My name is Garbo… don’t laugh. Nobody forgets. It’s Hungarian not Swedish. I’m not related. I’ve not seen her films. I am only familiar with a few scenes with her in a top hat on stage in some beer hall. She might be good. Is she the one who said “I vant tobe alone” ?
I’ve got two sides. The Hungarians, like Aunt Lina who was famous for her coconut cream pies, Mister Szabo ( a perfect souse) a friend of my father’s father who came to live with us after we moved to California after the war in ’47, and Uncle “Shadow” who got his nickname from following the older toughs of Buffalo. These are my father’s people (or were…all dead) Buffalo, that’s where we all come from.
My mothers people, the Sicilians were more interesting, only tales I overheard when they thought I was too young to understand or got scraps of ‘the lore’. Later my older Cousin Cookie and I sat around and drank when we were the only ones left. And now she’s dead and I have no one to envision or partake about life in the old days, the old ways of our clan. Not that I have no family. Mercy no. I have seven Grandchildren. But aside from Alyosha my second son and Sasha my first son, nobody inquires about their so-called roots. But, even they, have only made a cursory inquiry into the personalities that make up our gene pool so to speak. I once told a story that my Aunt Connie told me about my Grandfather, Nonno ( He and all my Grandparents died before I was born. I know them as characters in a never-ending story. His sir-name was Orazio. He came to America in 1914 from Valledolmo, Sicily with his bride Concetta. They had the usual difficulties ..food and shelter. Anyway the story went… Grandpa used to go to the park and catch pidgins that he would bring home in a cloth sack. Gramma Cocnetta made stew from these meager carcasses. Anyway he got tossed in the cooler for three days when he forgot his sack and his pockets full of pidgins got loose on the trolley home.
Other weird Italian cuisine included watching my Uncle Frank who boiled chickens feet and gnawed on them with a napkin tucked into his starched white dress shirt he wore every day cause he was a Jehovah Witness Minister. Being a servant of god didn’t stop him from molesting me and my cousin Carmine who turned out to prefer a homo salacious cornucopia.
Once after getting good and liquored up, Cookie asked if I remembered the funerial of Aunt Domanica when we were about 4 or 5. I asked in return if she was the one they made us kiss in the coffin. She said, “ I haven’t looked into a coffin since.” Me neither.
