My Immigrant Story. What Worked!

Picture courtesy of Tamara Barton at www.tamarabarton.com

Years ago, I immigrated to California with not much more than a prayer in my pocket and the promise of a new life awaiting me in the arms of a man I had fallen in love with.  I was young.  I was savvy.  I was head over heels.  I was either brave or crazy, or both.

I boarded a flight in Milan and landed halfway across the world in a beautiful and peculiar place I had long thought of as “exotic:” San Francisco.  It was beautiful alright; quirky, too, but it also set off alarm bells in my head.  I went from eating focaccia, touching the arms of people as I spoke with them, calling out ciao bello! across lively boulevards to navigating a land where bread came from gigantic supermarkets, people kept their distance,  and strangers spoke up only if they were lost or homeless or worked in customer service.

At first it was fun, and also funny.  With two people living inside of me (the Italian me, and the woman I was aching to become), I’d have entire conversations with myself.  Like: “This food is awful!  How can I possibly be expected to eat this stuff?”  Or, “He is cute but I don’t have a clue what he’s saying!”  I’d use my hands to ask for directions and the only one who seemed to understand me was my tail-wagging, doe-eyed dog, Luna.  We were great friends, Luna and I.  And hers was the only language I genuinely understood in California.

I moved into a house with six twenty-year old guys (one of them was my boyfriend, and he eventually became my husband) in suburban Silicon Valley.  Mind you, even though I flew in from Milan, I am from Florence, where every district is a small city onto itself, with colorful local cafés, bakeries on every corner, and antique churches on each block.  The suburbs left me dry-mouthed and starved for friendship, culture, and the rhythm of a cosmopolitan city.

The energy in Florence is contagious, thanks to the gregarious Italians who fill the street.  We love to be around others and we thrive on a strong sense of community and belonging.  There is a solid reason why Elizabeth Gilbert traveled to Italy to rediscover her appetite for sensory pleasures: A large part of our lives revolves around languid meals where we reconnect and recharge.

Not so in America.  Even though I was in a pretty unusual, and, one could argue “socially-padded” situation, during the first few weeks of my new life in California I watched in amazement as my roommates spooned ravioli out of cans, dressed them with brothy sauces (also out of cans), and ate them COLD at 10:00 pm when they returned from work (they were all students but worked part-time after their classes).  When I tried to make fun of them or crack a joke, all I could muster was a simple, stunned question like: “why?”  To which they laughed and said something I couldn’t understand.  Meanwhile, inside my head I had formulated twenty hilarious jokes, a couple of disgusting comments, and an essay I was planning to have published once I returned to Italy.  The spoken/written word became the trophy I was determined to hold, and also my biggest challenge.

When a few months later the time came to get a job, I realized that mastering the English language was paramount to everything else.   I had a prestigious position in Italy as a marketing manager, but I had to settle for becoming a customer service representative at a large semiconductor company.  For months I shared an office with two obese women who ate Twinkies all day long and polluted every other sentence with the F word.  I knew ten times what they knew but my impaired language skills reduced me to the level of a semi-capable person with an IQ of a nine- year-old.

What kept me going in spite of my challenges was, in order of importance, the following:

-       the great love I felt for my oh-so-apple-pie-American  boyfriend 

-       the fact that I could ALWAYS go back to Italy

-       the desire to explore new territories

-       and yes, the dog, whom I adored from the moment I saw her

Despite the list, which I kept on the forefront of my mind as I bustled my way through crowded supermarkets to find fresh produce, I knew I wouldn’t give up no matter what.  I remember to this day wanting to say “No wonder!” (which in Italian is figurati and doesn’t’ translate in the least), and never being able to crack this kind of idiom until much later.  I’d go to a bar and ask the guy at the entrance whether he wanted to see my AIUD (when I meant ID), or telling people that they were ducks (when I wanted to say turkey).    These mistakes, which were thought of as either endearing or confusing by others, went on, and on, and on.

One day, tired of being less than what I was, I began taking classes at a junior college.  Not in English As A Second Language, but in English as in “I am from here and I am taking the toughest courses that are offered.”  Almost every night I bid goodbye to my boyfriend and his roommates and headed to school.  Two years later, I obtained an Associate Degree (with Honors) in Literature.  I also found a job that was comparable to my previous position in Italy, and soon became a top performer for a well-known high-tech organization.  I was, as they say, On My Way.

The challenges of being in a foreign environment didn’t disappear overnight.  I’d stare in wonderment as my roommates put on jersey shirts and headed out to play basketball at dinner time, when in Italy sitting across from one another at the table to eat took precedence over everything else.   I felt the heat rise up on my face every time I opened my mouth and asked a question, my accent always giving me away.  People would turn and stare, sometimes smiling, sometimes wondering (I knew what they were thinking!) where I’d come from and what an interesting accent I had.  But being from Florence also gave me an advantage.  All I had to do is to say the word, and I became their best friend at once.

And friends, I thought, I made easily.  Some would call several of them “fair-weather friends,” a term that bewilders me to this day, and which presented me with one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome when I immigrated to the US.  What struck me a great deal was how casual and insincere relationships seemed to be.  Someone would say: “I’ll see you Thursday.”  But Thursday would arrive and this person would neither call nor show up.  This is relatively unheard of in Italy: We show up where we say we’ll be; we call when we say we will.  Here, it is often brushed off.  It is No Big Deal.  People would say they loved me, when I had met them only an hour before.  The problem was that I believed them, and at first thought I had died and landed in a small section of heaven where everyone was kind and generous and loyal and great fun. With time, I came to recognize the difference between what was meaningful conversation and what was not.

During those first few years I cried.  A lot.  I cried  knowing that I wouldn’t see my friend Graziella for who knows how long,  that my mom was thousands of miles away, that my family members were living lives that had little to do with me, that I was conflicted about the choices I’d made.  That I had, at long last, left the country that had brought me so much grief and yet so much joy.

My envy for tightly-knit cultures was acute at times.  I yearned to be a part of the large Latino families that populated the Mission district, who gathered together to celebrate quinceaneras and Day of the Dead.  I scoured the streets of San Francisco looking for Italians who might want to join me in creating a home away from home, but found only octogenarians whose parents hailed from Italy and who taught their children regional dialects I couldn’t understand.  I searched for Italian restaurants that served authentic fare but came up short.  I’d return to my roommates, deflated, and settle for boxed spaghetti with sauce from an aluminum can.

It’s been many years since I’ve visited the part of Silicon Valley I once lived in.  For all I know, the house has been torn down, and a small Italian bakery that specializes in cappuccinos is now in its place.  But I do know that I’ve grown fond of this land I immigrated to as a young woman eager for adventure, knowledge, love, family.  When I see canned ravioli at the grocery store, something in me stirs.  Sometimes I pick up a can, as it reminds me of the difficulties I overcame when I came to the US.  It also reminds me of the challenges I faced when I lived in Italy under harsh circumstances and was so desperate to get away that I found a way.  

To here, my adopted land, my beloved California, where I learned that the only true home is in our hearts.

Italian Meatballs

Last week, I posted the first of ten of my most beloved Italian recipes, all of which I learned from my grandmothers.  My maternal grandmother, Nonna Ida, a tiny, feisty woman from Florence, favored recipes that were simple but delightful.  Below you’ll find the recipe for her famous Italian Meatballs, a scrumptious main dish that I faithfully make for family and friends. 

 Ingredients

 1.5 lbs ground turkey (or ground beef, if you prefer)

1 egg

¼ cup flat parsley, chopped

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 slice of white bread soaked in milk

¼ cup of grated parmesan cheese

½ cup breadcrumbs

Pinch of salt, pepper, nutmeg

3 tablespoons olive oil, divided

¼ cup dry white wine

tk cup chicken broth

Mix the first 8 ingredients in a bowl.  Form the meat into small balls and coat them in breadcrumbs. 

Cooking Options

OPTION 1: In a nonstick skillet, heat the olive oil.  Brown the meatballs on both sides (approximately 2 minutes each).  Add the white wine.  Reduce the heat and add a few tablespoons of chicken broth (be careful not to drown the meatballs in the broth, as they’ll become mushy).  Once it is completely absorbed, remove from the heat and serve.  TOTAL COOKING TIME: 15 minutes

OPTION 2:  Replace the olive oil with vegetable oil and fill a frying pan to the top with the oil.  When very hot, deep fry the meatballs.  (The meatballs will be much crunchier, but the calorie count will of course be higher!)  TOTAL COOKING TIME: 10 minutes

OPTION 3: Omit the breadcrumbs and place the meatballs in simmering tomato sauce.  Cook the meat slowly, and serve over pasta.  TOTAL COOKING TIME: 30 minutes

*Looking for a great side dish to serve with these meatballs?  Consider serving a salad made with the following ingredients: arugula, sliced peaches, shaved fennel, slivered almonds, diced beets, goat cheese, and raspberry vinaigrette. 

Hello' Las Vegas!

  

The moment I stepped off the plane, it hit me: Loud music, glitz and grit, scantily-clad women sidestepping college students in skinny jeans and dirty shirts.  The smell of money, car exhaust, and spilled cocktails.  It was a hundred degrees out, the sun was relentless, and the neon signs cast tawdry light over the casinos and cars and malls and people from all walks of life, from the drunk and disillusioned to the men with dollar signs in their eyes.

Welcome to Las Vegas.

Our cab driver—a stubby man who was no more than thirty—looked at us sideways and told us, straight away, that he wouldn’t be talking on the ride to our hotel because he didn’t “like people.”

Did I tell you we were in Vegas?

Our hotel was a gargantuan golden structure that brought to mind the James Bond classic, Dr. No, in which the protagonist is painted in solid gold and ultimately dies of suffocation.  Gold was everywhere, but it failed to sparkle much in me besides terror: it rendered the place surreal and frightening.  I thought I might faint.  I thought I, too, might die from asphyxia.

This isn’t news: Las Vegas is contrived.  It’s an adult’s playground that’s filled with temptation.  Parts of it are opulent and beautiful; other parts are seamy and unkind. It’s filled with smoke.  It’s at once great fun, and, depending on the season and the time of day, either mildly or wildly offensive, even dangerous.  As my girlfriends and I rode the elevator up to our room, a large part of me shifted (and not just my body as I avoided the couple in the elevator with us—a middle-aged men with a chin that reached his chest and his wife, whose mouth was turned down like she’d just received impossibly bad news, both of them carrying half-filled glasses of white wine that were most likely dispensed ‘for free’ while they gambled away their kids’ college educations).  I found my mind reaching for the solace of nature, quiet amidst the angry house music that pounded through the burnt-out speakers.

I decided to take a walk along the strip.  This wasn’t my first time in Las Vegas, and despite the blistering weather and aggressiveness all around us, I was looking forward to our main reason for visiting, which was to see the Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil show.  Since I’d last been to the city, however, hotels had sprung up like mushrooms after an abundant rain.  It made me feel small and insignificant and yet  crowded in, and I thought of the panic-attack-inducing claustrophobia I’d experienced during previous visits.  But I tried something new.  I tried to see Las Vegas with fresh eyes.

I stood on the sidewalk, peering up at the ways the city had attempted to reproduce the natural beauty of Italy—my country, my original home.  Take The Bellagio, built after the style of the town of Bellagio on lake Como in Italy.  Fountains sprung up out of water that mirrored the faces of passersby every fifteen minutes, in sync with the sensuous music of Andrea Bocelli.  I walked on, towards The Venetian, where gondolas manned by men and women in black and white traveled across chlorinated canals, giving visitors views of the luxury shops that constellated the hotel: Gucci, Prada, Roberto Cavalli.  Then there was Paris Las Vegas, albeit not Italian, but which tried to capture the majesty of the Eiffel Tower.  The reproduction shot over three hundred feet into a blue, twilit, manufactured sky. 

I laughed quietly as I continued on my trek up and down the strip, imagining how my ancestors would feel if they saw these imitations of Italy, with its geographical wonders, its architectural achievements, its complex, layered history, its divine artwork and culture.  They would have been amused, annoyed, flabbergasted.  Just as I was.

I concluded the evening at Cirque du Soleil.  Spellbound by the heart-stopping, perfectly in-tune dancing and singing, I realized that despite all its imperfections and its naïveté, America is indeed the ultimate pioneer of creativity and inventiveness.  Italy cannot be recreated, but you can’t blame anyone for trying.

Flight Behavior and Motherhood

Barbara Kingsolver’s dazzling prose is undeniable and it’s on ample display in every book she has ever written, including her latest, Flight Behavior, the story of Dellarobia, a passionate young woman whose teen pregnancy and subsequent marriage halt her plans to attend college and force her to live out a dull existence in a forgotten town in the middle of Tennessee. With a controlling and cunning mother-in-law, a husband whose “eyes go glossy in front of the TV every night”…as he “channel surfed without cease,” Dellarobia has nothing of her own except a pair of brand new boots she wears on her way to meet a  potential lover. The meeting never takes place, as she stumbles upon a forest filled with Monarch butterflies—a forest ablaze—eliminating the possibility of an affair but also changing the course of her life forever.

Kingsolver skillfully parallels the penalties of climate change with the consequences of misguided life decisions. Like the Monarch butterflies who have fled Mexico for the harsh Tennessee winter, Dellarobia must learn to adapt to new seasons and daunting developments in order to survive.

In Dellarobia I found a great companion, and a part of myself. We are both mothers who love our children fiercely but who also, on some occasions, and sometimes painfully, long for a more significant existence outside the confines of our homes and domestic responsibilities. When I came upon the line, "but being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself," I thought yes, exactly. We are both survivors of marriages that have failed to meet our expectations, and Kingsolver writes about this with admirable candor: “She stared at Cub, trying to find holy matrimony in there, pushing her way back through the weeds as she always did.” We are both haunted by our parents’ deaths, disenchanted with the cards we’ve been dealt, and avid daydreamers. Most importantly, as Dellarobia discovers, and as I have been forced to realize, we are products of our environment…but that alone does not define us; we do have the power to change: “Something had gotten into her, yes. The arguments she’d always swallowed like a daily ration of pebbles had begun coming into her mouth and leaping out like frogs.” Witnessing Dellarobia gathering strength and giving into her intellectual curiosity, one can’t help but stand and cheer her on. 

Kingsolver’s talents neither start nor stop with memorable characters that are easy to identify with. She has a larger message here, and it is a message that needs to be heard.  She deftly braids a phenomenon of apocalyptic proportions within the humdrum of everyday life in a town made up of sheep laborers and farmers. The protagonist’s seemingly insignificant-existence-turned-upside-down represents the kind of transformation the world will have to face if it continues to be oblivious to the environment; that individuals will have to confront if they continue to be unaware of their potential. She demands our attention when she says, “They built their tidy houses of self-importance and special blessing and went inside and slammed the door, unaware the mountain behind them was aflame.” Ignorance and indifference and an unwillingness to adapt will surely ruin us, Kingsolver seems to be saying. And I couldn’t agree more.

I hope Kingsolver doesn’t wait as many years as she did between Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior to write a new novel. Her lyrical writing, the depth of her messages, her sense of humor, her keen understanding of nature--all of these aspects contribute to unforgettable, earth-shattering reading experiences that hit close to home in breathtaking, eye-opening ways.

Why emotions are reflected in the foods we cook

Like Water for Chocolate has stayed with me since I first saw it in the early 90s.  This dramatic, engrossing film follows Tita, a woman who is overcome with sadness when her family disapproves of her lover, Pedro.  Brokenhearted, she responds by cooking elaborate feasts for her family.  Cooking obsessively.  Which, on the surface, would seem fine, even appreciated by those she fed.  But her anguish is so intense that those who eat her dishes are infected with overwhelming despair and sorrow.

Eventually the two lovers find their way to each other again, only to be separated when Pedro dies. Tita, devastated and wanting to recreate the true passion she felt before, eats the candles that had lit the room until Pedro’s death and is reunited with him in the spirit world. The final union of their spirits and bodies sets fire to the entire ranch, and the only remnant left is Tita’s recipe book.

I, too, have found that the quality of the food I prepare is a direct reflection of my emotions.  If I’m upset while cooking dinner, the meal turns out overcooked, bland, or chewy—or all three.  When I’m happy, my food bursts with flavor.  The dishes are vibrant; they’re alive.

My culinary skills disappeared when my daughter Isabella left for college.  My ability to make delightful meals, from Italian meatballs and scaloppini to pasta with ragout, vanished seemingly overnight.  That talent seemed to belong to a different woman.  A woman who was on top of things.  A woman who kept a tidy kitchen stocked with fresh herbs, chunks of salty parmesan cheese, fresh mozzarella, loaves of bread.  A woman who was needed.

Like Tita, the emptiness I felt took a toll on those I attempted to feed.  Friends would talk less and stoop more when they came over for dinner.  They would stare at the flaccid Brussels sprouts on their plates, refusing to look me in the eye, and push pieces of stringy meat around, hiding them under uneaten lumps of oily starches.  They would drink glass after glass of wine, and leave only crumbs on the fruit and cheese plate appetizer I’d set out earlier in the night; meanwhile, their dinners grew cold and were eventually thrown out.  My husband would keep quiet—in case I’d snap back at him for his critical remarks—and I would finish off what was in front of me as if to say, eat up, this isn’t so bad.  These dismal meals would often leave me in tears by the time the last guest was at the door, begging off the dry, leftover casserole I offered them, the slice of pie filled with undercooked stone fruit.  These evenings would leave my confidence shattered.

Two years have passed since I became an empty-nester.  Two years in which I have slowly but surely learned to rediscover my zest for cooking.  How?  With the reliability of a church bell, I fly out to LA every four weeks to visit Isabella at college.  We shop for her favorite dishes and spend hours together in her small but efficient kitchen, making lasagna, gnocchi, meatballs, salads, pies, and cookies.  We sip wine and sing and joke around and steal bites of each other’s sauces.  We talk about anything and everything.  When her roommates return, we have feasts waiting for them, and three weeks’ of meals stacked and ready to be heated up in the freezer.  With my daughter, with so much life around me, I don’t worry about how the food will turn out.  Because I know it will mirror my pleasure.  I know it will be delicious.

And it always is.

Being away from my only child is still dumbfounding.  It can feel downright crippling at times.  But, unlike Tita, who resorted to eating matches to deal with her grief, I manage by knowing that, once a month, I’ll see my daughter.  I will be able to nourish her and enjoy her as she grows into a capable young woman.  Those weeks apart, while difficult, bring sweet anticipation.  They also keep me on my toes—my own kitchen is bright and fragrant, its counters covered with colorful cooking magazines to inspire me, the refrigerator full. 

Below you’ll find the first of ten recipes for dishes my grandmother taught me while I was growing up in Italy, dishes that I now make for and with Isabella. It is my hope that Isabella might one day teach and prepare these dishes for her own children and grandchildren.  In the meantime, bon appétit!.

1.     MINESTRA DI RISO E PREZZEMOLO (Rice and Parsley Soup)

The name of this soup suggests a bland, basic concoction.  I assure you it is not. Prepared correctly, it is one of the most delicious dishes I’ve learned to prepare.

INGREDIENTS

½ cup Arborio rice

½ yellow onion, chopped

32 oz. chicken or vegetable broth

1 bunch of fresh parsley, finely chopped (omit the stems)

3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, divided

Salt and pepper to taste

Generous fist full of freshly grated parmesan cheese

PREPARATION

Sauté the onion with half of the olive oil.  Meanwhile, bring the broth to a boil in a separate pot.  When the onion turns transparent, add the rice and brown it until the liquid is absorbed.  Add the broth to the rice and onion, along with the parsley, salt, and pepper.  Stir frequently.  Turn off the stove and add the remaining olive oil.  Sprinkle with parmesan cheese and serve immediately.

*If you find that the broth is lacking in flavor, you can add a bouillon cube.

The ONE step to ease suffering...

While I have a deep understanding of certain branches of spirituality—namely, how the principles in Emmet Fox’s THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT (a book that should be read by everyone) has shaped and informed my moral code—I don’t profess to be a guru or a spiritual guide of any kind.  There are enough of them out there, particularly in the pocket of Marin where I live.  You can walk out the front door and run smack into the next Deepak Chopra.  Rumor has it Huston Smith meditates in the park behind our house.  People like these do a great job of explaining ways to ease suffering and embrace a rewarding path of spirituality and wholeness.

People like me?  We live day by day.  Sometimes minute by minute.  This is a common occurrence in people who have survived childhoods that were rife with conflict and trauma.  We are perpetually in flight-or-fight mode.  If the kettle whistles too loudly, we are ready to run, even if our bags are not packed. 

And yet I can use my experience to offer others nuggets of advice.  Of wisdom gleaned from days spent in isolation and despair.

I was blue this morning.  I woke up to silence.  The birds that frequent our trees were quiet.  The first bad sign.  The sky was moody and gray.  Second omen.  A plane crash-landed at SFO and caught on fire, injuring many—the third indication that the world was coming to an end.  (Do you see how an uneasy mind works?  Everything is dire; everything is at risk).  Loneliness and fear sunk in. 

I couldn’t shake it, even as I walked my beloved dog in the woods nearby—an activity that usually succeeds at stamping out my disquiet.  Plays performed on dim stages filled my mind, my eyes.  They were noir; they bordered on macabre.

What to do?  WWEFD?  (What would Emmet Fox do?)

Fox emphasizes the notion that we have the power to turn off and shut out negative thoughts.  This is not an exercise for the weak-hearted.  This is not an exercise I wish I had to practice; sometimes, giving in to depression and anxiety is seductive, if not downright irresistible.  It allows you to stagger around, cry, sit, do nothing but feel.  And you can blame wasted days, weeks, months, and years on the emotions that intruded, knocked on the door, and locked themselves in.

If you resist the temptation to give in, however, you can achieve a degree of relief.  Perhaps even comfort.

So I did like Emmet Fox.  I did what spiritual gurus do: I meditated. 

I sat on a stool in my kitchen, aware only of the gentle music I put on my iPhone.  I breathed.  I breathed again.  I closed my eyes, blocked out whole thoughts, until I felt a strange return—to something warm, serene, and safe.  Something, somewhere, that resembled my mother’s womb.

When doubt crept in, I started again.  When distraction wormed its way into my thoughts—the errands I had to run, my evening plans, if my mother knew how much I regretted not sending her a postcard from my travels when she’d specifically asked me to, what I would wear to dinner, if my daughter had remembered to eat breakfast, if my beloved dog would last another year—I told myself I could think about my worries, both big and small, in ten more minutes.  And then another ten; another.  When I opened my eyes, an hour had slipped by.  I was boneless, my mind was relaxed, and while the sky was still gray, a small circle of sunlight shone through the fog.

I had succeeded at wiping away my brain’s clutter and had reunited with a state of natural wellbeing which, as we are told, is part of who we are, regardless of conflict, trauma, mere nuisances.

I still have bills to pay.  I still have concrete challenges to address, like everyone else. But I can either choose to let my mind take over with its endless plots and subplots, or I can embrace the practice of meditation to ease my suffering and enable myself to face life with joy and optimism.

Today, I chose the latter.  

Living with my alcoholic mother

Once upon a time, there is a little girl.  Blink and wink and that is me.  I am inside a bar, looking out at you.  You squint.  You’ve never seen such a thing—a toddler on a stool in a bar filled with smoke.  You have your own daughter at your hip, and her hair is in braids; you accomplished that just this morning while the kettle was whistling.  Your husband was nearby, and he smiled at you as he poured you tea.  The Beatles were on the radio, regretfully so.

You wonder where my mother is, and you ask this without saying a word.  I wave towards the back of the saloon, where my mom’s red hair is falling over her forehead as she keeps her hand of cards away from the eyes of the men she’s playing poker with.  There’s a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray in front of her.  You hold your own daughter closer still.

When you see me again, I am twelve years old, on a stoop in the snow.  It’s early morning, and the streets are quiet.  I am savoring the silence.  It’s been a night of terrors.  You sit beside me.  You listen.

Midnight.  I was huddled in bed under sheets stained with cat piss and soup in the condemned studio I share with my mom in the outskirts of Pavia, in Northern Italy.  Three mangy, skeletal cats are beside me, and I held them against my angry, hungry stomach.  They clawed my skin while trying to escape my desperation.

There is no electricity where I live.  There is no water.  There is no heat.  The bills have not been paid for months; no one knows that a girl on the cusp of her teens lives in the studio.

It snowed last night.  You know this; you saw it too.  The glass on our windows is broken and light shone through as I tried to find warmth.  The snow was a murmur and a spell outside the window.  If it were not for the condition I was in, it would have been terribly romantic.

When my mother came home, it was almost 2 am.  She was all stumble and rage.  Pray to the saints, my grandmother used to tell me.  So I did: Saint Rita, Saint Joseph, Saint Caterina.  I prayed until I ran out of names.

“Satan, where are you?” my mother yelled.  I stopped breathing, and my voice hitched in my throat.  Her fists hit the Formica cabinets.  She cried, and I didn’t have enough strength to get out of bed to try to console her.  Her sobs drilled holes in my heart.  When she fell asleep, her head on bruised knuckles, her skirt half way down her thighs, I tiptoed out of bed.  The kitchen was wrecked; the cabinets destroyed.  The studio smelled like a winery.

The cats fell asleep while I cleaned up the aftermath of my mother’s binge.  It had been going on for days. 

You hand me your rosary.  I wrap it around my fingers.  When you leave, I admire the way your hair falls just so.  I don’t know how long I will survive out here, but I am certain of this: I will never become prey to the beast that is booze.

Growing Up in Half-Broke Homes

Last night I had the pleasure of attending New York Times bestselling author Jeannette Walls’ reading at my favorite independent bookstore.  Rather than reading from her new novel, The Silver Star, Jeannette elected to talk about her difficult upbringing in West Virginia—a childhood that is recounted with skill, humor, and grace in her widely acclaimed memoir, The Glass Castle.

The Glass Castle is one of the top selling memoirs of all time, and deservedly so.  Walls is a candid writer with a story that is at once extraordinary and easy to relate to.  Her story is my story and your story, and it’s that universal feel to her narrative that has attracted readers from around the globe.

I’ve read the book several times, and have found numerous similarities between our childhoods and our wish to overcome the challenges we faced as kids from half-broke homes.  She was raised by an eccentric mother and an alcoholic father.  She was poor.  She salvaged food from garbage cans in order to survive—and this was before the dirtbag culture became trendy.  She was confused and often left to her own devices.  And yet she didn’t only survive: she carved out a life of great success for herself. 

What’s nagged at me during my readings of her work is this: I felt that Jeannette Walls was either exaggerating about her background, or received more love than what comes through in the book.

Jeannette was dynamite at the event: hilarious, self-confident, and down-to-earth.  Her comments touched everyone in the audience, and her answers to the questions raised by the attendees were honest, thoughtful, and provocative.  She also proved to me, and perhaps the rest of the audience, that her story was true, accurate to the bone.

Jeannette told a story that strengthened my trust in the veracity of her memoir.  When she was a child, her father gave her Venus as a Christmas present.  Years later, after the publication of The Glass Castle, a woman who was raised on Fifth Avenue by an incredibly wealthy family confessed: “I would have done anything to have had my father give me a Venus as a gift; I would have preferred to have been raised poor if it meant that my father would’ve been a presence in my life.”

Surely this is a tale that will stay with me.  Jeannette was raised, at certain points, without plumbing, electricity, adequate nutrition.  But if love is present, she emphasized during her talk, it can compensate for everything else.  It can make the whole world go ‘round.

I expected to feel bitter about her clarification of this.  I have distinct memories of thinking, when my mother was either passed out or absent for days at a time, that if only she’d been home, singing my name, brushing my hair, holding my hand, it wouldn’t matter that we didn’t have coal or groceries, and a lone candle was used to light up our entire apartment.  What would matter: We would have been together.  We would have endured the cold and long nights side by side, heart by heart.

Like Miss Walls, I learned to cope, parent myself, persevere.  Like Miss Walls, this made me fierce, outspoken, and independent.  It gave us both courage to reinvent ourselves.  Empowerment.  Unlike Miss Walls, however, it wasn’t love and affection from my family that kept me going.  It was the knowledge, deep down, that one day I would sprout wings.