at their place in Florida.
My Dad died in his early 70s of rapid onset dementia. Apparently a rare condition, he progressed from forgetting where he placed his keys to a memory care unit in just over a year. It was horrifying to see him decline so rapidly. His death broke my heart like it had never been broken before.
My mother died about ten years later, having lived into her eighties. But in her case, after suffering heart disease and obesity for much of her life, she was becoming visibly aged. She got around with a walker, had lost most of her hair, and lived with a variety of vascular and cardiac conditions. She had lived a long and interesting life. I was elected to speak at her funeral held at a church not far from her independent living apartment. It was my honor, although she and I were never very close.
So, is it just me or does everyone suddenly realize they have grown old?
Really, until just a year or two ago, I always felt like a young man.
My lovely partner assures me that I was always a young-thinking person. Is that a good thing, I wonder, or simply delusion?
In my mindfulness meditation group, we often talk about death, since we see it as the final transitional phase of life. Reminds me of the old saying, “Birth is a fatal condition.” I used to think that was funny. Maybe I still do.
In any case, just like you dear reader, I will continue enjoying life in every way I can. And then one day, I know, it will end.
I’ve always loved dramatic endings.
Vic Caldarola is the founder and lead facilitator for the Shine a Light Men’s Project, a mindfulness discussion group. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies.
Sign up here to receive our free weekly newsletter featuring the best of Crow’s Feet.
