During a recent trip to my home town, Hoboken, NJ., my brother-in-law, Joseph McAllister took a photo of my younger sister Josephine and I standing arm-in-arm with are backs facing the New York City skyline. A few days later, we visited our mother Maria at the Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington where she shares a plot with our late dad Frank who passed away last December.
We laid a floral bouquet at their tombstone. Mom was born on November 2, 1924 in a small fishing village of Roccalumera in the province of Messina of Sicily.
She came to the United in 1947. Three years later she gave birth to me—her fist child. She was very courageous. She gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search
of liberty and a better life and to meet my dad whom she only knew through a photograph sent with a letter from a matchmaker friend in the US.
She survived the carpet bombing and machine gun fire of US Army Air Corps in 1943 during World War ll as well as an electrical storm on a Merchant Marine Clipper
headed to Ellis Island. In the early years when I used to visit my ancestors I used to see the bullet holes in the stucco of my grandparents home.
I am proud of my Sicilian heritage. People get confused about the difference between Italians and Sicilians. Not all Italians are Sicilians but all Sicilians
are Italian. Apart from that, there is are no visible differences, though voicing such a thought could be perceived as fighting words to a Sicilian.
I have been blessed to have taken more than 15 trips to Sicily since the age of three.
Mom became a hard worker at a garment factory, or what was commonly called a sweat shop but later became a stay at home mom. She had a good heart. Her first thought was always to send care packages and money back to her native land to help her parents and siblings. She was protective of me, always kept a clean home and loved to cook. Her beauty caused most men’s heads to turn. She was popular with my friends.
She had a contagious laugh and a sharp wit and would not hesitate to give me a piece of her mind if I misbehaved. In later years, when I became successful in
my podiatry practice Cecile and I would take her and my younger brother Steve to visit the family in the old country. I used to love when Italian relatives and friends came to visit our home and spoke in their native tongue. In later years she loved to play bingo, she loved to walk, especially when we would fly her and dad out to California for visits where
she felt really peaceful. We loved to take walks together in the local or county parks. The topography and weather of Northern California reminded her of Sicily, which is one of the reasons I wanted to live in the Bay Area. We enjoyed taking her and dad on an Alaskan Cruise, to Mexico and multiple times to her and dad’s favorite island, Maui.
Though she has been gone five years last Mothers Day, she is always with me. She is the whisper of the wind, the rustling of the leaves on an autumn day. She is the smell of Italian foods. She is the fragrance of red roses we used to send her for Mother’s Day and her birthday, she is the cool hand on my forehead when I wasn’t feeling well as a child. She is the reassuring hug and soft voice when I was sad. She is the person who pushed me to continue my studies.
She is the sound of the rain that lulls me to sleep. She is the laugh I hear in myself, the inherited fissure skin above my brow, the place in her womb that nurtured me, the walks in the park, the sound of Italian music or the tourist or passersby speaking my mother’s native tongue. She is my first love and my first friend and though we sometimes had words, nothing on earth will ever separate the fact that she is my mother for all eternity. Not time, space or death will keep us apart.
Buon Compleanno (Happy Birthday), mom and thank you for giving me this life to live!
