Chapter II: The Middle

So, I was born in Greece in 1962.   It’s all my Dad’s fault.  I am born in the final chapter of his Chicken book.  Strangely, I never read the book till after I moved to Los Angeles, 5 years following my Mother’s death.  You would think if your Dad wrote a book you might read it, especially if it was about your life.  I always knew the folklore of the story and gave the book to good friends to read over the years as a qualifier of their friendship, but never read it for some reason.  I knew the story cold because I lived it so I always talked about the fable as if I wrote the thing myself.

As luck might have it, I gave it to a coworker of mine whose dad was this big Hollywood guy, past President of a large studio, Chairman of the Academy Awards, blah, blah.  She loved it and pushed me to give it to her dad.  Several years passed and I finally gave it to him.  Sure enough he loved it too but was too busy to produce it.  But he read it!  He said “It would make a great movie, but I have no time to work on the screenplay. The problem with the book is that it has no conflict in it, no tension between the main characters.  The “B” characters are well developed, very hysterical, but the main ones, the “A” characters, need conflict.  It has lots of funny scenes in it: the scene of Ya-Ya and trying to look up her skirt, blessing the rotting chickens in the hopes that the Greeks will come into the store, the scene of the customs agent and the barbeque machine, Nick-the-walk, etc., but it is missing tension and structure, people in Hollywood like to see a beginning, a middle and an end.”  Then he said, “I’ll tell you what, you work on it, find a writer, write the screenplay and I’ll help you once you have a draft, we’ll take it to Sony and pitch it.”

So, I did just that.  I worked on adding tension and Hollywood-like intrigue to the tale.  It was a weird task, messing with my parents’ story, but one I embraced with a spirit of their life, a spirit of drama and fiction.  After all, they were in their early 30’s when they took flight to Greece.  They were reckless, I knew that. They were charming; I benefited from that.  Most of all, they were characters—east coast style—and that was my heritage.  I forgave myself on the merits to toy with their lives, to spin conflict into it.  And in spinning this conflict, I came to grips with who I was, and where I came from.

Now you are in for a real treat.  Here is the Chicken story as written by my dear deceased Father, William G. Battista.  It is printed here as originally written, unabridged.  The Hollywood conflict that I would add to the story is simple, so I will offer it up now…imagine, all the while, that Bob Newman, Bill’s best friend is actually having an affair in Greece with Bill’s wife, Kay.  Imagine that her baby born towards the back of the book—me—is not really Bill’s offspring, but rather the product of a torrid love affair between Kay and Bob the friend and partner.  Imagine that Bill was in the dark about it the whole time.  I know, it sounds so Hollywood.  Good conflict though, right? 

My dad's book, as you will read, was set in 1961 as written by my dad in 1965. It really is hard to embellish on their story with much, as was always the problem with my flamboyant parents.

Now, in the spirit of making a movie, I casually set out to find a friend that is a screenplay writer.  That is not a difficult task when one lives in lala-land.  I picked one of my friends who was an aspiring screenwriter and he started on it.  We tried to add tension to the story but disagreed over the plot.  He did not like my thoughts that it should be a love comedy/tragedy between Bill, the sporadically insolent dreamer husband; Kay, the doting pent up, increasingly resentful wife; and Bob, the opportunistically voyeuristic and not so dedicated friend.  Not interesting he proclaimed.  I fired him.

My take was that the conflict would start to reveal itself when Kay gets pregnant and you don’t really know whose kid it is.  Bill is befuddled when he finds out Kay is pregnant; they have not been together in months.  He has his doubts but he dutifully rallies and re-embraces his family.  The moral is obvious: dreamer wanders in search of happiness only to discover that love was in the backyard all of the time, it had nothing to do with escapes from the accoutrements to far off lands.  The audience never really knows what happened but it doesn’t matter…great feel good story with a beginning, a middle and an end!   I had my movie.

Chapter III: The End

So, back to my movie pitch to Cathy.  After telling her an abbreviated version of what you already know, I staged the grand finale!

“The last scene in the movie is Kay [my Mom], Casablanca style, saying goodbye to Bob at the airport in Greece, I, a one-year old in her arms, year 1963, on the runway.  She takes the gold coin from around her neck and tells him—‘Baby, I want you to keep this Greek coin as a keepsake for Bobby.  Your son.’  Kay gently folding his hand shut with the coin in it.  Fade to black.  The End!”

As I told that finish, uttered those words to Cathy, in that very moment I had a thought: “What if it is true!”  I thought: I don’t look anything like my brothers, I have always been different from them, always the responsible one, albeit like we all have roles in a family.  They used to chide me I was adopted but all youngest kids get so chided.  I thought.  I searched.  I am the only one in the family with brown eyes, I had white hair when I was a kid which I always chalked up to being born to Greek beaches (although my Mom, prideful, always said we came from the Peloponisos, where the Turks never infiltration, and the Greeks were fair).  I was tall.  I was the only one in the family that did not have a substance abuse problem.  In my 30s I was going bald!  A Greek and Italian man going bald (although my Mom always said that you need to look beyond your immediate father to the Grandfather, which in this case was bald in his old age).  My Mother always said I was born unto that classic Greek song, Never On Sunday.  I never really understood what that meant other than it sounded forbidden.  Now I thought: forbidden how?

Ok, so my parents were dead.  I met Bob Newman once at my Mom’s funeral.  I did not even know him.  He appeared out of nowhere, gave me a Greek coin, and disappeared again. That was 10 years ago. I hadn’t given him another thought.  But now, all I could do was think of him.  The next day I called my sister.  She was the family record keeper and matriarch since my mother had died.  I told her I finally figured out how to tell the Chicken story, how to make it a great movie with conflict. She heard my pitch, the phone space between us oddly quiet.  Nancy said, “Do you think it’s true?”   I said, “I don’t know.”  I needed to find and call Bob Newman.  Nancy found his number in Mom’s old stuff, now 10 years gone by, and stoically gave it to me.

I sat on the precipice.  All of my human frailty rested in my still hands.  What was I to do?  My parents were dead.  What was the truth?  Would anyone tell me?  Did any of it matter? Was Bob Newman still alive?  How was he positioned?  Was he a friend or foe?  Was he to be honest?  Did he have a conscious?  Did any of it really matter?  What if he was senile and anyone that called him became his son?  All these thoughts cycled around in my head like electricity being called to a light switch when someone flicks it.  I had always lived a life of constant motion.  Activity—any type of activity—was a whimsical escape into a self controlled reality.  Now I was still.

I made the phone call to his Florida home after dinner the next evening.  I had a predicament in figuring out what to say?  If it is true there is a good chance he will not tell me as they obviously never intended that I know, their beguile making witness to my life.  We small talked for a minute or two.  I told him I was happy, married, kids, stable, financially secure and, oh yeah, I had a bizarre question for him.  I said before asking it:

“If it is true, don’t say a word.  Don’t say anything. Ok?”

“Ok” he capitulated.

“If it is not true, just tell me,” I continued.

“Ok,” he mused.

“Ok.  Is there any chance that you’re my father?!” I boldly stated.

1.5 seconds lapsed.

“It’s true.”

An eternity passed.

“It’s ok” I said strongly.  “I figured it out.”

“I’m so glad it’s out in the open” he confessed.  “I’m so glad its out.”  You could walk on the words.

“So how’s the health on that side of the family?” I quipped.

We went on from there to fill in the details.  How did it happen?  What happened?  Who knew?  What did they agree on?  Etc.  Turns out my Hollywood story superimposed on my Dad’s book was dead on, almost verbatim.  He said that he and my Mom fell deeply in love, that my Dad worked in the daytime at the store, and he worked at night (I chuckled a thought in my head: ‘yeah, in more ways than one’).  He explained it like it was yesterday, as if finishing a recent conversation, that my Dad and Mom were estranged at the time, were not sleeping together and when she was pregnant they all knew what had happened.  Listening to the story was like peering in on a bustling fish tank.  There was lots of activity but it was deadly silent and I could not do anything to get involved.  A dull numbness filled my brain.  I meandered a bit like a dingy being towed in tether to a boat drifting and accelerating, remembering its course only when being lunged by the taught rope.  The details were like a hard hail storm pelting the windshield while you sit safe and cozy in a plush car.  The storm was happening, it would pass, and these small ice balls that braved the elements, proud and strong, imploring their concerted message on the entrapped, would magically be vanquished by their new world, perhaps not without leaving small dents about which their origins would only be known to those that braved the storm, the aftermath of which to be duly afforded as a mystery to others.  Hail is a natural phenomenon that we witness in awe, such now was my news.  I also realized that I could really only hear his story at this point, my parents were poor players on his stage.  His message survived, it was given an opening through which he was releasing his hail storm, weighing me to my station immobile in the nested life that my parents provided acting as a protectorate like a windshield.  In this storm I was oddly feeling safe.  Here I was, 38 years old, getting told from a man I just met for all intensive purposes, no, my dad technically, getting told about how he and my mom, no, his lover, were going to take me and run away with the other kids to a life of happiness.  But then my Dad rallied.  He punched Newman in the nose, broke it, sent him to the hospital claimed me as his son, as part of his family. He became my father.  I was listening, chasing the story all the while seeing three confused people, in their young 30s trying to make sense of their unfettered detritus.

Here, at 38 I was evidently a new-man.  A Robert Joseph new-man, as was his name.  I already had the Robert Joseph part, just not the Newman part.  Over the coming weeks I pondered on a lot of material.  I grew up Greek and Italian.  Now I was Greek, German and Irish.  I always did get along unusually well with the Irish I thought.  I talked to my brother and sister.  Nancy grew up suspecting it all along, being 8 years older than I she remembered the fights between Mom, Dad and Dad at the time.  She remembered the time my Father (who will remain Bill Battista) broke Newman’s nose and took him to the peasantry public Greek hospital instead of the better private one. (It’s funny how kids remember things that don’t make sense.)  On his death bed, my Dad officially confessed to Nancy under an oath to secrecy.  After finding out the truth myself, I remember calling an old family friend, the kind of friend that even as an adult you still call “Mr.”  I was explaining how it was all a little different now.  How I am not really who I thought I was.

“It’s weird,” I said.  “I am not really Italian.  I loved the idea that I was some hot blooded Greek and Italian.  I cook great Italian food.”

“Bobby, you are Italian,” Mr. Iannocone asserted.  “Your Dad was Italian, he loved you so very much and you are Italian.  You know I am 100% Italian, ok.  I go to Italy every year to visit relatives, the old country.”

“Yeah?  Uh huh—”

“I say to my relatives, ‘I’m Italian!’  They laugh.  They say: ‘You’re not Italian.  You’re American Italian!’”

It was a great fable for me.  It grounded me.  It neither offended my biological father nor did it diminish my paternal father.  Besides the story helped me preserve my morphing identity, it made me gain perspective.  I thought, ‘huh, I should find like reckonings to as many of the open issues that avail me.’   I should celebrate the fact that I had two dads, one that raised me in unabashed, albeit dysfunctional love to the best of his abilities and one that was happy to be found.  I did, however, have a lot of thinking to do.  What was the essence of family?  Was it blood?  Was it nurturing?  On the one hand I had one dad that lived a pontificating ponderous existence, diverted by the occasional grandiose scheme and on the other hand, I had a dad that lived a blissfully happy sensate life over the countertops of his serial food establishments.  One lived romanticizing life through literature and one became alive through the realities of literature.  Nevertheless, accompanying my ambient sense of confusion was a luminous sense of relief.   Feelings of clarity coursed through me like a magical dye clearing a body of water of its opacity.

I had always yearned for one event, one magical bullet to kill a demon.  The demon was of a peculiar sort though. It was the demon betrothed to lack of acknowledgment and as such very illusive.  That was the entry of the bullet, the mere fact that I found the target.  The exit was that one event itself—one meaningful event—would assuredly rip all the injustice out of my life.  As one impact it was perhaps a decisive wound that would heal the two, acknowledgment with atrocity.  It is generally hard to find one ethereal event to accomplish all of that.  The New-man discovery was it.  It was large enough.  A total loss and found of identity.  A blank check to write all bad debts to.  I was gifted that in my news.  “I’m adopted!  I don’t belong here and I don’t belong there!”  I just belong.  I felt cleansed, admittedly in kind of a dirty way.  To this day I am not sure why; and, in that it is one of the only things I don’t question in life. It is one of the few things I leave in the sanctity of a sovereign state for my base emotions.  Maybe it is because I found an answer to a pestering emotion.  I always felt this open ended aspect to my life, a missing link. Don’t misunderstand: my interpretation of not belonging is not a license to stray; it is an emblem for groundedness, an absolution, of self and others.

My dads gave me many gifts, of this I am sure.  In their un-proclaimed struggle to find meaning, find love, they made me.  Made by consequence, reward, sacrifice, neglect and commitment.  I guess what I realized is that, unbeknownst to me, I was ½ made till I discovered the truth.  I always felt like I had a missing piece and figured that everyone felt that way, it was the human condition.  Upon discovery of Newman I thought that truth meant honesty. I felt quenched by the honesty only to be soon parched by the arid reality that honesty only facilitated enlightenment.  Truth has more to do with meaning and how we reconcile facts, honesty/dishonesty, into understanding. I have come to realize that truth is understanding which sits just atop of honesty.  An obtuse set of semantics admittedly but ones I cast fairly and ones that I am compelled to figure out in light of my news.  The big question being: Does it matter?  Does the truth matter?  Why?  Well, it all rests on the meaning of the “truth.”   The truth is not the fact pattern.  The truth is not a compilation of true statements.  There was so much deceit surrounding my life that I always felt I never knew truth.  I was missing ingredients to gain understanding.  Very frustrating. There is no greater loneliness than the feeling of isolation in the company of others.  It was, however, this very trait, or tolerance I should say that made me so successful in life.  Successful in relationships, in challenging situations, in my career.  I was both very tolerant of injustices and also always vigilant on finding clues to a more fulfilled life.

You must ask: “But don’t you feel betrayed?”  “Don’t you feel lied to?”  “Duped?”  “Bitter?”  No. Why would I?  How would I cycle to such ground?  It would be an idiot’s wind that I would draft to get there.  And now, when I was looking to affront such a draft, I would not be relegated to that space.  I did feel a tinge bit irrationalized in the world of faithful woman though.  None of our moms really had sex.  We were all immaculately conceived.  Right?  I had to think: ‘Who was unfaithful?’   My Mom?  My paternal Dad?  My biological Dad?  I suppose they all were. In this sense I still struggle.  I feel through people all too often.  Always have.  ‘What would so-and-so feel?  How would so-and-so feel?’  Things were generally discombobulated.  My discovery did help to correctively focus me on me.  I found my missing piece.  It forced me to think about how I felt about events, particularly since my parents were dead and interpretation lay on my shoulders.  I suppose I always felt through people as a means to try to spy the truth for myself like a ferret earning its name.  If I could always trust people to be dishonest, or more aptly be honest to the best of their ability as bound by their circumstances, then I always trusted people and ultimately relied on myself to find the truth.

As the ensuing months passed I came to grow into my new-man story.  I used it as a crooked crutch in times of fain togetherness.  Perhaps the most disconcerting time was when I actually went to meet my biological father a few months after I discovered the news.  It was a microcosm for what it all meant I guess.  I looked just like him.  I cooked like he cooked, we liked the same food, had the same strange metabolism that was the envy of my friends.  I remember feeling like I was a monkey raised by lions that actually thought I was a lion until I met another monkey.  I felt this strange sense of righteous betrayal of my heritage when I actually saw him.  In a good sense though.  The feelings had balance for me.  I felt self delivered, through my own vigilance, to this place.  I actually was a monkey but I belonged with the lions.  I knew their ways, their pride traditions, was conditioned by their haunting habits and would die by their veldt, ah, alas, but with monkey genes.

I also met a half sister, aptly named Nancy.   Fancy having two sisters named Nancy.  It was a little strange.  She was as kind as a sister would be.  That is one thing that I learned: family is family no matter what.  Maybe because we are all searching for more, or maybe because it is a matter of blood, but family has an aura to it, an energy and a claim to more.  It is a puzzle though, as we have all heard, “you cannot pick your family!”  I never knew anyone had a choice but in a strange sense I, for one did.  A choice of perspective, for my reality was my reality.  Of acceptance.  And, in that acceptance a choice of understanding.  I understand that the world is a broken place. I understand that people make mistakes. I understand that we make the best of situations.  I am such a situation.

Recently, Bob Newman died.  He died for what in my family was an old age of 75.  He died young in the standards of his family.  Most of his people lived into their 80s and 90s.  When I got “the call” of his passing I was very sad.  In a funny way it completed the meaning of the whole discovery for me.  I was alone and I knew it.  Years before my discovery, in my early 30s, I went to a Rabbi that I respected and vividly recall telling him: “I just want the sky to part and a pair of hands to come down, assuredly, to give me a badge acknowledging that I had a tough life.”  I said that I just wanted some definitive authority to acknowledge that sometimes it sucked, sometimes it was ugly and I did okay, I made it.  The Rabbi said to me: “No doubt you had a tough life, suffered great loss and were robbed of a childhood.  But, I would suggest that unless you find meaning in all of it, unless you accept how all those experiences shaped you, you will be lost.”  I was magnetically puzzled to this idea of finding meaning to my life through acceptance.  Only I was unsure of what to accept.  I lived a life pummeled by receptive acceptance, passively accepting my lot.  To accept pro-actively though, what would I want to accept? I had a choice?  On the day that I found my new-man news the sky parted.  On the day Robert Joseph Newman died I got my badge.  I was irrefutably alone.  I accepted that.  It calmed me.  I was cut loose.  There is no worse suffering than a pain unfixed to a source.  Such pain is without meaning and therefore without cure.  My pain began to gain a source and as such it flowed directly out of me like a ribbon might wisp free off a fence by catching a determined wind.  It was made real.  I have always lived in a resilient world self created by rationalizations.  My news was blessed news.  It was a gift.  I felt blessed to have figured it out.  I loved my Dad and I loved Bob Newman for the short time that I knew him.  My Dad made me resilient and Bob Newman made me rational.   His absence in my life gave me a yearning to learn the truth and in doing so gave me a behavioral skill that was now mine.

Oh the oddities come and go.  How many people can say they buried two Dads?  I hated funerals, having been to too many prematurely.  I knew I had to go to his.  It was oddly enough the only one I wasn’t afraid of and kind of excited to attend.  I knew it was critical to me for closure. I also knew for once, it was my decision to go.  It was my mourning.  No family pressure because there was really no bond with family on that side.  I was free to mourn as I pleased.  Nevertheless, age and adulthood status does not change the childhood impressions we have of certain social obligations.  Funerals are untouchable, they are like going to bed, you have to do it. Going was another trip altogether though.  I packed my bag for Florida. There I met my ½ brother, Robert Joseph and other ½ sister, Janet, both of which I never met till the day of his funeral.  Reflecting, it is ironic how many immediate blood relatives I met at funerals. It rings of the old cliché: with every death there is rebirth.  It is also ironic that both Bobby Newman and Janet did not speak to their father for some 15 years because he ended up leaving their mother to an affair with the cashier at his store. They being incensed at the deceit and indecency that surrounded his departure.  He initially married in the year after coming home from Greece, in 1964, had the three kids and divorced 10 years later.  He then remarried to the cashier in his store following his divorce and lived a happy life to his death 20 years later.

When I showed up to his funeral it was like Mick Jagger appearing at a teen party, except the teens were all seniors.  Everyone knew me.  I knew three people, Phyllis, his widow; Nancy, my sweet ½ sister and her husband, Sandro.   It was like playing a role in a movie, people came up to me, not even knowing who I was, but the combination of standing next to his widow and looking exactly like him, would say: “Your father was a great man, we loved to work with him.  We are so sorry for your loss.”  He worked at a supermarket up until he died. At my previous parental funerals I was always angered by the overtures of consolation and the “sorry” brigade. This time, I felt rested, actually calm enough to accept the consolation, even strong enough to console them with a haughty mourner’s phase.  I really felt like his spirit was in me and I was providing a service to the community.  To say that mourning is a personal experience is pejorative.  To be called to mourn without personal emotions is bizarre.  It feel like when you got a hall-pass to roam the empty corridors in grade school and all of your friends are getting tortured in their classes, but you, you were free.  You know what it feels like to be in the class, in the control of the teacher, but you were somehow stealing time and missing—forever—the material being covered.  For those brief “hall-pass” moments, you were invisible.  Such was the feeling of being at his funeral.  I was there, in my station, first pew position, the honored seat, but it was not really real.  I envisioned the funeral parlor as a school, with me walking in this neutral zone, though kids I did not know, maybe 7^th graders, walking these safe corridors, hall-pass in hand right through everyone. I tried so hard to feel what my ½ sister Nancy was feeling, she was crying, weeping in peaks and valleys unintentionally synchronized to the chorus of his widow’s dignified, albeit valium induced, corps speak.  Where else than a funeral can speaking to nobody be so accepted.  It is a blissful license afforded to the primary survivors. The widow is Queen at a funeral. Anything goes. In this case, with a touch of “it’s ok” humor, her valium high was confessed in a pew murmur.  Nancy said: “She took a valium to help out, she has been a mess,” and then Phyllis would chime in, “I’ve never taken these pills, they’re great, oh well, who knew…”  The valium seemed to help her in very social-like manner come in and out of the terrets of mourning.  It was actually endearing in the way that it took the awkwardness of her transitions from “Bobby, how was your trip” banter to “oh, Bob (her husband) when are you coming home” and then in a lower voice… “You know he loved to work, he loved the customers and the people at the store.”

One of the most amazing benefits of the funeral was this old couple from the Bronx, married 55, yes 55 years.  Between the two of them, equally summed, they might have been eight feet tall.  They knew my parents and Bob Newman as kids.  I melted into their tales and was coddled by their discreet intones of childhood confessions.  “Your Mom and Dad were great friends, we all grew up together…yeah we knew your Dad well.” No name was mentioned.  A Niagara of history coursed down the lineages that they represented.  They knew my grandparents (Grandpa Billy and Grandma Nancy and even the ones I didn’t know on the Newman side) which made me feel like I had family there at the funeral.  We all like to feel represented.  After all, that’s the essence of funerals—representation.  I felt my Mom and Dad there through their stories.  This little couple, preserved in Florida, was a connection to everyone.  They were also beautifully colored by the obvious grief over my dad du jour.  It was a peculiar feeling feeling so engaged in talking to them amidst the home court backdrop of the local fans.  We were both connected from the old school ties of the Bronx.  Images of family covered me as I stood listening, towering over these sweet, adorable sentries of both worlds.  Until we met we were both marginalized by the nouveau Florida community of mourners. The trip had purpose.  Meeting them was really special and, but not for a moment, the din of the parlor was muffled by the blanket of warmth that covered me with the soothing magic that a dense still-life snowfall makes on a bustling city park.

We buried Bob Newman in one of those “condo” tombs that they used to stock cartons of cigarettes in behind the counter.  ‘Uh, I’ll have a carton on Marlboros, and oh yeah, um, can you put my dad in the 4^th row, eight up…’  It felt good to put the services behind me.  Of course there was an “after party,” Bronx/Florida style.   These were “Deli” people.  People of the counter with a license to slice meat.  I was assigned to Nancy and Sandro as my priority escorts in that sobering postmortem parking lot negotiation that reminds people they have to move on and function.  Ah, the jarring and comforting aspects of logistics and small concerns.  It was agreed, I would follow Nancy and Sandro to the hosting house, the house of the widow’s sister.  The elongated and nondescript carpet of sun blanched Florida communities that we drove through were perfect to cleanse the mind after the funeral.   Life went on.  Cold-cuts would be served.  We choose life. We would eat to live; perhaps even tip the Chablis a little early if the widow leads the charge.

I prepared for phase II: the return to social conversation that cannot happen in the mourning parlor.  People would want to get to know me.  My family instincts prepared me for the situation as I docked my rental car along with the early arrivers on the lawn of the house I was entering.  I figured there had to be a drunken uncle in there somewhere and if I was lucky, I would get out before he reared so I could spare myself of that side of this family.  The house was perfectly Florida.  Ranch bungalow with trinkets resting on shelves that only retirement can populate with such precision.  It was sweet, the people were so nice.  I was still under the grandiosity of the first family.  I had a flight back home in four hours, which gave me about an hour and a half at the party, just enough time to lush through the first nectar of the tier one epitaphs and not enough time to have them tarnished by any breaks in the veneer of a wayward mourner.  Everyone was delightful. People changed into Florida casual wear, which in and of itself is like a sedative. Funeral’s over, respect Bobby Newman—production time, deli style. The General was dead, Sergeants became First Lieutenants and the food was laid out in great pride.  “Bobby loved parties, this is great roast beef, you want some? Try the liverwurst, he loved this...”  In the milling around of the kitchen, I was first told about the spread, where they got all the meats from and who pulled in favors from whom to procure Newman’s favorites.  The communal feeling of aloof nobility surrounding the meats and the cold-cuts was regal.  Bobby would have loved the party.

Moments like when I was reaching for a sandwich and one of his nieces (a teenager) started to tear up because my hands looked just like his, were, well, a bit strange.  They were endearing though.  “Look at his hands, they look just like his.  I’m sorry, it is just amazing though.”   Then Nancy and Sandro blurted out, “yeah, he drives like he did too, its weird, we were laughing so hard, he is all over the road, crossing the line, it is remarkable.  Just like pop did.”  I felt proud and I felt like I belonged.

So, this is my story.  Oh, I could go on…how it affected my life, my marriage, my subconscious choices in life.  You will have to wait on all those ditties as they remain unscripted until I am relegated to my cigarette carton in the sky.   My parents.  They moved to Greece in 1960 in an attempt to “start over.”  I was born in Greece.  I have three sisters and three brothers, two alive, one dead.   It really is a simple little story after all.  So life begins on this day.

- The End -