My Story Lives

TRAUMA DRAMA, Chapter One

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 22:50:00 +0000

By Bonnie Hayden

I was told I walked early. I don't remember.

I once saw a picture of "baby Bonnie" -- ME -- standing in front of our house.

I don't remember. I don't remember when I stopped walking.

I have little flashes of memories, from maybe when I was four years old. Doctors in white coats pulling on my legs, trying so damn hard to straighten out the muscles. Open the joints. Vaguely I recall thick white casts being smeared on my legs.

To this day, I don't know why the doctors were doing this.

Ma never said. She just stood by and watched.

I don't even remember how many times they tried to straighten my legs out and put them in casts. I remember they drilled holes in my knees, and in my ankles. Twice they did that.

I do remember the fear and the excruciating pain I felt every time I had to go to the doctor's office so they could cut the casts off.

I remember Ma covering my ears

and telling me to stop crying like a goddamn baby.

I was no more than four or five years old.

After the doctors were finished cutting off my casts, my dad would pick me up very gently and he would carry me to physical therapy.

I lived there, in what was then Pittsfield General Hospital, for months at a time. I never went to school. What I learned, I learned from tutors.

There at the hospital, therapists would try to force my legs to bend. They wanted to open my broken joints.

Pushing and pulling. Punishing. Always always punishing me with the pain. They were always measuring "degrees of movement" with

I was alone with these people, total strangers, for what felt like hours. Days. I was so very young.

No one talked to me. No one laughed or tried to cheer me up. THEY ALWAYS TALKED ABOUT ME, AS IF I WASN'T THERE. They talked about what to try next. They talked about what decisions they had to make:

which set of casts they would make into splints, splints that I had to wear every single night.

Torture. It was...torture.

Because my joints were collapsing from the juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, I had to sit all day long, and my knees would bend and every night Ma would force my legs back into the casts and tape them tight.

Dad would not do it.

Dad said that Ma was just torturing me, for nothing. He said the doctors and therapists were wasting their time.

Eventually I realized. Dad was right.

DRAMA QUEEN: How I Met Bonnie Hayden

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 22:36:00 +0000

By Claudia Ricci

I had the distinct privilege of meeting Bonnie Hayden, of Pittsfield, MA, only a few short weeks ago. Three, perhaps? Honestly, I keep going back to the calendar, and counting the days since I met her in early August, 2025. I keep being astonished, over and over and over again, by her unique life story, and what she has been willing to share about her lifelong struggle to survive rheumatoid arthritis.

Every time Bonnie sends me another piece of her life story -- some of it she sends by text, some by email -- I am astonished,

and completely outraged. I told her last week that her writing, and her story, may be the most powerful writing I've ever read from even my very best graduate students in Journalism at Georgetown University, where I was on a teaching sabbatical during 2009 when my husband, national political activist Richard Kirsch, and I lived in DC while he led the fight to get OBAMACARE passed.

Yes, I am astonished over and over again by Bonnie's heartbreaking life story, I am moved to tears by the needless agony she has endured. And yet not for a single moment have I been moved to pity Bonnie Hayden. Because one of the first things she made clear to me as we talked for hours and hours by phone, was that she has never wanted pity from anybody. And she certainly doesn't want it now.

What Bonnie Wants Now Is VERY Simple:

She wants to write a book. She wants desperately to tell her life story: "This book is my truth," she says. "It's not the life that other people tell me I had. This is the way it was."

All her life, Bonnie has had to deal with selfish and downright nasty family members, first and forement, her mother, and also, her sister who is 16 years older than Bonnie. Family members have tried to ignore or dismiss or discount her agonizing pain, and her truth. Family members who haven't made any attempt to hide their contempt for her, or their disgust, or their feeling that she was a hopeless burden. Family members who didn't really expect her to live past age 18.

More recently, Bonnie, who is 62, says that she is sick and tired of people who try to boss her around. And people who try to take advantage of her. Or use her for their own purposes.

Because she relies on a wheelchair and crutches, Bonnie confided, some people think she is weak, or weak-minded. They often try to dismiss her. Discount her. Or worse, they ignore her completely.

Bonnie grew up being told by her mother, over and over again, that she wasn't wanted. She grew up feeling INVISIBLE.

Somehow, though, Bonnie Hayden endured all of this endless, hellish physical and brutal emotional pain, relying on her faith, and her core of steel. She prayed constantly, pleading that God would grant her one thing in life: love.

I may have only known her a few weeks, but Bonnie Hayden is already one of my all-time favorite heroes. A fiercely determined woman, Bonnie has become a friend that I trust, a friend that I am fiercely determined to defend and support as she expresses her truth.

And her RAGE.

Bonnie Hayden is Determined to Set the Record Straight

Once and for all, Bonnie is going to tell all of the people who should have loved her but didn't to -- in three choice words -- go to hell. tell it the way she lived it. As it happened.

"My sister tries to tell me what my life was like but she wasn't even there." (Bonnie's sister is 16 years old than she is.)

"And my mom? My mom should have had a bumper sticker that read: everthing will be fine just as soon as you realize that I -- MOM -- am God!"

I am overwhelmed with admiration for Bonnie's fierce determination to do what everybody else tries to do: simply, to live a normal life, despite the rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that makes the body's immune system turn on itself. RA has ravaged her joints.

I am also infuriated into a bloody red rage

that her mother refused to bring her, when she was six years old, to Shriner's Children's Hospital in Springfield, MA, after the Pittsfield doctors said Bonnie needed to see a specialist. Instead, Bonnie was never seen by a rheumatologist, as she should have been, but instead spent months in hospitals as a parade of orthopedists who didn't have a clue how to treat her autoimmune disease basically experimented on her child's tender body -- they tortured her body, starting when she was only two years old.

*********

Within moments -- literally moments -- of hearing Bonnie's calm and yet very cheerful voice over the telephone, one thing became clear: I knew in the depths of my bone marrow that I was in the presence of a true hero.

I have been working as a journalist, a personal essayist and fiction writer for some 50 years, as a recent Substack column of mine reveals. A half century of writing?

It hardly seems possible sometimes. But it's true. I began my daily newspaper career at age 26 in April of 1979 at the Chicago Sun-Times, where after less than a year as the paper's environmental reporter, I proposed to my editor that the Sun-Times mount a state-wide investigation into the crooked and shady -- and altogether illegal -- dumping of highly dangerous and unhealthy chemical wastes into landfills that were supposed to be reserved for plain old household garbage.

"The Toxic Time Bomb" series of articles appeared in the Sun-Times in November, 1980, and the following spring, our team of a half dozen investigative reporters was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative reporting. Instead of sticking around Chicago to continue working with the likes of the extraordinarily successful investigative reporter Pamela Zekman, I opted instead to seek greener pastures in New York, accepting a job in July, 1982 as a Staff Writer at The Wall Street Journal..

*********

Over the course of my career writing journalism, essays, and in the early 1990s, fiction (I am at work on my sixth novel, "Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears,") I have done thousands upon thousands upon thousands of interviews. Actually, it feels from this vantage point that I may in fact have done millions of interviews.

But honestly, how can I possibly know?

I do know one thing for certain though. Three weeks ago, without thinking about it too much, without comparing Bonnie to any other "subject" I have interviewed, without even knowing quite what was happening to me, I knew deeply and intuitively in the depths of my bone marrow, that I had been given a rare and precious opportunity: to speak to a person who at 62, was not supposed to be here. A woman who was told as a teenager that she would never thrive. Or be normal, i.e., she would never have a partner. Nor would she, for God's sake, with her joints broken and her limbs shrunken by rheumatoid arthritis, EVER HOPE to bear children.

Ah but there we go again with la miracolosa Bonnie Hayden: she is the proud mother of three adult children, one of whom she lives with -- thanks in partnership to Central Berkshire Habitat for Humanity -- in a cozy little home in Pittsfield, MA, where she (and her son, Bobbie) chose to paint the living room walls a soothingly dark, dove gray, with crisp white trim.

It has taken me a few weeks to begin to understand that it is in fact the Divine Creator Herself -- in italiano, CARA DIVINA -- who seems to have chosen me for this extraordinary assignment: to partner in a unique writing project with a person who has boundless determination. And who has demonstrated the kind of bravery that is rare in this day and age. And above all, she is a person who has endured outright cruelty most of her life, still finds it in her heart to love very deeply.

********* As I wrote just a few days after the first interview I had with Bonnie on August 1, 2025: "Bonnie Hayden has a life story that will first break your heart, and then, perhaps, it will remake your heart, so that you will once again begin to believe in miracles. In italiano, miraculos.

I MIRACULOS

As a very young child, just after her second birthday in 1965, Bonnie's mother, Rose was told that her daughter, who had a rare disease that today would be called Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, couldn't possibly make it to her 18th birthday.

When Bonnie fooled all the doctors and was still living and breathing at age 18, she was told she would NEVER BE ABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN.

Bonnie defied everyone -- most notably her own mother -- and delivered three healthy children beginning in mid-October, 1986, which ironically is when I had my second child.

We were in the same hospital the same day, both giving birth to baby girls.

*********

Diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was only two years old, Bonnie spent most of her childhood living in hospitals -- for months at a time. Doctors had no clue what to do with -- or for -- her.

So, literally, they experimented.

She was treated by orthopedic specialists who tried setting her limbs in casts.

When that didn't work, they drilled holes in the bones of her tiny knees and ankles, and then strapped her into weird contraptions called tractions, trying to get the muscles and joints of her legs to straighten out.

Three separate times, they broke her thin little wrists when she was a child and reset them, thinking that might help straighten her arm muscles.

When she was six years old, Bonnie's mother, Rose, was instructed by local doctors in Pittsfield that Bonnie needed to be seen by specialists in rheumatoid arthritis at Shriner's Hospital in Springfield, MA, where she might get the appropriate treatment.

Rose chose to ignore the doctors' advice, telling Bonnie it was too much of a bother.

To this day, Bonnie, who is 62 years old, has seen a rheumatologist exactly once, for a consult, about 15 years ago:

"He told me there was nothing he could do to help me with the arthritis. He offered me morphine for the pain. I told him 'No thanks.' If I have pain, I take Tylenol."

What follows is the second chapter in Bonnie Hayden's healing story. Stay tuned, because Bonnie says she has been getting ready to tell this story for most of her challenging life.

When I had the privilege of meeting Bonnie for the first time on August 25, after she had spent a total of four hours on the phone, telling me her story, she said she has "always been told that I should write a book."

Indeed, Bonnie seems she's about ready to burst, because she wants so badly for the world to know how she grew up. How she suffered, oh my DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN, but also, how she managed to prevail against not just overwhelming odds.

She managed to prevail against all possible odds. She managed to prevail when anyone else would have gone sailing off into the sunset.

Because pain doesn't get any worse than the pain Bonnie endured at age 2, and age 5, and age 7, and age 11, and 13 and 14 and 24 and

yes, every single day of her entire life she has endured pain that would have sunk me for sure.

The second time I interviewed Bonnie, on July _____ for two straight hours, typing a total of 25 single-spaced pages of notes (because that is just one thing I was taught to do, very very carefully at The Wall Street Journal) she confided in me, very sweetly, that "I have always wanted, I have always intended, to write a book about my life. And people over and over again have said to me, 'Bonnie, you could, and should, write a book.'"

Well, now it's time. Bonnie is quite honestly, a bit nervous (and i am quite honestly more than a bit nervous because I feel so incredibly protective of my sweet new friend.)

But then Bonnie says something that sends me into hysterics, laughter that is, and I say to her and myself, "she is one tough cookie," and I take a breath in and say she/we will be fine, telling this story, together, my arm linked with hers. (Bonnie relies on crutches or a wheelchair to get around, and always has.)

Yes, she is one helluva of brave woman, and smart as a whip, as gifted as ANY of the students I taught for a year at Georgetown University in the Graduate School of Journalism! (No, dear Bonnie, I wasn't just saying that to butter you up or make you feel good -- it's the God's honest truth!)

In the end, when I said to her this afternoon, are you sure you're ready for this, Bonnie? Are you certain that you are ready to go out into the world without any cover? Are you prepared that your story could go -- well, who the hell knows? These days, a story goes viral faster than it takes to write down even one sentence!

She paused. She went silent as she does now and then as we are chatting. She thought about it for a while. I think it was in that moment that it really dawned on her what I was saying: once you go public in this godforsaken modern world, where misery and mayhem live side by side with blessings and beasts (like i will say it, okay, like our inhuman vermin that is the non-president, would-be DICTATOR DUMP)

When you drop all your cover from your life and the lives of the ones you love most, that for Bonnie being her precious children, well you better be prepared to get wet.

And then, Bonnie Hayden just got to her feet -- and here I am giving her speed she doesn't have with her legs but absolutely has with her BOUNDLESS HEART -- she ran right off an elevated platform --picture it here with me -- as if she is in fact one of those extraordinary divers we love watching in the Summer Olympics.

"I'm ready," she squeals and she just takes off -- goddammit Bonnie Hayden you are so damn fast!

I shout to her, "HEY Bonnie, for heaven's sake, wait up, will you? Wait up for me, I'm right behind you!"

But -- and here I'm laughing to think about it, because Bonnie Hayden, despite her RA, is such an incredible daredevil, and she's so incredibly gutsy.

And now she is out of earshot, she is flying out and over the water in a perfect jack-knife, she must be diving into the water by now I think, but I can't see her --

and I wonder, is she, like me, holding her breath on the way down into the blissfully cool water?"

********

What makes Bonnie Hayden want to tell her (almost impossible to believe) heartbreaking story? Why did she tell me almost immediately after we met each other in person that "people keep telling me to write a book and I want to. I want to write my story."

She wants to tell it so that others will know. She wants others to know what she lived through, not just physically, but emotionally too, because Bonnie's mother made it crystal clear to her daughter, starting from her first waking memory, that "I was not wanted. I was the fourth child, born 16 years after Louise..."

But do not for a moment think DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT that Bonnie Hayden EVER IN A MILLION YEARS wants your/our pity. No! UH HUH. Bonnie isn't the least bit interested in pity and in fact, when people have from time to time tried to use her to scour up pity, for their own purposes, she has gotten rightfully and understandably pissed off.

No. She wants others to know, for the record, of course, what happened. And to preserve for her children, and for their children, should they decide to have offspring, the extraordinarily deep trauma that she has survived.

But most of all, she wants to inspire others to be courageous. And to hang on to hope like a drowning victim would hang onto a rope.

She wants to reassure others, and to inspire others, people who live with excruciating pain -- physical, mental or emotional -- that she has been doing all that and then some, enduring pain that presses into her deepest fibers for more than six decades. NEVER LOSE HOPE, she says and never ever stop praying. PRAY EVERY DAY. PRAY EVERY MOMENT. Because she does just that. She continues to pray to a God that she is absolutely certain exists, despite the fact that she doesn't -- and I certainly don't either -- understand why this God allows people to suffer? Why most of all, why this God of OUR FATHERS especially, allows precious little children, the tenderest of children, i bambini, to sustain pain like she endured?

Because one thing we -- even the most diabolical among us and you know of whom I speak by now -- all can probably agree, children, especially children, never ever should have to endure the torture that she suffered.

She wants to tell her heartbreaking story, right now, before another moment goes by. Because she knows people are suffering all over, in Pittsfield, across Massachusetts, and all across the nation. And the world, too. From Gaza to the Ukraine, from South Sudan to the Congo, in Afghanistan and yes, in our own backyards, too.

Bonnie has an urgent message for all of us who feel so incredibly discouraged and fearful, nearly at the end of our ropes.

NO MATTER HOW BAD LIFE SEEMS, dear Bonnie says, NEVER EVER GIVE UP HOPE.

"Because there are angels out there," she says to me, and when she says it I get chills, running up and down my arms and legs. "Claudia, I know for a fact that there are angels out there to help you when we are most down and out. I know because I have met them, I have met them when I have felt like I had nowhere to turn!"

Oh yes, my new bestest in the world bestest, she knows about angels,

first-hand.

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 22:33:00 +0000

MEET Bonnie Hayden, USE THIS MATERIAL IN A FUTURE CLAUDIA CHAPTER****

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 13:19:00 +0000

Bonnie Hayden, of Pittsfield, MA, has a life story you might not believe -- or want to believe, not at first, anyway, because Bonnie has suffered physical and emotional pain the likes of which...

For starters, she spent most of her childhood living in hospitals -- for months at a time. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of two, Bonnie went to doctors who had no clue what to do with or for her.

So...they...experimented. Three different times, when she was only six and seven years old, these doctors put her in traction hoping her leg muscles would straighten out. The pain was excruciating.

They broke her wrists, too, three separate times, yes, that's right, three times, and then reset them in casts, hoping her wrist muscles would straighten out. The wrist muscles, like her leg muscles, did not straighten out. Because rheumatoid arthritis is NOT AN ORTHOPEDIC DISEASE. It is an auto-immune disorder, meaning the body mounts a severe immune response against itself.

The pain, in her words, was "unspeakable.'

As if that weren't enough, the doctors put Bonnie's legs in traction. Twice. When she was five and again when she was seven. To do that, they had to drill holes in her knees and her ankles. Yeah, she was just a child. And the procedures, the experiments, were totally unnecessary and ineffective. Many years after Bonnie suffered this horrible pain from the traction on her legs at North Adams hospital, she happened to see one of the doctors who had treated her. He had been a new doctor at the time.

“He was there when they put me in traction,” Bonnie recalls. "The doctor looked at me, and instantly he recognized me. I said to him, 'Yes, I know you, doctor,' and the doctor blurted out, 'We never should have done that to you.'

“He acknowledged me and I left in tears only because it was such an awful thing, I was an experiment, he knew it, he knew that it never should have happened.”

Before I met Bonnie on Monday, August 25, 2025, I interviewed her twice on the phone, each time for two hours straight. By the time I was finished these interviews, I had typed 25 pages of notes, single spaced.

Bonnie told me right away "my life is a book, and I want to write it."

When I finally got to meet Bonnie a couple of weeks ago, at her house, a home she was able to acquire in partnership with Central Berkshire Habitat for Humanity, an incredible not-for-profit organization in Pittsfield that makes it possible for everyday Americans -- teachers, nurses -- to own their own homes.

I knew for certain, immediately, that Bonnie's desire to write a book about her life was vital, not just for her, as she desperately needs it as part of her healing journey. But I knew too that it is incredibly important for the whole world to know Bonnie Hayden and what she has lived through.

The world doesn't yet know it, but they are waiting for her story.

Because Bonnie Hayden's life is the story of an incredible hero. And what we so desperately right now in our nation ARE STORIES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE WHO ARE EXTRAORDINARY, stories of people like Bonnie, who give us incredible HOPE. ******** When she was diagnosed at age two with rheumatoid arthritis, doctors told her mother, Rose, that Bonnie would never reach her 18th birthday. Then, when Bonnie turned 18, the doctors told Rose that Bonnie would never have children.

But she did. Bonnie is the proud mother of three healthy and beautiful adult kids, one of whom, Bobby, lives with her in a beautiful home that she never EVER EVER thought she would own.

What follows are the first steps that Bonnie is taking to write her book. The book she has always wanted to write.

"This book," she told me the other day, "is my truth. It's not the life that other people tell me I had. My sister tries to tell me what my life was like, but Louise May, she was 16 years older than me. She wasn't even there."

The letters that follow include Bonnie's very first writings, emails to me in response to mine to her. They are, collectively, a story for LABOR DAY. They are a rare and extremely courageous woman's story of an extraordinary LABOR.

********* Friday, Aug 22, 11:27 PM (9 days ago)

Hi Bonnie, so here is the healing story I wrote today, I spent many hours writing it, and I thought of you right away, because my HEART REALLY NEEDED IT! I thought it might give you food for thought about your own healing journey, whenever you are ready to take the first step.

More on Monday, August 25, 2025, when I pay you a FRIENDLY VISIT :)

HUGS,

Claudia

August 27, 2025

Hey Bonnie,

How would you like to have your own Substack column? Your son Bobby and I could set you up easily, he and your older son Andrew are sharp, sharp as razors

All you need to do is write ANYTHING you write anything

and I would put it into your own Substack or BOBBY COULD

just let YOUR story POUR OUT OF YOU

YOUR truth

just like I know you can do With a Substack blog, your story will go out to the world

RIGHT NOW

We could experiment. I could first put your writing, into my Substack

https://open.substack.com/pub/claudiaricci/p/art-heals-the-heart-here-s-how-i?r=ztmb9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false and then u will see how easy it is

Are you willing to try? I will coach you every step of the way

With a Substack, you will see your results immediately

YOU won’t need to WAIT, we can then assemble all of your columns into a book

OK, when you read the next email from me, talking about my labor with my sweet LINDSAY ANN on Sunday night, October 19, 1986,

After that, just write me as simple a letter as you want

it can be four words, or 40.

BREATHE in and out, staring into your doggy's eyes

then when you are very

relaxed

and not before,

just mosey back to your table, where you love to sit in the sunlight, like I am moseying right here to my table,

and

write something

anything will do just fine!

NO MORE EMAILS TONIGHT

promessa! Promise

Buona serra, sogni d'oro

Nighty night, sweet dreams dear new friend Bonnie Hayden

OK, Bonnie,here are my three children:

Claudia Ricci

Wed, Aug 27, 3:04 AM (4 days ago)

to Bonnie

That's Jocelyn on top, she is 40. She will be 41 on October 16th

LINDSAY

IS THE SAME EXACT AGE AS YOUR FIRST ONE, ELLEN

OK Bonnie, here is my LABOR STORY for my sweet Lindsay Ann:

October 19, 1986, it was a Sunday night

my WATER BROKE sitting on the couch immediately after giving a bday party for Jocelyn who was turning two.

Before I knew it, Richard was rushing me to the hospital at what felt like 90 miles an hour from Spencertown, me laboring the whole way, Richard hoping the whole way that we would get pulled over by a cop who could get us to Berkshire Medical Center

FAST

WELL, I had labored for what felt like forever for Jocelyn, my first little darling, it went for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and finally they gave me Pitocin in that awful New Jersey hospital. And then the nurses they left me alone, Bonnie.

It was very scary because I was having what felt like a train wreck in my abdomen and no one was there with me at all, except of course Richard who didn’t know what the hell was going on

My sister, Karen, was a labor and delivery room nurse at Berkshire Medical Center, but she wasn’t with me in New Jersey for Jossy, Karen told me later that my uterus could’ve exploded with the Pitocin. They were so so awful down there those nurses in New Jersey

Now I’m thinking about all the agony you suffered all your life growing up with Rheumatoid arthritis and those stupid doctors didn't know what the hell they were doing they put you through SUCH AGONY in the hospital

Oh, it makes me feel so angry, frustrated and confused, you have to write about it, Bonnie, it's YOUR HEALING JOURNEY, you have to start, just write me a letter maybe or not, whatever you want to do is fine... It’s way late, I have to go to bed, but I wanted you to know what I wrote in my journal today, I wrote this early in the morning when I was meditating: “I met Bonnie Hayden today. She already feels like another best friend!” Very late now, I have to get up to go to the doctor for my Medicare visit tomorrow morning. I will be busy until 12:30 and then free till 1:30 and then free again at 3 o’clock

Please don’t feel like you have to call me at all, really, no pressure no worries.

Write me a letter sometime. Tell me what it was like to go through that LABOR you alluded to with your stupid ass mother trying to get you to sign papers before your daughter was even born because, as you explained to me when we met at your house, your mother wanted you to give away your baby because she didn't think you would ever be able to take care of the baby and Social Services would then take the baby away and then your SSI check would go to your partner and then your mother would lose your SSI check...

My God...

I think one of the reasons I feel so close to you is that you have a girl and two boys and I have two girls and a boy. But what is incredible about you Bonnie, just one of the incredible things is that the doctors told your mother that you wouldn't live to 18, and then you did, and then the doctors said you would never have children, and you have three!

We have a lot to talk about my friend. Hope to hear from you soon, but no pressure no worries

Have a latte. And then, in italiano

ripossare— rest

ė (and)

rilassare — relax

I learned those two words today I’m trying to teach myself Italian with the help of a friend, a healing massage person actually. If you’d like, I will teach you some words too.

😂🙏❤️

***********

HELLO

Inbox

Bonnie Hayden

Fri, Aug 29, 10:00 AM (2 days ago)

to me

Hi, it's been a full week. Full of crazy. I sent you a part of my giving birth story. I think. I sent it as a reply to yours. Unless i deleted it. LOL. Any way, I wanted to thank you for such a fun visit on Monday. You brought joy and excitement. Hope all is well with you. Have a wonderful weekend.

******

Good morning Claudia! I've had my coffee so i'm half human now.

So, my birth story actually started on Labor Day in 1986. Doug and I were at a big family thing with his family. (They did not like me but, tolerated me). I started contractions that day. i was admitted to BMC. Spent a couple days getting fluid and a small dose of Mag Sulfate. Dr.Haling put me on bed rest. So, that went ok.. I putterred. I rested.Good morning! I've had my coffee so i'm half human now.

So, my birth story actually started on Labor Day in 1986. Doug and I were at a big family thing with his family. (They did not like me but, tolerated me). I started contractions that day. i was admitted to BMC. Spent a couple days getting fluid and a small dose of Mag Sulfate. Dr. Haling put me on bedrest. So, that went ok.. I puttered. I rested.

The first week of October, contractions hit again. This time it was more serious. I was in the hospital for four days with more meds. Then an amnioscentisis. Neonatologist said baby needed two more weeks. Labor stopped, so, back home to rest. Then i started getting sick. October 19th was Doug's and me one year anniversary of being together. Dr. Haling said I could go fishing with Doug. (I hate fishing) then to dinner that night. Our anniversary was actually the 21st of October, but that was a school day.

Your friend, Bonnie

Ancestors Are Whispering in My Ears, Telling the Story of the Two Dante Antonios

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 21:34:00 +0000

As hard as it is to believe, I am now beginning to understand that I may be writing another novel, another tale about another ancestor, this one on my mom's side of the family. This realization comes after I swore to my dear massage therapist Sarah Williams last fall that I might very well never write another novel again.

I am doing this when I haven't even picked up the paperback version of my fifth novel, "Finding Filomena." That happens tomorrow, August 1, 2025, when my husband and I drive an hour to The Troy Bookmakers to pick up the boxes. Am I excited, oh yes.

Anyway, if I didn't know better -- that is, if I didn't know very very well that it oftentimes takes hundreds, and even THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of pages of writing before a novelist even knows what chapter goes first -- then I might be willing to call what follows

CHAPTER TWO, "Angels (or Ancestors?) Keep Whispering in My Ears."

I am not more than four years old the first time I follow my Grandma Mish, short for Michelina (my mother’s mother) into her bedroom. She lifts the oval photo off the wall. She shines the glass with the bottom of her cotton apron.

Mish was, temperamentally, as soft and gentle as her pillowy lap.

I lived with my Grandma Mish and Grandpa Claude (“Pop” to everyone who knew him)

Grandma Mish lived until age 95, long enough to know my three beautiful children.

when I was a brand-new infant, while my Dad was finishing building -- with his own two hands -- our first house, in Bristol, Connecticut, and then again when Dad was away at IBM's computer school. Mom and me, and my brother Richie and my baby sister Karen stayed in Canton, CT -- about a half hour's drive from Bristol -- for what seemed like forever.

Anyway, in Grandma’s sweet bedroom, there is, hanging on the wall, an oval frame and

inside this frame is a baby. But this is not a baby, this creature inside the frame. He looks to be more like a doll, or better yet, a saint. In my first recollection, I remember him being all powder blue and yellow and glowing in the photo like an angel, at least the way I imagine angels being.

Grandma Mish is slowly polishing this precious photo of her first baby. But wait, when my cousin sends me the photo of the baby last week, I realize that my memory bank is all wrong.

He is cherubic, much like my grandson Monte (Italian for mountain), but this other long ago baby sits inside a gloomy background. Dark, just like his story.

He is Dante Antonio Rotondo. The first Dante Antonio Rotondo.

Is he a ghost? Who am I to say? Lately, I have begun to believe in ghosts, even though I never actually see them. Or do I?

But I know for a fact that this baby did haunt the life of the second Dante Antonio, my mother’s oldest brother, all of his life. My Uncle Dante was a giant of a man, like his brothers, over six feet tall. And handsome

as a movie star!

It is for my beloved uncle that my oldest grandson, Ronen Dante, 11 years old, is named.

What I remember best about Uncle Dante is his scissoring sense of humor. And his superb ability to make the best wisecracks.

I can still recall him telling all kinds of funny stories, many of which he shared as he sat sandwiched into the corner of Grandma Mish and Pop’s couch. Uncle Dan was such a great great storyteller, and jokester, that it should come as no surprise that his children, my beloved first cousins, whip out funny stories at dizzying speed. They are really really funny stories. Oh, and it also helps that their mother, my aunt who is 97 years young, and the last of my parents’ generation, has a crackling sense of humor too.

OK, back to Dante Antonio the first. This is the story of the first Dante Antonio. And also, inevitably the second Dante — whose middle name was Americanized to Anthony. Dante was my mother’s oldest brother and he suffered dearly because of Dante Antonio.

********

You may be wondering how this story of the two Dante Antonio's connects to "The Story of Clementina," which I wrote and posted in Substack last month.

The simple answer is that this story has EVERYTHING to do with Bis Nonna (Great Grandma) Clementina's story. I suppose I should just tell you right now that it was because of Clementina that the first Dante Antonio died, at the excruciatingly tender age of eight months, all cherubic and fleshy, his cheeks brushed pink and constantly reminding me -- and perhaps scaring me too -- of the cheeks of my darling grandson Monte, who is two and a half years old but still highly cherubic. When her precious first baby died, Grandma Mish was still a new bride, only 20 years old.

What continues to amaze me, all these many decades later, is that looking back, when Grandma Mish used to sit on her bed and proudly show me her beloved first baby, she never once spoke a mean word about her mother. She never once even whispered words of sadness. I didn't know better then, but now, as the mother of three and the grandmother of three, I realize that Mish's restraint bordered on the miraculous.

Can I in my wildest imagination comprehend how Mish managed to keep mum about the fierce sadness that must have hummed in her heart?

Ah, but as time would tell, Grandma Michelina, for all her pillowy softness, had a core of the hardest steel, as was demonstrated six decades later when in the space of ten years, she lost two of her beloved adult sons, Delio, who held a doctorate in Math (he succumbed to Multiple Myeloma in 1980,) and Claude, Jr., "Sonny," who held a doctorate in engineering, and who died in 1990 of a massive heart attack.

Back to baby Dante Antonio.

Grandma Mish learned very very early in her extraordinary life as a mother (she had six more children after losing the first Dante) a fundamental lesson that THANKFULLY we modern mothers rarely have to learn:

that children are God Given and (God FORBID) God Taken Away. At any moment of any day, these precious offspring can be snatched away from us, even in their prime months of babyhood.

The Story of Clementina, o "La Storia de mi Bis Nonna!"

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 17:45:00 +0000

July 16, 2025 1:13 pm

I spoke to Sarah Williams a few minutes ago on the phone. Sarah, a massage therapist in Lenox, MA, who spent a year living in Florence during college, was the person I turned to last fall when it was time to let someone fluent in Italian read my new novel, Finding Filomena.

Finding Filomena tells the story of how my great great grandmother Filomena Scrivano gave birth to her son out of wedlock in 1870 in southern Italy.

Filomena Scrivano’s son, Pasquale Orzo, was my father’s grandfather.

Much of this new novel, I am only a little embarrassed to say, I wrote with the assistance of Google translator. I am not too embarrassed because I was so desperate to write this book about my ancestor, and I don’t -- yet -- have the capability of speaking and writing in Italian. Voglio parlare e scrivere en Italian ma…

I have felt an irrepressible need to speak and to write and to hear Italian spoken for about five years now, ever since the pandemic to be exact. But I was much too busy writing this new novel to enroll in language classes.

So I relied on Google, along with the patchwork of Italian I know from sitting at the dining room table in Canton, Connecticut and listening endlessly to my Mom converse with her mother, Grandma Michelina Caponi Rotondo, and her father, Claude “Pop” Rotondo. I eked out the Italian as best I could.

Sarah, who is a massage therapist, read Finding Filomena so carefully, she even edited some of the English, along with correcting the Italian. That's not surprising, considering the fact that she did after all attend Mount Holyoke College, majoring in Italian.

My mother, C. Dena Ricci, and me, Claudia Ricci, age three or four.

It was after I got off Sarah’s massage table last September that I handed her a box with a neat pile of paper, three inches high, which was the manuscript. I remember asking her why it doesn’t work to rely on Google translator to write a book. Her reply was simple.

“Well,” she said in her very patient and loving way. “People just don’t speak like that.”

It was also during that same massage last September that I first found myself verbalizing a horrifying story from my MOTHER’s side of the family. The story involves my mother’s grandmother, Clementina Ciucci.

I didn’t even realize I was telling the story until Sarah stopped rubbing my right arm with lavender-scented lotion and said, without the least bit of humor in her voice, “Claudia this is your next novel.”

At that moment I surfaced out of the massage-induced trance. I laughed, quite dismissively. “Oh Sarah, I haven’t even finished writing about Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano. Right now, I cannot imagine writing another novel. Maybe ever!”

*****

Mom was christened Clementina Dena Rotondo in March of 1926 and as she grew into adulthood, she realized how much she detested her first name. She hated it so much that she actually went to court sometime during the 1990s to have her name officially changed to C. Dena Ricci.

“I don’t want that awful name Clementina on my gravestone,” Mom said matter-of-factly. My mom was as gentle a soul as you will find, an angel really, except every now and then, she would get enraged and put her foot down about something.

She put her foot down on this matter of her headstone.

When I texted Sarah the other day, I told her I needed to speak to her right away. She told me she had some time this morning before noon. Almost as soon as we began speaking, I told her that my mom and dad, who were the wind in my sails, pushing me to write Finding Filomena, are now pushing me to write my mother’s namesake’s story.

Sarah was shocked. She hadn’t forgotten about the story that she unlocked from me last September, but she was surprised that after telling her I might never write another novel, I was now, ten months later, telling her that I had to write the book, as in, right away.

I told her I was feeling scared. I told her that I wrote Finding Filomena with my parents vaguely floating all around me. But now they were making themselves known in more direct ways. It was, in short, kind of spooking me out.

"Sarah, I don't feel ready to meet with dead people, even if those dead people happen to be my beloved parents."

She didn’t miss a beat. She spoke softly but firmly, the way she always speaks. “Just ask your mom and dad

My parents, Dena Rotondo Ricci and Richard Louis Ricci, at their engagement in 1949. Rose painting by Fawn Frome, my brother Ric Ricci's wife.

to approach you with caution when they appear. Just tell them to go slow,” Sarah said, her gentle voice pouring over me as if I am a baby and my mother is pouring over me my first warm bathwater. I closed my eyes while she spoke.

I felt myself calming down right away. I told her that the way I relax these days is by shutting off my phone, and sitting quietly, doing absolutely nothing at all.

Sometimes, I said, I stare out at the glorious meadow, and the dancing willow trees, or the dazzling flower gardens in a rainbow of colors. Sometimes I lay in the pool in a "dead woman’s float," going limp and looking up at the cloud patterns in the deep blue sky.

Sarah endorsed relaxation above all else. She strongly encouraged me to keep shutting off my phone, and my computer if necessary. “Just give in to relaxation,” she said. “Feel your body. Listen to your body.”

So I am now going to shut off my phone.

To breathe. And maybe, just maybe, a little later on today, I will go back into my study and just sit quietly at my desk. Or maybe I will kneel at my meditation table.

I will speak very carefully, very slowly to my mom and to my dad, whose extraordinary photos stare at me over my computer.

I will breathe in and out a few times, and I will ask Mom to tell me the story of Clementina.

Finding Filomena is Coming Out in Paperback!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:08:00 +0000

Nancy Dunlop, an extraordinary poet, is the author of a fabulous chapbook called “Hospital Poems,” but she’s also really into reading memoirs. Here, she kindly reviewed Finding Filomena:

In exploring a family’s genealogy, we often assume that we will make a tidy family tree. But dipping into the past is not tidy.

It is strewn with questions only ghosts can answer. Claudia Ricci began questioning the ghosts of her ancestors to discover why she always felt an undercurrent of shame in her family. Was this shame generational? And if so, where did it come from?

This question led her to her great grandfather, Pasquale Orzo, born in Italy to an unwed mother in 1870. At that time, it was considered shameful for a woman to have a baby out of wedlock. The baby would be taken from its mother and forced into a foundling home by the Catholic Church, almost certain to die there. In fact, in 1870 in the region where Pasquale was born, more than 93% of babies ripped from their mothers by the Church died in foundling homes within a year. Little Pasquale survived. But how? Did his mother, Filomena Scrivano, go against the Church to protect her child? Just what was the story of this brave woman, Ricci’s great great grandmother?

In Finding Filomena, Ricci crafts a lively and imaginative fictional account of Filomena, exploring just how her ancestor might have saved her child. Here we find a woman who is not a victim. She has strength and agency, as well as a cast of colorful characters who help her in her quest.

And it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Filomena’s last name, Scrivano, means scribe in English. In the novel, Filomena is a writer who literally writes herself and her story into being. And the reader gets the feeling that Ricci is also writing HER story into being, with the clear belief in the power of writing to right a wrong.

In the end, we watch Filomena claim her child and her legacy, just as Ricci makes claim to the dignity of her extraordinary lineage.

If you are interested in pre-ordering a paperback copy of "Finding Filomena," please contact me at claudiajricci@gmail.com

What a Small Small World it Is! Also, a Print Version of My Novel is Coming Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Fri, 16 May 2025 13:57:00 +0000

My neighbor Lana Israel is leaving Massachusetts, moving back to Rhode Island to live near family, so a few friends and I took her out to lunch today.

She asked if I was working on a novel, so I told her about my new book, Finding Filomena, which tells the story of my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who way back in 1870 in southern Italy, had a baby — my great grandfather — out of wedlock (oh what an awful word.) The shame that resulted lived on for a long long time.

One thing led to another at lunch, and suddenly Lana said, “I know David Kertzer.” I was flabbergasted. What are the odds that she would know the historian at Brown University who wrote a definitive book: Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control. It’s an amazing book that explores the horrific facts surrounding my great great grandmother’s situation as an unwed mother. Lana’s family attends the same synagogue in Providence, Rhode Island, that Kertzer does. Lana’s husband, Richard J. Israel, served as Attorney General of Rhode Island from 1971 to 1975. He passed away in 2022.

A little-known fact — and one that Kertzer writes about in great detail — is that for centuries in Italy (and in all other Catholic countries in Europe) illegitimate babies were routinely taken away from their mothers and housed in “ospizios,” foundling homes where the poor infants usually perished because hired wet nurses readily transmitted disease from one baby to another. David Kertzer’s compelling historical account of this situation gave me a much-needed perspective on my great great grandmother’s scary dilemma back in the 19th century.

According to Kertzer, “even in the first years of the twentieth century…only 62 percent of Italy’s foundlings lived to their first birthday.”

Something else Kertzer reveals: women were policed! That is, unmarried women who got pregnant were often turned into authorities by priests, doctors, midwifes or even neighbors. Women were imprisoned in order to prevent them from seeking abortions.

In other words, women in Italy in the old days faced a predicament not entirely unlike that of too many women today. According to Sacrificed for Honor, published in 1993, hundreds of thousands of babies died throughout Europe because of this monstrous practice by the Catholic Church (which apparently started in Italy and was most extreme there.)

In 1870, in the southern region of Calabria, Italy, where my great great grandmother delivered her son (who was given the rather silly name of Pasquale Orzo), Kertzer reports that a horrifying 93 percent of the illegitimate babies died, making it an absolute “miraculo” that my great grandfather survived.

It was in part because I wanted to explain how this miracle came to pass that I decided to write Finding Filomena, the novel about my great great grandmother.

Until now, I haven’t publicly thanked Dr. Kertzer for his extraordinary book. He has written numerous other fine books, too, including several histories of the Vatican and the Popes. Kertzer still teaches at Brown University, where he is Paul Dupee Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies. I was a student in the 1970s; I graduated from Brown a few years after Kertzer did.

Meanwhile, my novel is earning praise even from some non-family members, which comes as a welcome surprise to me.

And now, it looks like there will be a print version of the book, and that makes me very excited. If you’re interested in a copy of the print edition, please email me at claudiajricci@gmail.com.

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 17:24:00 +0000

Finding Filomena is now available as an ebook on on Amazon.com and also, on Kobo.com.

An old black and white photo of a young woman, buried in a family trunk. Whispers over the years among my grandmother and her five sisters.

For as long as I can remember, there was a dark secret in my father's family. But once my grandmother and all her sisters had passed, the secret was out: my great grandfather, Pasquale Orzo, was born out of wedlock in 1870 to a poor young woman named Filomena Scrivano, who lived in the southern province of Calabria in a small seaside town called Paola.

In English, the name Scrivano means "scribe," but in this novel, I take on the job of scribe for my ancestor's love story, one that was “channeled” through me after I visited the tiny seaside town of Paola and met dear Great Great Grandma — Bis Bis Nonna, in Italian — in an old seaside cafe in 2023.

Finding Filomena, the book that resulted, is now available as an ebook on Amazon.com and Kobo.com. Not only does the book identify the man Filomena fell in love with, the man who is responsible for producing the enormous Orzo clan – one which today numbers hundreds of descendants from Connecticut to California – the novel also solves perhaps an even bigger mystery:

A little-known, and thoroughly appalling, fact is that for centuries in Italy (and in all other Catholic countries in Europe) illegitimate babies were routinely taken away from their mothers and housed in “ospizios,” horrible foundling homes where the babies usually perished before the age of one, principally because hired wet nurses transmitted disease from infant to another.

According to a well-researched book called Sacrificed for Honor, by Brown University historian David Kertzer, hundreds of thousands of babies died because of this monstrous practice. In 1870, in the region of Calabria where Pasquale Orzo was born, a horrifying 93 percent of the illegitimate babies died, according to Kertzer, leaving us asking the question: how did the "miraculo" (miracle) happen? How is it that our illegitimate ancestor Pasquale Orzo managed to survive?

For years and years, my family members have traded countless emails and conversations, always asking the same question: who was Pasquale’s father? Some speculated that Filomena’s lover was a nobleman from the north of Italy. Others suggested he was a rich businessman. Or a member of the Swiss Guard, the elite military assigned to the Pope.

In writing my novel, it was my intention to restore dignity to Filomena Scrivano’s reputation. I also wanted to try to erase the endless shame that was handed down from Pasquale Orzo to my grandmother, Albina Orzo Ricci, and her five Orzo sisters, as well as to their offspring.

What I didn’t realize until Filomena began to come alive as a character for me, is that this book is a dramatic coming-of-age story for a young woman who was born into a situation with absolutely no horizons, no opportunity, no possibility of escape. When she meets the charming Giovanni Masiero, her world opens up. Filomena realizes not only the possibility of love, but she is also exposed to Giovanni’s cultured world, where she finds herself as an artist (a writer, like her name suggests) and as a strong, independent woman. Filomena finds the inner resources to survive and ultimately, to transcend the tragedy of her circumstances. At the end of the book, Filomena and her best friend Nunzi actually come up with a marvelous way to help other young women who become pregnant and are in danger of having their babies taken away.

PICTURED ABOVE: Pasquale Orzo and his wife, Caterina, with six of his ten children. My grandmother, Albina, is standing to the right of her mother.

Some readers have asked how I came to write this story. To be absolutely honest, I really didn’t do the choosing. Like so much of the best fiction, the story was delivered to me by mysterious means. Moreover, as I will reveal in later posts, I received ample help in writing the book from my dear parents, Ric and Dena Ricci, who passed away before I wrote the book. I know, I know, how weird, right? But trust me, I have kept careful notes on the help they delivered.

Of course I received help from living relatives as well. First and foremost, I owe so much to my first cousin, Donna Ricci (her father and mine were brothers), who has done an enormous amount of important genealogical research on the Orzo family over the years. Indeed, it was Donna who inherited that trunk from our grandmother Albina Orzo Ricci’s younger sister, Lisette Orzo DiPinto. It was Donna who found the only photo that we have of Filomena Scrivano, the one that graces the book’s cover. On the back of the photo was a date, 23 Ottobre 1919,

and just a couple of lines of script: Filomena Scrivano Pera was presenting the photo “al mio caro figlio Pasquale,” to her dear son Pasquale. Beneath Filomena’s handwriting, my grandmother Albina identified Filomena Scrivano as her “Paternal grandmother.” In other words, Filomena is my grandmother’s grandmother.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me in writing this book is that it ended up helping me tap into a whole new identity. As I explain in the book, growing up, I never felt much pride in my Italian-American heritage. But in the course of writing this book, and traveling to southern Italy to research it, I discovered not only that I love Italy (which was always true), but also that I love being Italian, I love hearing and learning and speaking the language and I love learning the country’s unusual history.

In other words, I have become passionate about being Italian American!

I have lots more I can say about the book. For now, though, I have my feet up and I am enjoying the fact that I “found” Filomena. As I say at the end of the book, “I’m done for now, but should our dear Great Great Grandma Filomena have more to tell me, I will be ready, and eagerly waiting to hear what she has to say.”

Thank You Mom and Dad, for Helping Me Write "Finding Filomena!"

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 20:04:00 +0000

I wasn't going to post this chapter. I kept telling myself it's just too kooky and "out there" and people might doubt my sanity :) But now that Filomena Scrivano, my great great grandmother,

has finished telling me, chapter by chapter, her very sad love story, and the ebook is out, I figure it's time to thank my parents -- who routinely were contacting me via my iPhone -- for helping me to write this book. Oh, I almost forgot to say, both of my parents passed away before I started writing the book.

How It All Began

I can't recall exactly when it started, but the first time I actually recorded their contact was in October, 2023, when Rich and I were travelling in southern Italy, in large part to research my great great grandmother Filomena's life. It was the 27th of October, 2023, to be exact, and we were in Lecce,

a magnificent old city in the region of Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot.) Rich had just been diagnosed with COVID. He was sick in bed with a fever, chills, aches, congestion, and a sore throat.

I had gone out in search of a "farmacia" for medication;

I was completely distracted because my husband was busy texting me. He was trying to explain what medication the physician, who spoke only Italian, had told him to buy. The woman at the farmacia didn't speak English either. Ayayayay,

the last thing I expected at that moment was to see my "pop" suddenly pop up on my iphone!

Perhaps because I was so so surprised, I decided to record dad's appearance. When I told my sister Holly about it (because we often talk about missing our dad!) she was skeptical. "Claud, dad never called himself pop!" she observed. And while she is right, most of the time he did not call himself pop, I do recall times when he was in a good mood, he did refer to himself that way.

This Is How It Works

What happens is this: I am on my phone, texting, and then I put my phone down for a moment. When I go to pick it up again, I have, in the texting line, either:

mom

OR

pop.

Here below, I will show you the latest two contacts, from last week.

The first is from Mom, while I was texting with a friend in the morning:

And the second, three hours later, from my dad (calling himself pop) while I was texting with my daughter Lindsay:

Something similar happened about two weeks before, when Mom and Dad got in touch on the same day. First, when I was texting with my friend Leslie in the morning:

And then, when I was texting with another friend in the afternoon, my dad popped up again.

My Parents Have Helped Me Write Filomena's Story

I'm pretty certain I know why they have been in touch so often. Mom and Dad have been cheering me on as I have been busy writing "Finding Filomena," my tale about how Filomena fell in love and got pregnant and had to give her infant son (my great grandfather Pasquale Orzo) away because she was an unmarried mother. Filomena was my Dad's great grandmother. His mother's maiden name was Orzo, which may also explain why in the last ten years of his life, Dad tried so extraordinarily hard to complete the ORZO family tree.

The Orzo Family Tree

He spent days using an exacto knife to cut out tiny rectangular pieces of paper with each family member's name; he glued them very carefully on a sheet of 11 by 17 inch paper. Despite all his hard work, however, Dad never quite finished the Orzo family tree, which is why I feel certain, in my heart of hearts, that he really wanted me to tell his great grandmother's tragic story.

Dad has also appeared when Rich and I have been texting about politics.

That's not surprising, considering the fact that my dad and I had countless arguments about politics. Dad supported Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and on and on while I supported Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden. (I never asked my dad if he voted for Trump, because, by 2016, when Dad was 90 years old, I had told him that I refused to argue about politics with him anymore; he was too old, and I cared about him too much.)

The Weirdest iPhone Message of All

By far the most puzzling sighting EVER happened at the end of December, 2023, when my mother appeared not as MOM but as

DEE, which was everybody's favorite nickname for her (my mother's first name was Dena.)

The strangest thing about this DEE sighting on my iPhone was that it came in a conversation with my son Noah, who lives in Colorado. Noah was texting with me and my husband, telling us that he and a good friend had just completed a FOUR (yes, four!) hour meditation. He texted:

"Lots of images of grandparents came up in the last hour"

"Lots of crying"

"They loved me so much!"

And that's EXACTLY when his grandmother DEE appeared as

/e

e dee

on my iPhone. When I pointed this sighting out to my son, he responded:

"That is VERY weird"

and after I sent him more examples, he wrote

"Hmmmm!"

"Maybe there is a ghost afoot!"

Even my sister Holly lost some of her skepticism. When I described to her what had transpired with Noah, sending her that chain of texts after he meditated for four hours, she replied

"Holy crap!"

So now, of course, the question arises: can I explain what's going on here?

Of course not, not if you're asking me to present the underlying physics of how this happens.

Our Ancestors Are With Us But I do have an answer to the question: What does this mean?

What I think it means is that my parents are very close to me, spiritually. Many many times as I have been writing Filomena's story, I have felt their presence. Even though I don't see my therapist Mary Marino anymore, I remember how clearly and emphatically she believed that

there is no death, for the soul, the loved ones we lose are always with us, and

our ancestors are looking out for us, and they love us beyond measure.

She explained it to me this way: "Think about how much you love your children. Then think about how even more precious your grandchildren are to you. Now imagine your grandchildren having children. And those children, and on and on..."

With each generation, your love intensifies.

So I am going to stop here. Because clearly I have gone out on a bit of a shaky limb. I am quite sure that there are readers who are highly skeptical that my parents have been in contact with me. I fully realize that I am asking you the reader to believe in...well, in ghosts, as Noah suggested.

But believing in ghosts doesn't hurt anyone, at least as far as I can tell. And believing in ghosts, for lack of a better word, helps me, especially lately, when the world of politics feels so dark and desperate.

As I look back, I feel an immense amount of love for my parents, and I am endlessly thankful to them for all sorts of blessings they bestowed on me and my family. I am not ashamed to say that one way or another, my mother and father -- along with many of my other ancestors -- have been the wind in my sails as I've written this book. As we say in Italian, I am very very grateful: Sono così così grata!

Neurofeedback: Another Way to Treat Depression!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 19:33:00 +0000

I am sitting at my dining room table wearing what looks like an old lady’s bathing cap, only this one comes with wires, electrodes and a battery pack.

It may look weird, but lately this safe but very powerful device has become my closest ally in keeping depression at bay. While I wear it, I am doing something called neurofeedback, a decades-old technique that not only has helped me, but also has dramatically improved the lives of others I know, people for whom no other depression treatments have worked.

One of those people is a dear friend in Denver, where I live during the winter months. Carol, whose name I have changed, has tried a boatload of different antidepresssants over the years, but has never found a drug that worked successfully to boost her mood. After my success with neurofeedback late last year, I mentioned the technique to her over coffee in January, and told her how much it was helping me.

The next thing I knew she had found a neurofeedback practitioner and had begun treatment.

When I met Carol for coffee last week, she greeted me by saying, "Claudia, I am deeply indebted to you for that recommendation." I was surprised and delighted, and asked her how she was feeling.

"I am a completely new person," she said.

A Well-Kept Secret in Mental Health Treatment

Carol isn't the only person who has responded so dramatically. I have, and so has my sister and at least one other person I know of. The question I keep asking myself is why did I have to wait until I was in my seventies to discover neurofeedback? Why is this antidepressant treatment such a well-kept secret? Like so many millions of others, I thought the principle way to treat depression was chemical, that is, to take oodles of anti-depressants.

One book I have consulted, called A Symphony in the Brain, by Jim Robbins, suggests why neurofeedback hasn't "exploded onto the treatment landscape."

"Brain wave training remains a victim of the fact that it is outside mainstream concepts, is far ahead of the science of how it works, has a persistent but undeserved reputation as a softheaded 'new age' idea, and is a model that -- unlike the drug model -- doesn't lend itself to astronomical profits."

In other words, Big Pharma hasn't found a way to make oodles of money on neurofeedback.

How Neurofeedback Works

When people learn about my experience, they inevitably ask me how neurofeedback works. Here is what I understand. I sit before a computer screen displaying powerful visual images -- like spectacular photos of the cosmos or gorgeous scenes from what looks like the Colorado Rockies where my husband and I love to hike.

But I don't see the entire image all at once. Instead, I receive it piece by piece, one small rectangle at a time. My brain in effect earns each new section of the image only when I'm emitting the optimal brain waves.

Through this process, my brain learns to reprogram itself. What do I need to do to generate these improved brain waves? Not much. I am instructed simply to relax and focus on the image. Often, I find myself smiling knowing I am effectively crafting a healthier brain -- it feels rather cosmic.

OK, but I can't say precisely how that brain reprogramming happens. How exactly do brain neurons that have been firing one way for years, suddenly change gears and fire in another way?

Even neurofeedback practitioners aren't exactly sure how it works. But the important thing is, they know it does work. And unlike many antidepressant drugs, neurofeedback doesn't seem to have any adverse side effects, either.

My Sister's Introduction to Neurofeedback

It was my younger sister, Karen Ricci, trained as an RN and public health researcher, who first introduced me to the idea of neurofeedback. She started working with a neurofeedback practitioner in Hadley, Massachusetts, Mark Gapen, PhD, last June and pretty soon Karen reported to me that her mood had lifted in a remarkable way, one that she had never experienced before. She wasn’t giddy; she simply felt like she had a buoyant new energy.

“I’m awfully glad I found it,” she says. It has made all the difference in how my sister feels about life. She is upbeat and energetic, and thinking about life in a positive way.

From Political Depression to Personal Crisis

I grew a lot more interested in neurofeedback after the election last November, when, like millions and millions of other Americans, I felt like I had rolled off a cliff into a deep dark crevass of fear, depression and terror at what was to come.

Meanwhile, a week later, my husband was told that he needed major back surgery. That too had me tied up in knots. The combination was deadly, or so it felt in late November.

I talked to my therapist and she mentioned that she had a client who was having remarkable results with neurofeedback.

“He’s tried everything,” Maureen told me, “including ketamine and nothing worked for him before, not until this!”

That was enough for me. I quickly called the neurofeedback practitioner that her client was seeing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. By some miracle, I was able to get an appointment.

Rapid Results that Seem Impossible

OK, this next part might strike you as impossible. But I swear it’s the truth: after a couple of intake discussions by phone, I had my first neurofeedback session in Pittsfield on December 10th with family therapist Margaret Dondiego, who is board certified in neurofeedback. I had two sessions with her the following week, on December 17th and 19th. I skipped a week or so for the holidays and had my fourth session on January 2, 2025, just a few days before my husband and I left for Colorado.

By that point, I was feeling a dramatic improvement in my mood.

Moreover, as I explained to Margaret, I was feeling more calm and resilient than I had in a very long time.

How is it possible that four sessions could have such an impact?

The short answer is that neurofeedback builds on the brain’s inherent “neuroplasticity,” its natural ability to change, and it leads the brain to function more calmly and effectively. As one website explains, neurofeedback is a safe and non-invasive technique that enables you to alter your own brain wave characteristics. “You can think of it as exercise for the brain.”

Or as Margaret keeps emphasizing with me, “you are rewiring your brain so that it can better regulate itself.” She adds: “It is, in a certain way, technology-assisted meditation.”

That’s something I can relate to, as I’ve been meditating every morning for decades.

The Science Behind the Treatment

Margaret’s initial instructions to me when I first started in her office were very simple. “Try to remain internally calm and externally focused.” Why? Because if you’re not calm and focused, you won’t get the brain reward that neurofeedback delivers.

The field of neurofeedback has been around as far back as the 1970s and 1980s, when researchers began studying the effects of neurofeedback on control epilepsy.

One of the biggest proponents of the field today is psychologist Sebern Fisher, who is based in Northampton, MA. Dr. Fisher trains practitioners in neurofeedback all over the world. Beginning in about 1996, she began using neurofeedback on children and adolescents who were suffering from severe abuse and trauma.

As clinical director of a residential treatment center in Massachusetts for many years, Dr. Fisher encountered some of the most difficult and destructive behaviors imaginable in a population of kids who never had love from a mother or other primary caretaker. Many of these kids were shipped from one foster home to another. Most suffered from neglect or complete abandonment.

What's amazing is that Dr. Fisher discovered that neurofeedback worked wonders in this hard-to-treat population. Neurofeedback acted on the so-called "primitive" brain, helping kids and young adults who desperately needed to deal with their fear, the emotion which is at the heart of so-called developmental trauma. What Dr. Sebern found is that after treatment with neurofeedback, these children were able to begin talk therapy for the very first time in their lives.

My Ongoing Journey

When I first saw Margaret,

I had the feeing that no amount of talk therapy would move me out of my slump. I was completely unwilling to consider that I might be able to meet the challenges facing me. Or think about life in a positive way. But after only a few sessions, I felt like I was back in the land of the living, feeling hopeful in spite of the problems I had perceived to be overwhelming only weeks before.

I have told Margaret several times over the last three months that I feel "resilient," that is, I have a calm feeling of confidence in myself. And I believe in a gut way that I can handle life's ups and downs.

My friend Carol in Denver describes a similar experience. Her mood is lifted in a way it wasn't before. And for the first time in her adult life, she is starting to exercise. Like me, she describes feeling resilient and energized.

Because my husband and I live in Colorado in the winter months, helping to take care of our grandson, I am not able to see Margaret for neurofeedback in her office in Massachusetts. But Margaret has helped me acquire (and wire) that silly contraption that I have on my head in the photo up top. Outfitted with my odd-looking cap, and an easy-to-use app on

my iphone, I can now do neurofeedback wherever I happen to be.

If all this sounds implausible, I assure you it isn’t.

I am living proof that neurofeedback works. I continue to marvel at its power to positively affect mind and brain. But it isn't just my experience. Jim Robbins, author of A Symphony in the Brain, writes, "The effects of neurofeedback are not subtle. They are extremely robust. There is nothing else like it, not even other kinds of biofeedback That's one of the reasons it has languished. There is nothing to compare it to."

Unfortunately, practitioners and researchers trying to get grants to study neurofeedback have been stymied. One highly respected researcher at UCLA, Dr. Barry Sherman, has done pioneering research on neurofeedback, and has published more than 150 papers in top journals. He has applied for grants to continue studying neurobeedback but the NIH has turned him down.

"...the National Institutes of Health will not give us grants," Sherman told author Robbins. "We've written solid grants but the minute you use the term neurofeedback certain people's minds snap shut. Sometimes I feel like Galileo."

This personal account reflects my own experience with neurofeedback. While it has been transformative for me, individual results may vary. Always consult healthcare professionals about treatment options for depression or other mental health conditions. If you are looking for a neurofeedback practitioner in your area, be sure to consult the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance (BCIA), the organization that certifies individuals in the practise.

Resurrected Once Again by Art, and Love

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 16:51:00 +0000

It's no accident that it has been months since I last wrote a blogpost. The election leveled me (and so many millions of others.) It felt like the world had ended. What point was there in writing another blogpost? But then the most wonderful things started to happen, all to do with friends and their writing and their art. What follows is the story of those things. I posted it first on my Substack column, called "Here, Now."

One of my favorite Christmas cards this season comes from an old friend and lifelong political activist who turned painter in his retirement. Jeff Blum is a person I admire for many reasons, not the least of which is that he devoted his entire energy this past fall to the political fight in North Carolina. The fact that Dems did reasonably well in that state is testament in part to the work by him and so many other activists.

But it was Jeff’s holiday card to me and my husband Richard Kirsch, another lifelong political activist who introduced me to Jeff years back, that touched me. The painting on front is his own, an image of his precious granddaughter Kira sitting in a chair. Inside he writes:

“Peace? Justice? Democracy? Back at it. Glad to share the [political] work with you. And we still have art.”

I haven’t been able to write a word here in Substack since the debacle that was the election, but that card started me thinking that maybe, maybe, art could lead me out of my deep doldrums.

But then I dismissed the idea: who wanted to hear my voice, talking about the gut punch that was Dump’s win. Certainly not me.

The next nudge came from a student of mine, from decades ago, who is fighting a valiant battle against an aggressive case of Parkinson’s. The fact that Josh Powell is writing so furiously intrigued me. As did a long conversation I had with him a few weeks back, to discuss a very important memoir he is writing, called “Father and Son.” At the end of our talk, he encouraged me to start writing. “Don’t you remember what you used to tell all your students? That no matter what the feelings are, you have to sit down and just write?!”

Sure, I thought. But how do I do that with absolutely nothing to say?

And then came the texts from my wonderful sister-in-law Fawn Frome Walker, who is an extraordinary watercolor painter.

She texted to ask how I was doing since she had not heard from me in a while. I told her my energy post-Dump’s triumph was lower than Death Valley. I told her that I didn’t know how I was going to go forward. She wrote me back. Twice. The first time she said:

“Was thinking about you and your trump funk. I think the best way to get around this is to NOT waste time, energy or love on anything to do with it. You’re giving away your power by staying in a funk…”

🙏

Yes, what she wrote was absolutely right. And it made me think a little more about writing and painting. Her words, and her concern and love, gave me a tweak of hope. I was reminded that no matter what happens in life, we really have no choice but to live bravely and carry on. I learned that lesson very well when I had cancer 23 years ago. That’s when I started painting. (You can read my tale about art and healing here on MyStoryLives.)

I knew Fawn was right, that I was indeed leaking power, big time. Somehow, I needed to figure it out. I had to fight my way back on track. And then two days before Christmas she texted me this genuinely good tidbit from author Mel Robbins:

“Don’t give up on this year. Keep fighting for the good. Keep showing up. Keep loving. Keep being kind. Keep being brave. Keep caring. Keep trying new things. Keep showing grace. Keep on.

“This world needs you to believe in the good.”

All of what Robbins said resonated. That combined with Jeff’s card and Fawn’s words stirred me further, made me think, OK, I really must start painting. Nothing earthshaking happened. On a scale of one to ten, the energy I felt was about a four, but it was just enough to get me seeing myself smearing bright colors on white canvas. Some kind of buoyancy, a tiny creativity wave if you will, was set in motion. It started to roll and twist and pull something out of my heart.

And so a few days ago I finally took out some paint. I reached for tubes intuitively, in other words, I picked colors that resonated: bright yellow and tomato red and almost neon orange. Oh, and white and turquoise. I took a large palette knife and scooped up the squiggles of paint and shimmied them onto the white canvas. And as so often happens when I start playing with paint, I felt a twinge of joy. It wasn’t like it hit me over the head or anything. It was more like it gave me a firm nudge in the ribs.

I painted for a steady couple of hours that first day. I actually took out a second unfinished painting, one that’s been on hold for many many months and began working on that one too.

Meanwhile, during meditation, I continued to ask the Universe for help, invoking the Divine Feminine in Italian: Per favore, Divina Femminile, aiutamì a cominciare a dipingere e scrivere. There is power in asking the Universe for help.

And then finally, the last straw, or in this case, the match that was needed to rekindle my creative fire, was a particularly moving and magnificent essay by that friend and former student, Josh Powell. So powerful was this piece of writing, called “The Perfect Lens,” that practically overnight it acted on my subconscious, giving me the sustenance and psychic support I needed to begin creating again.

What Josh said in the essay was, basically, that even though he is quickly losing ground to the Parkinson’s, he is not giving up:

“While my physical capabilities diminish, my anger sometimes flares - not from depression or fear, but from the fierce desire to continue embracing life in all its fullness. This anger, too, is a kind of gift - evidence of how deeply I've loved this life I've been given…So I'll keep writing, keep loving, keep finding the divine in flowing waters and human hearts. There's such beauty in seeing life through the perfect lens of mortality - how it brings everything into sharp, precious focus. Every sunrise becomes a psalm, every shared laugh a hallelujah, every moment of connection a small miracle.”

I love Josh, and I love his writing. And knowing that he is as wildly courageous as a tiger at this time in his life — he turns 60 this year — made me see that Fawn was absolutely spot on when she said that that I can’t waste any more time wallowing in funk.

All of it came to fruition as I meditated a couple mornings ago, all of the messages — from Jeff, Fawn and Josh — began swirling around and around inside my brain and heart, and in an instant, I felt an exquisite ball of fire take over.

When meditation ended, I went back to work on the second painting — which I realized is for a very dear friend facing another serious health challenge. Hell, it may not be a great painting, but that’s not the point. I am painting again. With love for those who matter so much to me.

And all that got me writing this.

There are so many many people I love who are hurting right now, all of us dreading the dark chaos that awaits our nation. I continue to pray and meditate, asking for miracles. But I know that prayer is at heart a conversation with the divine, not a petition per se. Miracles may not be in store.

No matter what happens to us, though, I know my friends are right when they say we have to continue to believe that we have power. We have agency. We have the ability to try something new, both as individuals and as groups.

The best way I know how is to express power is through art. I tell people all the time, you should try throwing paint on canvas and see if it lifts your heart. For me, painting is all about play. As children, we play with the world around us, in simple and complex ways, and this play gives us unbridled joy, and teaches us a myriad of things. And it reaches inside our hearts and lights our imagination.

If you’ve ever thought about painting, if you’ve ever had the least desire to do it, I highly recommend you don’t wait. Take yourself to a store and buy yourself a canvas or a notebook. Try alcohol ink, which you blow through a straw. Or acrylics which I use in part because they’re so easy to wash away if you are displeased with what you are producing. Easier still, get yourself some lush crayons or lovely pastels and apply them to whatever surface appeals to you. Or stick to drawing, black charcoal pencil on white. The point is, let go, make a mess, but most of all, have a little fun, even if it’s just a bit. Somehow the act of making color and lines, or taking photographs. It all helps to ease the pain.

So if you’re not a painter and have no desire to be? How about going to a museum and just sitting on one of those cushioned benches and staring at a piece of art that moves you.

It’s a little like visiting old (or new) friends. It kindles warmth and love. Which of course is essential post-election.

Is it any wonder that art works so profoundly on our hearts and minds? Like everything else in the Universe, artistic expression is a form of energy. When it comes to healing, indigenous peoples down through the ages have known where to start: with the spirit, the energy and grace of the Universe, captured in song and sound and image and words expressed by human beings.

As the year ends, I keep returning to the Italian words that I have written in my journal and spoken out loud over and over again this year as I’ve been writing a novel about a very brave ancestor — my Great Great Grandmother, Filomena Scrivano — who grew up in the southern Italian region of Calabria, and had a baby (my great grandfather) out of wedlock in 1870. It is an absolute miracle he survived.

I’ve got so much to be grateful for. Sono così così grato. I am so so grateful.

For art of all kinds, for the love of family and friends, for health and well-being, for animals and nature in all its wonders. For life.

Stories My Grandmother -- Albina Orzo Ricci -- Told Me

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 19:23:00 +0000

Grandma Albina was only six years old, but she knew for sure she didn't like dried figs. Or dried pork. But that's all there was to eat during that miserable year or so she spent living in Italy with her parents and her three younger sisters. It was the spring of 1909 when her father, my great grandfather Pasquale Orzo, decided to try his luck becoming a farmer over in Paola, the seaside town in Calabria in southern Italy where he was born in 1870.

Grandma's reaction to the new world that she encountered back in the Old World sounds pretty typical for a child of six: "I didn't like the food," she said. And that's not all she objected to.

"I was used to drinking coffee and milk." But in Italy, there wasn't any coffee to be had. From our modern vantage point, living in the bountiful USA, it's hard to believe there was no coffee in Italy in those days. But the more I learn about my ancestor Pasquale Orzo's life in Calabria, the more I realize how little people there had to eat.

Great Grandma Caterina Amendola Orzo, wife of Pasquale Orzo. She passed in November of 1951, exactly a year before I was born.

If people drank warm beverages at all in the morning in the 1900s, it was most likely chicory, derived from chicory root, which was roasted, ground and brewed. Ironically, the other possibility is that my Orzo ancestors may have drunk orzo, otherwise known as barley wheat. Called caffe d'orzo, the grain was, like chicory, roasted and ground before it was brewed.

These and other interesting details emerged during a wonderful conversation I had on August 29, 2024, with my Aunt Bette (nee Ricci) Foeller, who was the youngest of my grandmother Albina's five children. My Dad, Ric Ricci, was Aunt Bette's

older brother.Above, my Aunt Bette (Elizabeth Ricci) Foeller, with her father, my grandfather, Angelo Ricci, in her vegetable garden in Hudson, Illinois

Below, me holding a photo of my Dad, Ric Ricci, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

For as long as I can remember, Aunt Bette has made her home in Illinois, near Normal, where her now-deceased husband, George Foeller, had a long and very distinguished career at Illinois State University as Director of Bands and Trombone instructor. Uncle George was also the originator of the Big Red Marching Band at the University. He will be formally inducted into the Marching Band Hall of Fame on Saturday, October 19, 2024, at Illinois State, where he retired in 1990 after 30 years with the University.

My conversation with Aunt Bette (which I recorded) focused on some extraordinary stories that I learned directly from my Grandma Albina Ricci; I tooks notes during our conversation, which took place nearly 45 years ago, on seven small pieces of paper.

It was sometime about 1980 when Grandma Albina sat me down in her kitchen one afternoon and poured her heart out to me. At the time Grandma and I spoke, I was 28 years old. I couldn't begin to grasp the significance of what she was telling me. Nonetheless, I knew enough to save all the notes I took -- in red magic marker pen. I slipped those seven pieces of paper into an orange file labeled "Pasquale Orzo," and that's where they sat until the day in late August when I finally took them out, and carefully examined them.

The first thing Grandma described to me was how her father, Pasquale, at 28 years of age, fell in love with her mother, Caterina Amendola. Grandma told me that Caterina was 15 at the time: "He saw her one day, combing her long long, dark brown hair, almost black, almost to her hips. He was fascinated by her! They were married within six months," in January, 1898, in a beautiful seaside church named for San Giovanni, perched on a cliff in San Lucido, Italy.

Last October, in 2023, my husband Richard Kirsch and I had the great privilege of standing in that church in San Lucido where

my great grandparents Pasquale and Caterina were married. What a thrill that was -- and what happened after we stepped out of the church,

with the ocean a few steps away -- that was even more extraordinary.

Even though the sun was setting into the Mediterranean in the western sky,

an ethereal dazzling pink and yellow light was somehow coming from the East and flooding the outside of the church and the beautiful surrounding town.

That very special sunlight even had our young tour guide -- Antonello Zaccharia, who grew up in nearby Amantea, flummoxed. That breathtaking light lasted for several minutes.

Back to the red pages. Grandma Albina told me many stories in that conversation in 1980, but what stands out is the story she told me about the horrendous year or so she spent living in southern Italy with her family. In the spring of 1909, when Grandma was still six years old, and the oldest of her siblings, traveled back to Italy to the seaside town of Paola, the town adjacent to San Lucido.

Grandma said that it was her father Pasquale's intention to settle in Italy and become a farmer in his birthplace. At first, Grandma seemed to think it would be nice to live beside the ocean in the Mediterranean climate in Paola: "You could hear the beach waves. It wasn't ever winter."

But things didn't go well at all for her father. After ten months in Paola,

Driving to Paola last October, 2023, we saw plenty of road signs for Paola, and for Cosenza, the regional capital.

Pasquale abandoned the idea of becoming a farmer because he couldn't acquire land. Grandma didn't say it, but I am convinced that the reason Pasquale was unable to buy land in Paola was because people in that town were deeply prejudiced against him: after all, he was born to a woman who was unmarried -- and in that time and place in history, being a "bastardo" was extraordinarily shameful for my great grandfather and his entire family. Indeed, that heavy burden shame followed him and his six daughters -- including my Grandma Albina-- for the rest of their lives.

We know about Pasquale's birth mother thanks to some extraordinary sleuthing by my cousin, Donna Ricci -- her father Bob was my Dad's older brother. In an event that sounds like it came from a movie, Donna discovered a single photograph in an old trunk bequeathed to her by Grandma Albina's younger sister, Lisetta. On the back of the photo, a woman named Filomena (Pera) Scrivano wrote in 1919, in Italian, addressing her beloved son, Pasquale. It was that photo, and extensive genealogical research by my cousin Donna, that led her in 2014 to write a highly detailed narrative about the Orzo family lineage. It was because of that narrative that I came to write my novel, Finding Filomena, which tells a redeeming story about Filomena. Because of her last name, Scrivano, I turn my great great grandmother into a writer, and I tell the tale of how she comes to fall deeply in love with a wealthy man from Tuscany. Their child is my great grandfather, Pasquale Orzo.

Speaking to me in 1980, Grandma never breathed a word about the fact her father was illegitimate; she and her sisters were so deeply ashamed of their father's status they managed to keep it a secret their whole lives. But amazingly, Grandma did provide an important hint to me about what went on with her father: on one page of my notes, off to the left side, I wrote down very clearly that her father had been fed by a "wet nurse."

Filomena Scrivano, above, mother to Pasquale Orzo, below.

Once he gave up on being a farmer in Italy, Pasquale returned to the states, but he left behind his wife, Caterina, along with Grandma Albina and her three younger sisters -- at least one or two of whom must have still been in diapers. They all moved in with Caterina's father, Giuseppe, and his new wife, Madelena. Giuseppi's first wife, Alvira -- Caterina's mother -- had passed away.

I imagine it was mighty difficult for Madelena to welcome into her small home her husband's daughter, along with four children under the age of seven. But it was Grandma who seems to have suffered the most because of the situation. Referring to Madelena, Grandma told me, "She didn't treat me good!" To make matters worse, Grandma's mother, Caterina, blamed Grandma for not getting along with the -- ok, I'll say it, the EVIL -- stepmother.

There were other problems. Grandma told me: "We four kids got measles, mumps and all the childhood diseases."

Eventually, Caterina and the children had to leave her father's house; it wasn't easy to find another place to live: "We got an apartment because my mother had a friend who knew of a place." But this place wasn't an apartment: "It was one big room, for four children and our mother. It was stucco."

It was miserable, particularly because as the oldest child, Grandma was expected to help chase after the younger children; sometimes that also meant she had to scramble to find them food.

Speaking about her mother, Grandma said Caterina was extremely mild-mannered, in contrast to Pasquale, who had a notorious temper. Grandma said her mother was bashful, and she was mortified, too, specifically, about sex. Caterina wasn't prepared at all to have sex with her 28-year old husband, Grandma said. Her mother wasn't prepared for childbirth, either. Still 16 when she delivered her first baby, Caterina's labor lasted an exhausting three days and three nights.

The child, Adelina, or Lela, apparently was born with a congenital defect. She passed away at the age of five, her death a source of great heartbreak to her parents. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the heartbreak Pasquale and Caterina suffered over children passing. Out of the ten children they had, four passed at a very young age.

When he came back to Bristol after giving up on farming in Italy, Grandma said Pasquale worked as a mason. He built the steeple of the Lutheran church in town. He also eventually built the family a home at 295 Park Street in Bristol; eventually that home was passed down to subsequent generations.

When Caterina finally returned from Italy to join her husband in Bristol, she travelled in the company of her brother, Gaetano Amendola. The ship's manifest (Cousin Donna Ricci examined dozens of ship manifests when she was researching our Orzo family history) indicates Caterina used her maiden name Amendola. There she was, travelling across the Atlantic with four young daughters and her brother. It makes sense that she used the family name, Amendola.

Back in Bristol, Gaetano went to work in a factory called New Departure. Soon, though, according to Grandma Albina, Gaetano's wife back in Italy wrote to ask her husband to return to Italy to get her. Once there, however, Gaetano's wife convinced him to go to Brazil rather than to the US. Eventually, a very sad Caterina received a letter from her brother, telling her that he had settled in Rio de Janeiro, and was working as a fruit seller.

Caterina, Grandma recalled, was brokenhearted. She missed her brother terribly.

Now I understand why Grandma and her sisters traveled (by prop plane) in the 1950s and 60s to visit our relatives in Rio de Janeiro. Apparently, one of those relatives edited a magazine in Rio. I would be very curious to know what it was called!

Great grandma Caterina was 69 when she died; Grandma Albina's sister, Lisetta, quit her nursing job to take care of her mother after Caterina was diagnosed with a heart condition. In those days, there wasn't much to be done about a heart problem.

It was during this period that Aunt Bette, Grandma's youngest child, used to visit her grandmother, who she calls "Nonna Caterina." Bette, born in 1934, attended Saint Anthony's Catholic School, the elementary school attached to Grandma Albina's parish. I attended this school, too, until third grade, when my Dad and Mom made the bold decision to move us out of the Ricci family orbit in Bristol "far away" to Poughkeepsie, New York, so Dad could take advantage of a wonderful career opportunity, a job as a Customer Engineer with IBM. Working in Poughkeepsie, I am proud to say, Dad's career in the booming computer industry flourished.

Back to Aunt Bette's tale: "I was about eight years old then, and after school, I would go to Nonna Caterina's house on Upson Street and wait for my parents, who were working at Ingraham's, the clock factory in Bristol."

"I got to know Great Grandma Caterina very well. She was a very sweet and affectionate woman, and she was so lovely, with that long, long flowing brown hair."

"It was very very nice for me to be with Nonna. One thing I remember very clearly is Nonna combing her hair in front of the window. Then she would braid her hair and use those amber pins to secure a bun in back. She would be sure to have the window open too, and so she would pick basil from the window box and stick the twig of basil into her hair. When I think of Nonna, I always think of the fragrance of sweet basil. She was a very, very lovely person."

I asked Aunt Bette if she knew that Nonna Caterina had a weak heart.

"Well, when I was with her, she didn't seem sick. She would putter around, but then, I never saw her do anything too strenuous or physically taxing."

Curiously, Aunt Bette has no memory of Nonna Caterina dying in November of 1951, about a year before I was born in November of 1952.

"In those days," Aunt Bette recalled, "adults protected children from death or any mention or discussion of it."

"Do you remember her being in bed?"

"No, because I wasn't allowed to be in her company when she was sick. And by that time, I was old enough so that I didn't have to go to Nonna Caterina's house anymore after school. I went to the Girls Club, so I missed seeing her. But I learned how to do so many things, one of the things I learned how to do was sew."

"Oh Aunt Bette, I remember going to the Girls Club too!"

Aunt Bette was born in 1934, I was born in 1952, so she was 18 years old when I was born. I tell her that it was a huge age difference in those days; but today, she is 90 and I am 71, and I feel like I am closer to her in age and experience than I am to so many family members younger than me.

"I certainly feel closer to you in experinence than I do to my children. I've entered into the ancestor range...actually I tell people that I feel like I am 'an ancestor in training.' I don't mind it, either." I laugh.

I recalled for Aunt Bette what my dad used to say to me as he got to be in his mid-80s. I'd say "Dad, I can't deal with you and Mom dying..." I tell Aunt Bette that as a child, I found it very very difficult to think about death. It was especially a problem for me during summer vacations when I had a lot of time on my hands to ponder, and to worry.

"I'd wait for Dad to come home from work during those long summer days and I'd go into Mom and Dad's bedroom and start crying, and carrying on. I'd say 'I don't want you to ever die.'"

Naturally, Mom and Dad would try to soothe me, saying "Oh honey, now don't be worrying about that. We are going to live a long, long time."

When Dad was well into his eighties, I was in my early 60s, and I would say once again to him that I was struggling with the idea of him and Mom dying. "I don't know how to let you go Dad. You or Mom!" What I didn't say to him, but didn't have to say, was that I was troubled thinking about my own mortality.

Dad could be such a bear sometimes -- displaying outbursts of what we called fondly the "Orzo" temper -- but in this case, he was instead very, very sweet to me. "Oh, Sparky, (his favorite nickname for me was Sparky, or "Spargegela," in Italian) when you get there, you'll be ready."

I told this to Aunt Bette: "Dad was amazing..I really appreciate now what an incredible dad he was. And my mom, she was so amazing too."

At that very moment, I had to stop the interview!

"Oh my God there are two Baltimore orioles here at the orange feeder, Aunt Bette, oh my heavens, excuse me, Aunt Bette, I just have to take a photo. There, I just took one, now I have to go closer..." Could that be? Were these two Baltimore Orioles my mom and dad visiting me?

Aunt Bette asks: "Do you feed the orioles grape jelly?"

"Oh yes, yes we do, and we even found a bottle of Welch's that is made of plastic, you squirt it right into the orange Oriole feeder."

I pause to send her the photos and the phone connection disappears. And then it's back:

"You know Aunt Bette, my sister Holly and I have talked about the fact that Grandma had a really really rough time of it growing up. She had a father who was enraged over his circumstances. And she was very bright. She had great unrealized potential."

Ironically, though, she didn't want my very bright Dad to go to college; she told him, "your dad has worked at Ingraham's all his life, if it was good enough for him, why isn't it good enough for you?"

At the end of the conversation, I tell Aunt Bette that all in all, while Grandma certainly had her shortcomings, "I've become much much more forgiving toward her, after reading through these seven pages of notes."

Aunt Bette laughs, that husky laugh of hers. I recall how Aunt Bette used to smoke as a young woman; she gave up the habit when it became so clear cigarettes are extremely dangerous to one's health.

"Let's talk again," I say, and I tell her how much I've enjoyed sharing information with her while writing Finding Filomena.

"Oh yes," she agrees. "It's been so much fun for me too!"

"Well, so, that's it for today Aunt Bette. I'm so glad that we had this chance to talk. I really wanted you to know what it was Grandma told me so long ago."

Indeed, I have "known" for more than four decades all kinds of things about my grandmother and her family. Why did it take me such a long long time to realize what my grandma had said to me? I wish I could answer that question but I can't. It is what it is. Thankfully, though, as I am finishing writing Finding Filomena, I finally have brought forth the stories from those seven magical, red magic-markered pages in the orange file.

How Seven Pieces of Paper from an Old Orange File Threw My Novel -- and my Grandma Albina Ricci's Life -- Into a New Light!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 15:45:00 +0000

How could seven pieces of paper, each only five by eight inches, suddenly become so important to me and to the novel that I'm writing about my 19th-century ancestor, Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano? Why did it take me almost 45 years to look at them? And why did the memories recorded on these tiny sheets end up squeezing my heart, making me feel so much more sympathy for Filomena's granddaughter -- my very own grandmother, Albina Orzo Ricci?

Looking at these yellowed sheets, you would disregard them, understandably, as "Trash!" The pages are covered in scrawl, my own, all of it in red magic marker. Perhaps the most amazing thing about these scraps of paper is that I managed to ignore them for more than four decades. I stored them quite casually in an orange paper file marked "ORZO, Pasquale."

Pasquale Orzo was Grandma Albina's father and my great grandfather. It wasn't until Grandma Albina and all five of her "Orzo" sisters died that the secret shrouding Pasquale's birth was finally revealed to us.

My great grandparents, Pasquale and Caterina Orzo, and their six daughters. My grandmother, Albina Orzo, is second from the right, standing beside her mother.

******

OK, wind the clock back 45 years. My husband, Richard Kirsch, and I got married in 1978 and immediately moved to a very high-rise apartment in Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago. Rich was studying for his MBA at the University of Chicago. I was following my dream, and had a chance to become a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. I covered all kinds of fascinating stories, but specialized in covering environmental news -- I broke numerous front-page stories about the great hazards of the nuclear power industry, locally and around the region. I also worked with the Sun-Times' well respected investigative team to do an in-depth investigation of illegal dumping of hazardous wastes in the state of Illinois and in Indiana. I am prooud to say that our investigation, with several of my articles, ran in November of 1980 and was nominated the following year for a Pulitzer Prize.

Occasionally when we went back East to visit family, Rich and I would drive a couple of hours to see Grandma Albina and Grandpa Angelo in their cozy house at 218 Crown Street in Bristol, Connecticut, the small city where I was born. I have a crystal clear vision of Grandma and Grandpa's house -- I know that I will never forget it.

Grandpa had a Victrola -- stored within a handsome mahogany cabinet-- in the dining room. Grandma's big wooden rocking chair sat in one corner of the kitchen, smack up next to the stove and beneath the wooden clothes drying rack attached to the ceiling. Grandma and Grandpa and I always watched Lawrence Welk on TV whenever I was overnight there on a Saturday -- Grandma adored him. In the upstairs bedroom, where my Dad and his brother Bob grew up, I can see clear as day the khaki-colored wallpaper that sported World War II fighter planes flying this way and that. At the other end of the upstairs hall was the walk-in attic with a gazillion boxes and trunks with clothes and hats and furs and one odd thing after another to snoop through.

It was on one of Rich's and my visits -- about 1980 or '81 -- that I sat down one day with Grandma Albina at the white enamel kitchen table she owned as long as I knew her. I was clueless at the time, but Grandma began pouring her heart out to me, telling me stories about her childhood that only today I realize helped to shape who she was, and why, for example, she was so incredibly religious. What is astonishing to me is that Grandma never told these stories to anyone else, not even her own daughter, my Aunt Bette -- who has been reading each and every version of my book and helping me to understand more fully what my great grandparents Pasquale and Caterina were like.

Grandma spoke in great earnest to me about her parents, Pasquale Orzo and Caterina Amendola, but honestly, I was clueless. There I was about 28 years old, without children of my own, and with virtually no interest at all in my ancestors I really never had never given the least bit of thought to all the (many) people -- including Bis (which means Great) Nonno Pasquale, and Bis Nonna Caterina, who died before I was born.

Being the good reporter I was trained to be, however, I dutifully wrote down every single word Grandma said, in red magic marker pen, on those seven skimpy pieces of paper that she probably had taken out of a kitchen drawer. I covered the pages with diagrams and arrows too -- pointing this way and that -- as I tried my darndest to follow what she was saying about her father, Pasquale Orzo, and her mother, Caterina. She kept referring to a place called Paola, a seaside town in southern Italy where Pasquale was born. Apparently she had lived there at some point; she told me that there is a Saint Francis of Paola, much like there is a Saint Francis of Assisi.

GRANDMA ALBINA LAUGHING HER BIG LAUGH -- at our wedding, 9/2/78

Her stories meant absolutely nothing to me and so, after returning to my hectic life in Chicago, I promptly forgot all about what Grandma had said. But I save everything, so I created the orange Pasquale Orzo file and tucked the seven pages inside.

What Grandma HAD LEFT OUT OF HER TALK WITH ME -- because she and her sisters never breathed a word to anyone except of course to each other -- was that her childhood was miserable because Filimona was not married when Pasquale was born. He was "ILLEGITIMATE" -- I use quotes for this detestable word because I challenge its validity. I do the same thing with the ridiculous term, "out of wedlock." These and other words served only to shame my ancestors. Their trauma was so deep that my ancestors never recovered; sadly, they passed it on to their children -- Grandma and her five wonderful sisters -- who turned around and handed it on to my Dad's generation. The shame landed squarely on me and my siblings and my many cousins.

I decided to write "Finding Filomena"

in large part to undo (to the extent it's possible) this destructive legacy of shame and even, self-loathing and fierce anger. As I learn more about him, I understand that Pasquale had a very short fuse, and a mean temper, perhaps because of all the intense humiliation to which he was subjected, beginning when he was a child. Even his last name, ORZO -- the most inconsequential form of pasta -- was given to him by a municipal or church official with the intention, I firmly believe, to humiliate him his entire life.

By "RE" writing Filomena's life story, I have tried to empower my great grandmother by giving her a new history, or in this case, HERstory. Filomena thrives, and finds love and redemption, in my book, in spite of the fact she lives in an era and a nation that was and continues to be highly patriarchal, a culture that has held women back in every way possible.

My ancestor Filomena's last name, Scrivano, ironically, translates as "scribe." Lately I have begun to wonder if by writing this book, I am Filomena's scribe, or, whether she is actually the scribe who is working inside me! It gets complicated, this business of writing a book, especially when you are looking deep into the past into the lives of those responsible for creating you.

It was only a few weeks ago -- August 28, 2024 -- that I finally took those well worn pieces of paper out of the orange file, where I stuffed them after that crucial talk I had with Grandma. Heaven knows what prompted me to pull them out of the file! But I did, and once in hand, I decided to spend a few minutes trying to make sense of them -- no matter that I wrote the notes down, they've always looked like a bunch of scrawl that would simply be impossible to read and decipher.

As I sat in my living room pouring over the pages, occupying the grey sofa where I have written most of the novel, I had the overwhelming (and rather eerie) feeling that Grandma Albina was actually sitting right next to me on the couch. Maybe she was crocheting another afghan -- she managed to make at least five or six dozen in her lifetime, each grandchild getting at least one. (OK, truth be told, I got...more than one.)

Suddenly I could see Grandma's olive skin, her forehead creased in the way it did when she threw her head back and laughed her biggest laugh, her eyes clouded behind her eyeglasses (there's a great photo from my wedding where she's laughing like that.) I could also see my Grandma as she got irritated (Grandma, I'm afraid, inherited what we call the Orzo temper, taking after Pasquale. Numerous others, including my Dad and both my sisters, admit to having it.) Grandma could get really worked up over just about anything, especially if someone -- including her mild-mannered husband and her three rebellious children -- defied her wishes. Complaining in a kind of increasingly shrill tone, Grandma would declare something particularly unfair by shouting out: "Now that really gets my nanny goat!" Sometimes she was funny; other times I'm afraid, she wasn't funny at all.

Despite her foibles, I loved Grandma Albina so incredily much. She wrote letters constantly; during World War II she wrote to her two beloved sons, my Dad and Uncle Bob, who were both overseas seeing combat, every single day. She wrote to me in college constantly and yes, I wrote back; sometimes I think it's because of Grandma (oh yes, and my Dad) that I ended up a writer. Grandma loved to read too. She told me time and again that her favorite novel of all time was Anna Karenina -- "I loved this love story," she said.

She was a fantastic Grandmother, always thinking of us, loving us to the moon and back. She was interested in what each of us was doing, where we were traveling (because she and Grandpa traveled all over the world.) She took us shopping, she took us to the movies, and she bought us the best Christmas and birthday presents. I can still see the tiny white wooden table with black wrought iron legs that she presented me on my fifth birthday.

I was incredibly fortunate when it came to grandparents. Grandma Albina is one of the two most wonderful grandmothers a kid could have. She, long with my Mom's mom, Grandma Mich (for Michelina) were grandmothers who taught me through and through what it means to be a devoted grandma myself. Today I am ecstatic to be Gma to three amazing "grands," two -- Ronen and Dani -- who live in Boston, and the other little "mountain" man, Monte, in Denver.

The very next morning after I read those seven pages, I texted Aunt Bette to say that we needed to speak right away. I wanted to make sure that she, of all people, knew the stories contained in those seven pages. A few days later, I called her in Illinois and recorded a 45-minute conversation in which I slowly and carefully relayed to Aunt Bette, exactly what Grandma had said to me so many decades before. I told her about the discrimination that Pasquale endured, but most importantly, I let her know what had happened to her mother, my Grandma Albina, to make her childhood just miserable.

I think my Aunt Bette was shocked; she had never heard any of these stories. Grandma never told her how she had suffered as a child. Sadly, Grandma and Aunt Bette clashed fiercely when my aunt turned her back on the Catholic Church. Grandma told her that she felt "betrayed." I haven't asked, but I'm almost certain that they had not mended their relationship when Grandma passed away in December of 1987 at the age of 84.

The information in those seven pages, which I relayed to my aunt, is essential, I believe, to understanding why Grandma leaned so heavily on her religion. The irony was lost on her: she was blindly devoted to the Catholic Church, that very same church that took her father away from his birth mother Filomena Scrivano, simply because Filomena wasn't married. That same Church labeled Pasquale "illegitimate," ensuring that he would be a second- or third-class citizen for the rest of his life, and that shame would shadow all of his children as well.

In addition to explaining how her tall, irascible father came to marry her petite, sweet-tempered mother, Grandma also told me that day in 1980 about a particularly traumatic period of her childhood. The details of Grandma's misery -- which lasted about a year -- are spelled out in the seven small pages that are covered, fittingly, in blood red marker.

In the spring of 1910, just as Grandma Albina turned seven years old, she and her parents and three younger sisters left the USA to return to Italy, to their father's hometown of Paola. Grandma told me that her father wanted to try to become a farmer. After only about a month, however, Pasquale gave up his dream of trying to buy land in Paola -- I suspect he met with intense discrimination at home because he was endlessly branded "illegitimate." He left Caterina and the children behind, and that's when life turned downright scary for Grandma Albina.

The family moved in with Caterina's father, Giuseppe Amendola. But he had remarried -- his new wife, Madeline, wasn't thrilled to have a brood of four young kids she didn't know move into her home. She particularly seemed to hate Grandma Albina, who was the oldest, but still just an innocent child.

Like all first-born children, Grandma was expected to look after her three younger sisters, who were babies. Frequently, my grandmother found herself scrambling for food. Even worse, she and her mother and siblings apparently had to leave Giuseppe's house because Grandma describes having to search everywhere for shelter in Paola; they ended up in a one-room hovel.

Thankfully, Pasquale found work back in the United States as a mason, building at least one church spire. He also worked as a carpenter, and eventually built the family a home at 295 Park Street in Bristol. His wife and daughters returned from Italy about a year later. They sailed on the SS Luisiana, arriving at Ellis Island on May 6, 1911. This information comes from my cousin Donna Ricci, who has done an extraordinary amount of work researching Orzo family genealogy. Besides examining birth, marriage and death records for Pasquale and his family, Donna also looked at dozens of ship manifests. The manifest for the SS Luisiana on May 6, 1911, shows that Caterina sailed with the children using her maiden name, Amendola, because she was accompanied by her beloved brother, Gaetano.

********

Grandma Albina was actually the second of ten children born to Pasquale and Caterina Orzo. Their first daughter, Adelina Natalina Orzo (known as Lela), was born in December, 1898, apparently with some kind of birth defect. She died at age five, bringing unimaginable grief to her parents. But that was just the beginning of the horror. In 1922, daughters Nicoletta and Lucy died within a week of each other. The cause of death for both girls was whooping cough (pertussis) and pneumonia. I cannot fathom the grief that accompanied this double tragedy. I cannot let my mind go there. And yet, even more heartbreak was in store for Pasquale, Caterina and his family.

They had one son, Francis,

a sweet little boy born in September of 1921. On a summer day in August of 1929, when Francis was seven, he was playing with my Dad, who was three, and Dad's older brother Bob, age four. Pasquale and other family members sat a few feet away on the front porch of 295 Park Street. According to my cousin Donna, who heard it directly from her father, Bob Ricci, Francis told Bob that he would go across the street to pick him some chokecherries. He walked between two parked cars, turned and told Bob to wait for him there. As Francis backed into the street, a car struck and killed him while Pasquale and the family watched in horror. Dad was too young to remember anything, but my dear Uncle Bob apparently was traumatized for life. In 2013, Bob and Donna visited 295 Park Street together; he recalled with great sadness that after Francis died, he and his grandfather Pasquale "stared at the [blood]stain in the road for what seemed like months."

His only son's death proved to be a deep knife to Pasquale's heart. Bis Nonno suffered a stroke not longer afterward, from which he only partially emerged. He was bedridden for the next ten years, cared for by Caterina and her daughters, and at times, by his grandchildren. Dad recalls his grandfather sitting in a chair, drooling, unable to speak. Pasquale Orzo died in 1940, at the age of 70. Which was exactly the age I was in 2022 when I began to turn all of my attention to writing about "les antenati" -- my many Italian ancestors, specifically Bis Nonno Pasquale.

Aunt Bette Foeller (nee Elizabeth Ricci) and her cousin, Phyllis Ingellis, on their Confirmation Day. When my husband and I visited Paola a year ago, in October of 2023, I hadn't looked at these seven remarkable pages of notes. It wasn't until one evening a few weeks ago, for reasons I cannot explain, that I rather casually took them out of the orange file. I had finished writing the inner story of "Finding Filomena," and it left me wondering about Pasquale's life. The reporter in me wanted to know in more detail how his unfortunate birth circumstances clouded his life and the lives of his descendants. I had decided to interview a few of my cousins, too, specifically the children of my Grandmother's sister, Mary Ingellis.

Aunt Bette surveying her garden in Hudson, Illinois, with her father, my grandfather, Angelo Ricci - who grew a sumptuous garden back in Bristol, Connecticut. She has read every draft of my new novel, "Finding Filomena," the story of our ancestor, Filomena Scrivano. ******

That day in 1980 that Grandma spoke to me, she seemed old. But she was only in her late seventies -- not much older than I am today. What I wouldn't understand until I became a GRANDMA myself is that without actually telling me, Grandma gave me in effect, ancestral "jewels," extraordinary details of how her father met and fell deeply in love with her mother, Caterina Amendola, a soft-spoken woman with the longest and most beautiful hair that for her whole life, she wound around and around into a bun at the back of her head.

While I don't remember having the conversation with Grandma, I recall the kitchen perfectly. Albina Orzo Ricci's kitchen spilled over with the fragrance her very special (warm) loaves of just baked bread resting on top of the stove. It was the place she made buttery round Italian cookies with pastel icing and sprinkles, for Easter, along with yummy cream puffs and the traditional "lamb" cake -- she made a simple white cake and divided the batter into two pans, each shaped like half a lamb. Once baked, the two halves were frosted together and on the outside it was heavily sprinkled with white coconut. Thus, the Easter lamb!

Grandma also made the most divine spaghetti sauce. Her eggplant Parmesan was such that I can still recall 50 years later eating it warm, and then, eating it cold between two slices of that fabulous Italian bread. Perhaps the piece de resistance for me was Grandma Albina's "minestra" -- she cooked it for me every summer of my childhood when I would stay with her a few days.

Into her minestra Grandma dropped carrots, onions, tomatoes, parsley and very tender (Italian) flat string beans and of course, zucchini, or in her dialect, "cogootz." All of these veggies were grown with immense love and pride by my mild-mannered Grandfather, Angelo Ricci, in his mammoth vegetable garden. Besides growing boatloads of veggies, Grandpa also grew all kinds of flowers; the ones I remember best are the bountiful roses growing on split-rail fences and wooden lattices and the purple irises -- some of that very same stock now grow at my house and at my younger sister Karen's house in Massachusetts.

*****

The fact that Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano was unmarried when she gave birth to Pasquale Orzo on November 3, 1870 seems so incredibly inconsequential from my modern perspective. But living as she did in the small seaside town of Paola, in Calabria, the southern-most province of Italy, Filomena was squeezed. Like all Catholic countries in those days, Italy adhered closely to strict religious laws that shaped civic laws, all of which were imposed to basically punish unmarried women. Ah, but there wasn't a single word of reprimand for the men who created these pregnancies. Things have changed, but really, how much have they changed?

By decree of the all powerful Catholic church, beginning in the 16th century, all unwed women had to give their babies up to so-called "ozpizias," often decrepit and filthy foundling homes where babies were fed by wet nurses who passed deadly diseases from one infant to another. Most of these poor infants -- an estimated 93 percent in my Great Grandfather's birth year (1870) and region (Cosenza) -- died before their first birthdays!

So how exactly did Bis Nonno Pasquale manage to survive this gauntlet? For that you must read my book! I began doing "research" for this book nearly five years ago, when the pandemic hit in March of 2020 (there was no connection, at least none I can identify.) I started mulling over family stories that I had heard growing up, from Mom and Dad, and from my grandparents, about the ancestors, or in italiano, "les antenati."

Simultaneously, I started "craving" the soft mellifulous sound of the Italian language. My yearning to hear and to speak and finally, to write Italian has grown and grown over the past four years. Today I am writing in Italian (a little) and listening to Italian music. And I am planning to return to Naples next year, and visit Paola again, hopefully in early May, 2025, in time for the huge festival in Paola that celebrates "the other Saint Francis," not the one we all know about, from Assisi, but instead, the meek but beatific saint who grew up in Paola and fasted in the caves on the hillside in the 1500s.

********

Why did it take me until I was 70 years old to begin caring about my ancestors? I don't know the answer to that important question. Even though both my parents are Italian, and my mom and her parents (Claude and Michelina Rotondo) were fluent and spoke Italian constantly as I sat at their dining room table for endless numbers of meals, I was never interested in learning the ancestor's language (and it wasn't available in school, either.) Instead I enjoyed learning Spanish, and then French, in high school and college.

But something strange started up in the Spring of 2020 and my longtime writing buddy, Peggy Woods, was witness to all of it. Almost overnight, I found myself feeling a deep fascination with Italian.

And when I turned 70 two years later, on November 29, 2022, the intensity of my fascination grew sharply. That's when our daughter Lindsay Kirsch Kaatz, and her husband Geoff, Coloradans who love hiking, had their first baby, on November 26, 2022, meaning grandbaby number three (Monte) and I share the same Thanksgiving birthday weekend. Lindsay and Geoff decided to name their firstborn Monte, (Italian for mountain) in part because Linds wanted to honor her family. She says they were driving along one day and she got a glimpse of the awesome Front Range of the Rockies, and boom, the name Monte ...was just...there.

*****

Great Great Grandma (Bis bis Nonna)Filomena gave birth to Pasquale Orzo in 1870, and exactly a century later, in September, 1970, I entered Brown University as a (full scholarship-funded) freshman. As I was growing up, my mom would often say to me, in a kind almost teasing way, "Ah tu se fortunata!" "You are lucky!" All those years, I never really grasped what she meant. I was lucky...in what way exactly? Lucky to go to college? "But everybody goes to college, Ma? Don't they?"

It's only now, looking back, and especially considering what intense hardships my grandparents and great grandparents endured, on my behalf, on behalf of all of their children and grandchildren, that I really understand how fortunate I am.

Like all immigrants in every age, my ancestors did what they had to do in order to survive. In order to eat. In order to make lives for their families. In order that their descendants would get ahead. It's a very American, and an old-fashioned story, and yet, it's also a brand new story, for every immigrant today who yearns to step onto U.S. soil to make her/his fortune.

*********

I'm diverging here because honestly after finishing "Finding Filomena," I'm feeling "steered" by the Universe? les antenati? to write about my Mom's side of the family. When her mother, Grandma Mish and Mish's sister, Gina, and their mother, Clementina Ciucci, came to America, they left the Abruzzi -- a beautiful mountainous region northeast of Rome -- in November of 1918, and sail sailed out of Naples on the Olympia, the sister ship to the Titanic. The journey to America was supposed to take about a week, except that it was the middle of World War I. The ship ended up in Gibralter for ten days, during which time Grandma and her famiy ate nothing but bread and grapes.

They didn't arrive in Boston for two months -- by then it was the middle of winter, frigid January. The man who was to become my Grandpa Claude took them to Hartford, CT to a well-known department store named GFox where they bought winter coats. Like all immigrants, my ancestors did whatever it took to give their children food to eat, a roof over their heads and a better life. A chance at success. Two of my mother's brothers, Grandma Mish's boys, got PhDs; Claude Rotondo Jr in Engineering and Delio J. Rotondo, in Education; both had highly successful careers. My Uncle Paul Ricci -- Dad's younger brother -- taught philosophy for years in the California State College system. Countless other relatives have achieved great things.

I have the great good fortune to live in the USA, such a bountifully rich and free country, only because my ancestors took risks, and sacrificed dearly on behalf of me and the rest of my family. Sono cosi grato, antenati. Siamo cosi fortunata. I am very grateful. What a privilege it is to be able to write this book, to tell Bis Bis Nonna Filomena and Bis Nonno Pasquale's stories, to pay homage to him and to his wife, Bis Nonna Caterina, and the myriad other "antenati" who came long before I was born -- oh there are so many people I have never met, people I want to thank.

Lately, I feel like I know them on a much deeper level. My cousins Bill and Pat Ingellis, and their sister, Sandra Druhan-Morse -- who as a high school student used babysit for me and my brother Ric and her brother Bill and oh what terrorists we were! These dear cousins -- children of my Grandma Albina's sister, Aunt Mary Ingellis. My cousins have so kindly sent dozens of amazing photos -- and shared amazing memories with me by phone and email. All of this will enliven the "Finding Filomena" ebook, which is coming out soon.

And then there all of my own photos, spanning four generations of my family:

Every time I look at these old photos, which I treasure, I sink into a reverie. I feel so deeply connected to all of them...in a distinctly ethereal way. And I especially feel les antenati, every time I write in, or speak Italian.

Io amo scrivere in italiano!

I love writing in Italian!

I also have begun to say (out loud) some of my mother's favorite Italian sayings -- what doozies they are. When I hear myself saying them, feel the words rolling around in my mouth, I feel Mom! She is beside me, she is inside me, a great great loving spirit. I feel her arms around me, holding me, as if I am resting on an everlasting cloud. She is always smiling. She is always gently telling me that everything is just

perfetto!

Yes, Mom, I feel you and Dad and my grandparents and all of les antenati and I am happy and at peace, knowing that one day I too will have the privilege of becoming an ancestor in our loving family.

Letter to Antonello Zaccaria: "MILLE GRAZIE for Your Crucial Help in Finding Filomena!"

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 16:55:00 +0000

Buona serra Antonello! From my international weather forecast, I see it is evening and about 27 degrees Celsius in Paola right now! Oh, I bet it has been a beautiful day there beside the turquoise sea.

Here in Massachusetts, it is currently just about the same temperature, but we have a mix of sun and clouds. It is 2:08 in the afternoon on Sunday, August 25th, 2024 or as you express it, 25-8-2024. I am busy busy busy getting my manuscript, “Finding Filomena,” together! I just this minute translated the title into Italian — using Google -- yes, sadly I have to rely on Google, but sono cosi grato that a decent translator exists!

I am at this very moment in the timeless present, and I am typing the title of the book -- in italiano 🇨🇮 -- on the first page of the manuscript, beneath the words "Finding Filomena." It seems only fitting that I inform you first Antonello, because without you, I’m not sure this book would exist, it most certainly wouldn't exist in its present form! Who would have thought when you and Richard and I met on that very rainy Saturday morning last October in the parking lot of the Sanctuario di San Francesco di Paola, that you would play such a key role in the life of this book!

To think, I found you in such a random off-hand fashion, after the other Italian tourism guide was unable to meet us at the last minute. Ah, but I do believe that the Universe (I refer to "her" as Cara Divina) has our ancestors' best interests in mind; I feel a kind of divine energy at my back, helping to push me along with this book.

My husband and I liked you the moment we met you, Antonello, although it was a bit difficult to talk as we were all three of us under ombrelli!Oh but we were so happy to learn that even though you look to be about the age of our son Noah, who is 35 years old,

you have plenty of experience. Not only were you born and raised just a few kilometers from Paola (in your beloved seaside town of Amantea), you also gained a much deeper understanding of the region when you worked as a local reporter. And then you got certified as a guida turistica -- by the state of Italy. Your company, Core Calabria,

is fabulous, and your new website, with that handsome photo of you, is going to attract tourists, i.e. young women, in droves! L O L ! I told you I like to tease people, just like my namesake, Claudio Rotondo (my mother's papa!) used to when I was a child.

Seriously, though, Antonello, what is/was most amazing about you is what you told us over lunch in that gorgeous little town of San Lucido where my great grandparents got married in January 1898. We were dining on ensalada parmesana e capuccino) and you casually mentioned that one of your favorite pastimes is assisting people with family genealogy! I opened my mouth to speak -- Dio Mio, and Madonna Mia, -- but nothing came out except, "wow, that's great!" Inside though I was speaking to my cousin Donna Ricci back in the states: "Cousin, we have hit the jackpot for sure!"

And yet, even though you seemed perfect for the job of tracking down Filomena, I still wasn’t altogether convinced you would be able to do it. I mean, how would you possibly track down our elusive Bis Bis Nonna when all you had to go on was a shred of information -- three or four handwritten lines on the back of the ONLY photo we have of Filomena, supplied of course by cousin Donna. No, it wasn't much of a clue at all: these words you can barely see here basically translate as: "To my dear son, Pasquale, Filomena Scrivano (Pera), 23 October, 1919."

That's all you had to go on! Miraculously, though, after only three months of intensive searching (for which you refused to take even un centisimo!) you found her, Antonello! OMG I remember that Thursday morning! It was January 25th, exactly seven months ago today. I was sashaying down Sixth Avenue in Denver, Colorado, killing time while my dog Poco was being groomed. It was a bluebird day -- that's shorthand in Colorado for pure blue skies, no clouds allowed -- and I was headed for Cheseman Park, figuring I'd hang out there, when I happened to casually glance at my Inbox. HOLY MADONNA, there it was -- your email!

"Hello Claudia 🙂🖐🏾 and Donna

it is me, Antonello Zaccaria from Calabria

I want to share my happiness this afternoon...

I'm in the center of Paola

I think I've found death certificate of Filomena Pera ...... OUR Filomena😍🥰

She married Leonardo Scrivano.

She died in 1927 in the seaside area of Paola. I Read the document today.

I'll send u more mail to explain all I understood...

And I'm gonna send a picture 📸 of what I have seen."

I screamed with joy, and immediately dialed your cell phone in Amantea. I don't recall what I said to you, something like, "I am hysterically happy" -- no, I probably did NOT use the word hysterically, as that might have confused you as to my state of mind. Let's just say that I was somewhere out in the stratosphere all day long!

I do remember dancing on the sidewalk and then calling my cousin Donna (our fathers were brothers) up in Kennebunkport, Maine. She and I agreed that you, Antonello, are definitely UN MIRACULO, a miracle for sure, as well as a gift from God, un dono di Dio. How long and hard you must have looked. I know the search was something you cared about deeply, and I know you devoted yourself to it. All your hard work paid off -- as did your decision to look in one last room, one last the corner, in one last (and improbable) dusty file drawer!

Because of you, Antonello, WE NOW HAVE CONCRETE EVIDENCE THAT OUR BIS BIS NONNA FILOMENA SCRIVANO actually lived -- and died!

For Donna, who has been on the Filomena trail for more than a decade, this meant that her long search for Filomena was not in vain. As I explained to you, Donna and her husband Dave made the trip to Paola back in 2014. They presented themselves at the municipal office in Paola and my cousin politely asked for our Great Grandfather Pasquale Orzo's birth certificate. Dammit, but didn't those asinine women in the stupid municipal office give my cousin nothing but agita! and the old Italian version of runaround (hey, Antonello, how do you translate runaround into Italian??)

Even though the women clearly were in possession of the birth certificate, because Donna could see it on the desk, they simply refused to give it to her. And then they had the audacity to point at our great grandfather's last name, Orzo, and LAUGH at it! Oh dear God I wish those women heartburn of the very worst sort -- bruciore di stomaco della peggior specie! These pathetic women were certainly as evil-minded as the original beasts who in the very same municipal office way back in 1870 annointed our ancestor with the demeaning name ORZO, the very least important sort of pasta there is!

Enough ranting and raving, scatenarsi e delirare! I want to say that the last year and a half writing this book has been nothing short of un miraculo for me personally. I fully expected to write a story about my great great grandmother that would provide some much-desired “answers” to questions that have been flying around in our family for decades. I really wasn't too worried about writing it. Having published four novels, I was pretty confident that I could come up with some kind of love story about Filomena that family members might enjoy, a story that would also, importantly, give my great great grandmother back her stature. More than anything, I wanted to restore my ancestors' dignity. Because as you well know, Antonello, Filomena had her baby way back in 1870 in SOUTHERN Italy, for heaven's sake. That's 154 years ago, and yes, Pasquale was born outside of marriage -- the term is out of wedlock or — fuori dal matrimonio. Dear GOD and Mary how I loathe those deadly words! The shame that was historically associated with this sin is unfathomable to us moderns. I wonder, Antonello, is that true of young people in Italy too today? Do they readily accept the idea that a woman may decide to have a baby without being married?

Whatever is true today, illegitimacy was undeniably the source of almost intolerable shame back then, and not only shame. For centuries, under the ironclad rule of the Catholic Church in Italy (as well as in Spain, France, Portugal and Belgium), women who delivered babies outside of marriage were forced to GIVE UP their babies to church officials who then placed these precious infants in decrepit “ozpizias” literally hospices where they were fed by wet nurses who passed diseases from one baby to another.

I am going to pause here Antonello, because I need some air. Honestly, I cannot go forward at this moment thinking about what happened to all of those hundreds of thousands of infants. It makes me physically ill and I feel like I can't breathe properly.

I've told you what happened to these hundreds of thousands of tiny souls, all of them up in heaven as angels for sure. I will resume my letter after I've had un caffe or perhaps a stroll through Mother Nature, una passeggiata nella
Madre Natura!

It is this feminine (some would say feminist) energy in the Universe that has been missing for most of history. It is this feminine energy, embodied in women, and also in the Virgin Mary, that is so popular with millions and millions of indigenous peoples around the world. It was the MADONNA figure that the Roman Catholic patriarchy, all of them men, tried to wipe out UNSUCCESSFULLY around the world. Indigenous cultures have clung to their madonnas. Which from my point of view, is a good, no, a great thing. It is this very energy that is coming into its own right NOW, right here, in the U.S.of A. In our (knock 'em dead KAMALA HARRIS!) election coming this November. Yes, we are praying around the clock that the opposition candidate, a Republican who will remain nameless, will disappear after he is handily defeated once and for all.

OKAY, time I am got off my soapbox. Time to take un passeggiata in Mother Nature, my dear friend, mio caro amico, Antonello!

HAWK, HAWK TAWK TO ME!!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 15:26:00 +0000

August 20, 2024 Come closer, HAWK, fly up and out of the field, tell me why you have been crying incessantly since early July? What are you trying to tell me? Why oh why are you crying so much over and over and over again, why are you crying so loud?

I hear you first thing in the morning while I am meditating, kneeling in front of the open door of my studio, the one that faces the meadow. I am trying to focus on breathing, on clearing my mind. I am trying not to let my attention stray out to the beautiful green field, crowned with delicate Queen Anne’s lace and fluffy yellow ragweed, where soft brown deer wander, where red fox seek their prey, where bobcats and bears occasionally appear. I need to focus, and yet, your haunting cry sears my mind, lands and resonates deeply in my chest. Please come out of the bountiful wetland, where you seem to have settled, and let me know something, anything, what are you trying to say?!

********

It was the 7th of July, 2024, a Sunday in a month that was to prove thoroughly REMARKABLE and LIFE-CHANGING, I first heard you. I paused meditating. I wrote in my journal, “I hear a hawk,” which is always a thrill. How many times hawks have visited me

branch overhead,

in the past, landing on a branch I look up to in meditation. Seeing a hawk, or hawks, who knows how many, came to be such a regular occurrence a few years back, that I came to expect it.

Ah, but that dear branch didn’t last. As of this past spring, the branch snapped -- it hangs from the tree now, looking like a sorry, drooping limb.

The day I set off for Boston, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, on a Greyhound, to help care for my beloved grandchildren, Ronen, 10, and his sister, Dani, 4, I noted HAWK's arrival again: “Red-shouldered HAWK you keep crying and crying, do you miss me before I even leave for Boston? What are you trying to tell me?” Perhaps her cry was a warning, I wondered? Ah, but that sounded ominous. Looking back now, from the perspective of August 23, 2024, I now realize that the HAWK WAS BEARING GOOD – even AMAZING news!?

*******

July 16, 2024 8:33 a.m. “Red-shouldered hawk, you are crying again, please please just tawk to me please just tawk to me PLEASE!” Then I wrote down the word SACRED and then, SAC(RED)-shouldered hawk.

I decided to text my college roommate, Cathie Murray, who lives in Rockland, Maine. Cathie is very well educated in the natural world.

“Good morning Cathie! So I was just meditating for a long time and a red-shouldered hawk was crying and crying. Do you think that’s because the hawk is in stress? Do you have any ideas or suggestions as to why the hawk would continue to cry?”

She answered: “Thanks for asking about the hawk. I’m guessing it is a young one being very insistent about food. This time of year, young hawks leave the nest but are still totally dependent on the parents for food for quite a while. WaaaaH!”

A few days later, I wrote to Cathie again: “That hawk has been crying all week, Cath. Finally, we saw him (or her or they or whatever) sitting in a willow tree in the middle of the meadow. The hawk seems to like the third willow tree, consistently – and has visited it every single day this week!” She sent me back on-line information about why

“Juvenile Hawks Cry Wolf.”

Later, I texted Cathie about the hawk’s flight patterns – “sometimes the hawk is making circles over the meadow,” and its landing pattern: “This afternoon after my writing group ended, I saw the red-shouldered hawk sitting on a low branch of the third willow tree.”

On Sunday, July 21, 2024, a day that will go down in HERstory (and MYstory too) as it turns out, I wrote Cathie first thing, saying “you are on my mind once again this morning because this time I opened the front door and the red-shouldered hawk was over to the right in the pine tree, only 25 yards from me standing at the front door. The sound of his/her/their crying was SO incredibly loud that I called out to the hawk "Please HAWK, please TAWK! What do you want to tell me?”

Oh wow was I excited by the HAWK coming so close! When I went to sit down for meditation, I decided to don the exquisite red prayer shawl decorated in black symbols

that my sister-in-law Jo Kirsch -- an extraordinary yoga teacher up in Vermont -- gave me for my seventieth birthday. I told Cathie: “I didn’t know what to do with that red shawl until today!”

So it wasn't until now, on August 23, 2024, that things came into sharp focus. Only now, as I am looking back over my journal for the last few weeks, I am piecing together the events of July, and in particular that day when the HAWK practically walked up to my front door. Only NOW do I understand why the HAWK was TAWKing, what she was saying, or trying to say, so desperately.

My life changed in July. So did the lives of millions of other Americans. It changed because on that HERstoric Sunday, President Joe Biden did the most selfless and the incredibly patriotic thing: he graciously stepped out of the 2024 race for President allowing Kamala Harris to slip in. (In my Substack columns, I call her CALM a La!)

But before that happened, something really strange, really hard to explain, happened to me in the middle of the night.

About four am on that Sunday morning, I woke up out of a dead sleep and pulled out the tiny black notebook I keep for just such nocturnal musings. Without thinking, without even looking at the page, I wrote down a haiku

(probably because my dear friend Sharon sends me a daily haiku.) They are kind of infectious, those haikus, once you start writing them, you start thinking in haiku format, turning everything haiku-like.

On that very early morning I opened the little black book and in red pen I wrote across two pages:

CALM a LA Harris

maybe our next President

Blood, bullets may fly

I fiddled with the last line:

Blood, bullets, might fly

and then

Please God, no blood fly

and then just

BALLOTS not BULLETS!

On and on through the next two pages I wrote, playing with different third lines. I gave the poem a title, “Harris Haiku,” and drew a heart around it. By then I was exhausted, so I fell back to sleep. I didn’t think much about the Harris haiku until just after Rich and I finished brunch the next day, SUNDAY JULY 21st. I said to my husband, political activist Richard Kirsch, “hey honey I wrote a haiku about Kamala Harris in the middle of the night.” My husband is a terrific writer and particularly clever with haikus, so he took it up and produced the final draft:

CALM a La Harris

Maybe — our next President?

God, no bullets fly

We immediately texted the haiku to our son, Noah, a commercial solar energy consultant out in Colorado – he just loves politics. What he wrote back simultaneously was this:

“HE’s OUT!” Biden had, at the very same moment we sent the haiku, announced that he would step out of the race. I got up off the couch. Stunned. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out except a squeak (or was it a hawk-like squawk?) and then a cry of joy! The synchronicity of writing that poem on the very day the election went topsy turvy set my head spinning, and it hasn’t stopped since!

You might say that on that historic/HERstoric day in July, I quite suddenly and without any warning, turned back into the writer I used to be at the start of my writing career. All I know is that I started writing every day during that thrilling week that followed – as Kamala raked in a slew of campaign contributions, and earned endorsements all around. Once again, 40 years after retiring from daily journalism, I wrote “on deadline.” I “filed” a Substack story every day (in my previously unused Substack column called "Here, NOW!".

I’m no longer writing for Substack every day, but I am thinking like a journalist again, identifying story ideas that might work as blogposts. It’s so much fun write quickly, the way I used to in my newspaper days, before I quit daily journalism to raise my three children. It’s also wonderful to feel so hopeful and excited about this incredible election.

Moreover, it has become clear to me today, as I am writing this, that like the fledgling HAWK who was having difficulty separating from the nest, squawking the whole time as she has found her independence, I too have separated from the “nest” that for four decades –- my daughter Jocelyn

"HEART EXPLOSION," painted for my beloved JOCELYN, hanging in her office at the SOUTH BOSTON COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER, where she is Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, caring for many, many patients, as well as Chief Operating Officer. During the pandemic, Jocelyn supervised a team of nurses and health aides who vaccinated more than 35,000 patients against COVID.

turns 40 in October -- I made a priority for my children. I am no longer the woman who, for such a long time after the nest went empty, was paralyzed by the need for my children’s approval and emotional support.

Finally, I can stand back, and look at Jocelyn and her siblings, Lindsay and Noah, and say, God Bless you all, I love you to pieces, but I don’t need to “nest” you anymore. I recognize that you are adult children and you have successfully fledged! And now, thank God, so too I have fledged!

God knows I’m not sure how this realization happened in one fell swoop. Perhaps it has been coming for a long time, and I just didn't realize it.

Something else happened: I decided to do a deep clean of my office/art studio, which I haven’t done in many, many years.

Looking into really old file cabinets, I found countless stories that I had written for the Chicago Sun-Times and for The Wall Street Journal (as well as many other newspapers and magazines.) Honestly, I had forgotten all about this work. When I looked at it again, it hit me: some of these articles should really appear on my website. I contacted the talented young woman who helps me with the site and she said, “By all means, it will enliven your website if you were to include as many of these stories as you like, because in the digital world, there is no limit.”

Well, actually, there is a limit. I have no intention of flooding the website, but I will include, say, a dozen or so of my best stories, including the ones that won me prizes and a nomination for a Pulitzer (along with the other reporters at the Sun-Times who helped investigate illegal toxic waste dumping in Illinois back in the early 1980s.) Ancient history, all of it, but it’s my ancient history (or HERstory) so it certainly belongs in the website.

Meanwhile, I decided that I will publish, as an ebook, the novel “Finding Filomena,” a fictional memoir about my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano. Fi’s story – which I keep referring to as the inner story – needs another chapter (or two). As for the outer narrative that I have been writing to weave around Filomena’s tale, for now, I’m happy not writing it, or maybe writing it. I've decided that I'm not going to worry about it. Just as I sometimes let unfinished paintings “season” (or simmer) in my studio, I’m content just to let it be whatever it is, for now.

August 23, 2024 “I hear you HAWK. Loud and clear! Thank you thank you for tawking to me! Yes, I’m putting on the red-shouldered shawl again, which I do whenever I hear you. And I am lighting the red candle. I am HERE NOW, this morning, listening to you, as you keep crying, crying, I HEAR YOU, you, red-shouldered HAWK, HAWK, keep TAWKing!”

And please, dear HAWK, fly fly fly and take up the cry wherever you can and with all the HAWKS (and doves and any birds you meet), tell all of them to join the cry: ELECT CALM a LA HARRIS and TIM WALZ IN NOVEMBER!

Celebrating My Wonderful DAD -- Ric Ricci -- What a Life He Had!!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 17:07:00 +0000

As today is August 15, 2024, the fifth anniversary of my Dad's becoming an OFFICIAL ANCESTOR, it's time we celebrate his amazing life. Of course, we can't tell Dad's story without bringing in his extraordinary wife, our mother, Dena -- we called her Dee. Mom became an OFFICIAL ANCESTOR on October 17, 2014 -- going on a decade. It doesn't make sense perhaps, but I miss her more today than ever!

Here are the famous pair, standing on the porch of their Pittsfield, MA, "retirement" house. That house -- which Dad painstakingly redecorated -- is forever seared into my memory. Close my eyes and I can see all the Rose of Sharon (pink, purple, white) that Dad planted -- it always bloomed in profusion in late summer against the back porch. Inside the house, I see the cheerful living room, with the gorgeous pink stiped wallpaper and the flowered sofa -- where we would squeeze in together on Christmas Eve -- to that blue and white kitchen, where Mom made miracles happen every day! In this photo, I choose to think that perhaps Mom and Dad are waving to us from the GREAT BEYOND!

Dad wasn't born into money or privilege, but he sure was born into a lot of love! His parents, Albina Orzo Ricci, and Angelo Ricci,

were crazy about each other -- so much so that when Grandpa Angelo's mother -- a snob named Augusta Baldini Ricci who hailed from Rome -- rejected my dear Grandma Albina (because her Orzo family was dirt poor, and worse, they hailed from Calabria in southern Italy) --

my grandparents decided in October of 1921 to ELOPE!

According to my Aunt Bette, the youngest of my grandparents' five children, Angelo and Albina were overtly affectionate with one another throughout their 66-year marriage. But Grandma Albina was given to fits of anger, especially when her "honey husband" won the cardgames they played together at night. Aunt Bette says that Grandma wasn't terrific at keeping track of the cards, while Grandpa Angelo was. Every time he laid down four aces or some other winning hand, crushing the card game, Grandma would get furious -- and sometimes she would hit my poor grandfather!

My Dad was son number two, born on July 25, 1926, in Bristol, Connecticut, two years after his older brother Bob; the two brothers fought fiercely growing up. Indeeed, Aunt Bette -- who turned 90 last May (here she is with her dad, my Grandpa Angelo)

recalls that her older brothers' fights got so physical so fast, that she was terrified they might strike her as they hit each other. So frightened was young Bette that she ran into the coat closet to hide.

"I still remember the smell of my mother's black Persian wool coat," she says. She remained in the closet until it was safe to come out. Unfortunately, the anger that ran through Dad's family -- his mother and his brother Bob had notoriously furied tempers -- sometimes landed squarely in the laps of my brother and sisters and me. As much as I adored Dad, his explosive temper could, even at the end of his life, scare the bejesus out of me.

Nonetheless, my dad's obituary -- which he composed himself in the last days before he passed -- makes a point of saying that he "grew up surrounded by a large and loving family. Ric had an idyllic and adventurous boyhood, playing in the woods behind his parents' house on Crown Street, and generally raising hell with his brother and cousins." Dad told us a few stories about precisely how he raised hell and all I can say is that it's a good thing he lived to tell them!

Despite the fact that my grandparents had a limited amount of education, Dad demonstrated his intellectual potential early. At age 14, he won first prize in an essay contest sponsored by The Bristol Courant, a competition that provided 48 newspaper boys with a TRIP TO WASHINGTON, D.C. for FDR's third inauguration in 1941! Dad won the contest after selling a record number of new subscriptions to The Courant! As I read his essay today, goosebumps shivered up and down my arms and tears flooded my eyes!

Entitled "The Chance of a Lifetime," Dad's essay recounted getting up at 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, January 19, 1941, "after a night of restlessness and anxiety, [as] I was ready to go on a trip to Washington, D.C. to see the Inauguration of President Roosevelt. A most historical one for never before has a President taken the oath of office for three terms."

The boys boarded buses in nearby Hartford, Connecticut, stopped briefly in New York City for church services, and then "sped through Philadelphia and Baltimore," arriving in DC on Sunday afternoon, the "realization of a dream!" The first thing Dad did when he arrived in DC was "immediately mail cards to my folks and friends at home." The cards featured all the places he was scheduled to visit on his once-in-a-lifetime trip to the nation's capital.

Monday, January 20, 1941 was FDR's third Inauguration Day. The boys did some sightseeing, during which Dad aimed his camera in every direction. Nothing escaped him: he even noted that the streets of Washington, D.C. were "like a wheel with the spokes representing the avenues of our states. The axis of the wheel is the nation's Capitol Building."

As the buses carrying the newspaper boys drove up Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, crowds of people were filling the grandstands. The Bristol Courant had reserved a bank of prime seats for their delivery boys -- and their excitement spilled over as FDR approached!

At first all they could see was President Roosevelt's official car.

"Then, at last, we could see him, the President of our country, Franklin Delano Roosevelt." FDR delivered a brief inaugural speech, and according to Dad's essay, the President addressed the woes of the nation. "A marvelous and thrilling parade soon followed, with soldiers on foot, cavalrymen on their horses army tanks and machine gunds mounted on trucks." Airplane formations "clouded the sky, adding to the display."

On the last day of the trip, the boys visited Mount Vernon on a "beautiful site facing the Potomac River. Down an old brick path off on a side of the home is the tomb where lies the Father of our country." And then the epitome of his trip: "I visited the Lincoln Memorial and with my hand I touched the most lifelike statue of

... Abraham Lincoln, sculptured by Daniel French. I had seen it in pictures many times, and now there it was before me!"

Dad concluded his winning essay in gratitude: "Many thanks to those who made such a trip possible for a 14-year old newspaper boy."

Dad retained his love of travel and adventure until the very end of his life. In July of 2017, at the age of 91, he boarded a plane at Bradley International Airport with his daughter, Karen, and Karen's husband, Dale, to fly to Denver, Colorado, for the wedding of his fourth granddaughter, my own daughter, Lindsay Ann Ricci Kirsch,

to her amazing husband, Geoffry Kaatz.

In 2016, having lost our sweet Mom less than a year before, Dad bravely flew to Los Angeles, where he proceeded to drive with my sister Karen and her husband to a wedding destination in the beautiful golden hills above Santa Barbara, California. That trip celebrated the wedding

of Dad's oldest granddaugher, my wonderful niece, Hollywood movie producer Sarah Jean Donohue, to William DiCenzo, another amazing young man.

I will never forget that balmy September night when Dad, at age 90, finally arrived at the somewhat remote wedding location near Solvang, California. I was incredibly nervous all day, worrying that Dad would disintegrate before he reached us. I got continual updates from my sisters, who accompanied dad on the long flight from Hartford to Los Angeles, and then, on the lengthy drive up to the wedding resort. It was after midnight when Dad finally emerged from my sister's rented car. He walked very slowly, without a cane, up the sidewalk to where I was waiting for him at the front door of the hotel. He was quite dishevelled; his shirt had come untucked from his pants, and he looked like a little boy who was too tired to know where he was exactly.

But Dad was smiling so brightly that he lit up the night sky. He was so thrilled and proud that he was able to join the family for Sarah and Billy's wedding. (Excuse me, but I have to stop writing for a moment, as now I am crying because I miss my adventurous Dad -- with his boundless energy and enthusiasm -- so much!)

Dad had an insatiable curiosity and a sharp mind. He was an amateur scientist, always devouring Popular Science magazines. With zero money and no experience, Dad built the first house

I lived in -- a three-bedroom "hip roof" ranch, on Sherbrooke Street, on top of a mountain in Bristol. He built the house the year I was born, in direct defiance of his mother -- Grandma Albina -- who famously predicted that Dad was foolish to undertake the project. She told him he would fail. Not a chance! Dad financed the house relying on building loans -- the bank approved a sum of money to first pour the foundation, then inspected the work before awarding a subsequent sums of money to cover subsequent phases of building.

He wired the Sherbrooke Street house

himself and did such a good job that he ended up helping several others, including my mother's brothers in Connecticut, to wire their houses. To the end of his days, Dad was fascinated with electricity (as well as an endless number of other topics, including solar energy, electric vehicles, comets, gardening, space travel, the secrets of the Universe, and the reason why the dinosaurs went extinct.) You name it, Dad was interested.

What follows here is a very detailed diagram that I found just yesterday in my "Dad folder." For whatever reason, he sketched this electricty schemata

in 2011 for my parents' Pittsfield, MA, home. Heaven knows why he needed such a sketch! He was always busy building one thing or another, or planning a new project. A talented carpenter, he spent many happy hours as a "mole" (Mom's word for him) in his woodworking shop in the basement. The wooden furniture and little toys and

Christmas ornaments he created are treasured by everybody who owns them. At the end of his life, when he could no longer work with wood, he became known as the "Cardboard King" at Daybrook Village in Holyoke, MA, creating nifty boxes and other items out of Amazon packing boxes my sister Holly sent to his apartment.

Among the sweetest things that Dad did toward the end of his life was buy each of his granddaughters and his daughters tiny ceramic birds! Mine is a goldfinch, which makes sense, as that was my husband's favorite bird when he was growing up. One more major piece of evidence that Dad would have been an extraordinary engineer: after we moved into our second home in 1960, in Pleasant Valley, New York (because Dad had taken a job as a Customer Engineer at IBM in Poughkeepside) it soon became apparent that our well wasn't deep enough to provide adequate water. We ran out of water continually -- until finally, Dad decided to design and build (with his own two hands) a CISTERN, the likes of which I've never seen except, say, as part of the Roman aqueducts!

Dad figured out how to route rainwater into the cavernous cinderblock cistern (which he buried underground.) From that point on, Mom washed all of our clothes in the cistern's water; the rainwater in the cistern also flushed the toilets in our house. Thanks to Dad's ingenuity, we never ran out of water again!

Everyone who knew Dad agreed that besides being smart and curious (and a total perfectionist) he was also an all-around charming man -- he had a great smile and was very good at making conversation even with total strangers. People frequently told him that he resembled Mario Cuomo, and he didn't mind that comparison, even though he was a lifelong Republican. Somebody once joked that Dad could talk the ear off a brass monkey -- Mom frequently reminded us of this, especially when he won an argument! He was also a wonderful writer and at one point in his career at IBM he worked as an Engineering Technical Writer, producing maintenance and repair manuals for computer systems.

Had Grandma Albina been a more sophisticated woman, Dad most certainly would have gone to college. But Grandma could see absolutely no reason for Dad to go to college; she and Grandpa Angelo worked at the Ingraham clock factory in Bristol, for decades, so why wouldn't Dad do the same thing? In the long run, what Dad did was anticipate the computer age! He went to work for IBM in 1957 as a Customer Service Engineer, helping to maintain and repair some of IBM's largest mainframes. In the mid-1980s, Dad helped us buy our first IBM personal computer.

Before he landed in his career at IBM, Dad attended electronics technical schools in Chicago and Detroit. Back in Bristol, he worked for WBIS, Bristol's new AM radio station, designing and building several pieces of specialized equipment for the station. I was always fascinated by my Dad's work at the radio station as I grew up; besides being Chief Engineer, he was also chief cook and bottle washer. During a huge flood in 1955, Dad escorted the Mayor of Bristol through town in a boat so the Mayor could survey the flood damage and broadcast messages to reassure the people of Bristol. It's no wonder that I wanted to follow in Dad's footsteps -- when I got to college in 1970, I immediately started working at the campus radio station, WBRU-FM, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1944, when he turned 18, Dad was part of the 94th Infantry Division, attached to General George Patton's Third Army during the Rhineland campaign in Germany. Once the war ended, Dad became a miltary policeman; ever the adventurer, he applied for security detail in northern Africa, where, sporting a thin black mustache,

he spent 23 months driving Army bigshots around in jeeps! Discharged in Casablanca, Morocco, he was assigned to security duty at an unpopulated American Army base in Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa.

In fairness to my dear Grandma Albina, what she lacked in imagination for her son's future, she made up in being an amazing and extraordinary letter writer. My sister Holly has assembled a gigantic white notebook in which she lovingly placed in plastic sleeves the countless letters that Dad and his mom wrote back-and-forth during his years in the Army. Here is one I particularly love, from Dad, dated October 30, 1946. It's from Casablanca.

"Yes, Mom, I'm finally coming home after two years of wandering. And to be truthful, I can't wait." Dad goes on to tell his mother that he's been writing "a lot of hooey" to her in recent letters; the truth was he had "gotten fed up with" his job in Dakar and left and he was now headed for Paris where he figured "it will take me a good month or more just to get out" because so many soldiers were trying to get home. "What I may do is go to Bremerhaven, Germany, and catch a boat. Either way, is at government expense." He told her to expect him back in Connecticut within six weeks; he warned her that this would be his last letter to her from abroad, "So until you hear from me again, don't fret if I don't write."

As I reflect back, it occurs to me now that I definitely inherited what Mom always called my "long leg," or in Italian, "samba longa," that is, my wanderlust, from Dad. At one point, Mom told me she had, count them, 21 different addresses for me, in all kinds of places I lived, from Rhode Island, Maine, Boston, Oslo, Norway, California and Chicago.

Among the things Mom and Dad left for me were letters that I wrote to them when Rich and I were travelling for two months in 1978. I am so incredibly grateful that they saved the onionskin sheafs from England and Italy and especially, from Israel. As I reread these letters I'd written 45 years ago, I was delighted to relive those adventures.

Dad brought home some gorgeous souvenirs from Africa, including money from Morocco,

-- as well as two beautiful leather purses, both of which he promptly gave to my mom after he met her a few years later. Dad always said that "the best and most important decision he ever made was to ask the 'love of his life,' Dena Rotondo, to marry him in 1949." Mom was an extraordinary woman, a homemaker, and later a wonderful stained glass artist. Unequaled as a cook, she made pot roast that was so tender and delicious you didn't need a knife. Her homemade breads and cinnamon buns and all kinds of desserts were legendary: I still dream about her apple and blueberry pies and try as I might, I can't reproduce them. My husband still talks about her cream puffs, which she made at Easter. My dad claimed that he fell in love with Mom's cream puffs (at a church bazaar) before he met her!

Dad was devastated when Mom passed quite suddenly on October 17, 2015, only a week after she received a deadly diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He missed her warmth and loving companionship terribly, and he was further saddened by the realization that we children -- my brother Rick, me, and my sisters Karen and Holly -- had overnight lost our supremely loving and devoted mother. Dad sold their Pittsfield house a few months later and moved into an assisted living facility in Holyoke, MA, near my sister Karen, who as an RN attended to all of Dad's health care needs (until late September of 2018 when she suffered a terrible stroke.)

My sister's stroke broke my Dad's heart. Even though Karen has regained much of her mobility and virtually all of her speech, Dad had lost his caretaker. He was devastated, and angry at a world that would do something so cruel to his beloved daughter Karen. Within a few months after her stroke, Dad began to decline, basically because he had started to lose his will to live. It was awfully sad for us kids. Dad entered the Hospice of the Fisher Home in Amherst, MA early in August of 2019. The Fisher Home was such a peaceful facility and Dad received great care.

I took my last photo of Dad on the day that my granddaughter, Dani Marcella Guggenheim, was born: August 6, 2019. I pointed the camera at him and said, “Dad, I’m going to take your photo now, so pretend you’re holding our darling little Dani in your arms.” Which he did; half sitting up in bed, he cradled his well-weathered hands together.

On August 9th, 2019, three days after Dani came roaring into the world (her mother, our daughter Jocelyn, was only in the hospital 18 minutes!) my husband and I drove to Boston to meet our sweet little Dee, who was named for my mom, Dena. From the moment little Dee was born, we treasured her. Leaving Boston that evening, we stopped at the hospice in Amherst. Later that night, in my journal, I wrote: "I just saw Dad; the skin of his face is pulled tight and parched. His cheek was cool to my hand. I leaned over and kissed him and said, "Dad, I love you very much," and he whispered back, "That's very sweet of you." Maybe he called me "Sparky," his favorite knickname for me, but perhaps I just imagined that! "I shook Dad gently and tried to show him the first photos of Dani that I had taken only a few hours earlier in Boston. Sadly, Dad started to get upset; he actually began to cry and the nurse said that often happens when patients are close to the end. I suppose it makes sense; there was Dad, all of his energy poised on leaving the world, and there I was, trying to interest him in photos that pointed to the future, to his second great grandchild. (Dani's older brother, Ronen Dante Guggenheim, was born on February 12, 2014.)

The next thing I remember is that I leaned over and, bawling, I said, 'Dad I love you and I forgive you for everything you ever did to me!"

And that was it. I left the hospice in Amherst and my husband and I drove home; I was feeling a crazy mixture of ecstasy over Dani's birth, and crushing sadness over Dad's looming death.

He was up and down over the next week. In my journal I wrote:

"August 10, 2019, 6:25 p.m. Dad asked for pizza. He rallied and is in a good mood. Glad that daughter Lindsay gets to see him that way. I wonder why there are such ups and downs in Dad's appetite and moods. I guess dying is a gradual process." Yes, indeed, dying can take what feels like forever.

"August 11, 2019, 10:31 a.m. A gorgeous morning. I am staying PRESENT. Rich and I will canoe today and we plan to see Dani again on Tuesday, August 13th, for her naming ceremony. Doing yoga in the garden this morning, I see all the day lilies are past and most of the bee balm too. I see clearly that everything in the world is fleeting. But moments that are still feel timeless and eternal. 10:34 a.m."

"August 15, 2019, Dad passed about 1:15 a.m. Holly called me right away; she was so incredibly calm. She had left Dad's room a few minutes before but she returned just in time! She told me, 'I stepped back in the room just as everything started to quicken.'"

"Oh Dad, may you rest in peace with Mom and all of our ancestors. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!"

One last thing: the night Dad passed, Holly phoned me just before 1:30 in the morning. I woke up right away and I was staring out the dark window at the brightest and fullest white moon imaginable!

Holly told me that she felt an extraordinary number of "presences" in the room when Dad passed. As if the ancestors were all there waiting to greet him! I sure hope so.

Note: In this photo of the Baldini family above, my Grandpa Angelo is sitting on the floor at the left hand side. His fearsome-looking mother, Augusta Baldini Ricci, is at the very center of the photograph, with a white scarf around her neck. The Baldini women in this photo are wearing rather sophisticated satin dresses and jewelry; yes, they do look well-off. My dear Aunt Bette told me that Augusta Baldini's family owned a cheese store; the Ricci family was in some other business, meaning they too were fairly well off, at least compared to my Grandma Albina's family, who came from the starkly poor region of Calabria in southern Italy. One very curious thing about this photo: my Grandpa Angelo's father, Giovanni Ricci, is nowhere to be seen. I sure do wonder why!

ADDITIONAL FAMILY PHOTOS!

My niece Lauren Marie Donohue's marriage to the terrific Jay Scott, September 20, 2015

Lauren and Jay made my parents' day! And they were such a handsome couple!!

Dad and I had more than our share of arguments over the years, mostly about politics, starting when I was 12 years old, in 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran for President. Dad and I subsequently bashed heads over Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Oh and naturally, we did intense battle over the War in Vietnam and later, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill mess. But when Dad turned 85, in 2011, I called a truce; I told him, "Dad, I refuse to argue with you anymore, I love you and I just want to enjoy your company from here on!" I remember so clearly, we were sitting in Mom's immaculate kitchen, at the little breakfast table, he on one side of me, Mom on the other. Dad was shocked. He didn't challenge me but he was clearly very disappointed, because he was still brimming with intellectual fervor, and well, he just loved to do verbal battle. I include this photo to show the other side of Dad, how deeply he loved his family. I also want to recall that when I was studying for my doctoral degree in English (creative writing) from SUNY Albany in the mid-1990s, Dad (and Mom) were super supportive; Dad in particular loved to hear me pontificate over narrative theory, even though it was FEMINIST narrative theory that I was feeding him. Dad and Mom gave me a set of Oxford English dictionaries when I earned my Ph.D. and these huge books hold a treasured place on my bookshelf.

Dad was always up for a YANKEES game, as long as his NEW YORK team won! Holly loves the Yankees too.

Dad morphed into an AMAZING "PA RIC!" He sure enjoyed his grandson, Noah Jon Ricci Kirsch

We celebrated Dad's 75th birthday in July, 2001, at our farmhouse in Austerlitz, NY. Dad never knew this, but our naughty dog, a "chowbrador" named Bear, tore into Dad's gorgeous chocolate birthday cake when no one was looking! Thank God that my mother-in-law, ABIGAIL KIRSCH, was a guest -- she picked up a knife and smiling serenely, quickly "reconfigured" the cake -- no one ever knew (until now :)!

The amazing family that Mom and Dad spawned gathered in July, 2022, in my sister Holly's backyard in Easthampton, MA, where we have so many great barbecues in the summer, with S'MORES galore. And on Christmas Eve, we come to Holly's for a feast!

CALM A LA Delights Hundreds of Dems in Pittsfield, MA!!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 10:56:00 +0000

By Claudia Ricci and Alyson Slutzky

It was an extraordinary experience all around last Saturday at the Colonial in Pittsfield! Hundreds turned out, thrilled to be part of this historic -- or was it HERstoric? -- event.

Naturally, Calm a la's supporters were out in force, but so too, were supporters of...oh, well, you know that other guy, the incredibly WEIRD one who is running for President as a Republican, along with his even WEIRDER Vice Presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, whose past (ridiculous) positions on women with cats etc are coming back to haunt him!

Once inside, we were instructed not to photograph Calm a la or any of the other participants: Former Governor Duvall Patrick, followed by U.S. Congressman Richie Neal, Massachusetts U.S. Senators Ed Markie and Elizabeth Warren, and historian Heather Cox Richardson. Oh, and there were a few musical luminaries as well: cellist Yo Yo Ma and classical pianist Emanuel Ax highlighted the entertainment. No less than Berkshire's own James Taylor also emerged and along with Yo Yo Ma and Ax, the threesome played and sang "Here Comes the Sun." What could be better?

Well, maybe when James’ wife and his son emerged and the whole Taylor family delighted the crowd with that goosebump-producing Taylor favorite: "Shower the people you love with love…”

OK, that's when CALM a LA came striding in from the wings of the magnificently restored Colonial, to the resounding applause of the crowd, applause that reverberated around the Colonial Theater, a treasured gem in the city of Pittsfield.

An avalanche of American flags were standing at attention right behind the Vice President and a huge Harris for President sign stood above the flags. Her podium boasted the Vice Presidential seal, of course, as well as the nearly invisible wings of a teleprompter.

Calm a la spoke for about a quarter of an hour, just enough to fire up the crowd even more than they were, with more cheering and applause. Interestingly, Calm a la was quite soft-spoken at the Colonial unlike the way she spoke in her Wisconsin speech which appeared on YouTube.

Speaking in Pittsfield, she went off script a bit, and I -- I being Alyson Slutzky, who as Chair of the Democratic Party in the Town of Egremont, MA, about 45 minutes south of Pittsfield -- had the distinct pleasure (and honor) of being in the crowd at the Colonial on Saturday! I liked the unscripted remarks best. What an incredible and distinct honor it was for me to hear the Vice President call for unity and a victory in November!

This exhilerating campaign event -- which had been planned BEFORE President Biden stepped down on Sunday, July 21st -- was expected to raise $400,000 but amazingly, the event raised $1.8 million! I had never been to an event like this before, and I will remember it for the rest of my life, as it was exciting beyond belief!

I just LOVED the way she spoke, because she speaks that way all the time. Her tough talk and her willingness to attack Trump (we will do everything possible to defeat that lying creep) reflect her many years being a Prosecutor, state Attorney General in California, U.S. Senator from California and finally, Vice President. She is so intelligent and so incisive and so powerful and she cuts through the BS and she makes me feel safe,

like she can really attack Trump in an effective way and defeat him in November!

Speaking for women and men across the nation, Alyson concluded: "I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my chest. And I hear other people say the same thing. I felt so incredibly hopeless for so long that Trump was definitely going to win. And now I feel like there is a really good that Kamala may pull this victory off!"

Slutzky says that she and others have been working tirelessly on behalf of the Democratic ticket, now headed by a woman. The work of Dems was given a huge shot in the arm by Calm a La's visit to Pittsfield.

Need we say more?

Claudia Ricci, PhD.,is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, taught English, creative writing and journalism at SUNY Albany and Georgetown University. Ricci began her writing career as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, where she won numerous prizes, and later, as a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal. She has published four novels and is writing a fifth novel, called Finding Filomena, a fictional memoir about her great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who delivered a baby -- her great grandfather Pasquale Orzo -- out of wedlock in 1870 in a small town in Calabria in southern Italy.

Alyson Slutzky is a Social Worker and Chair of the Egremont Democratic Committee, as well as Lead Organizer for Left Field, a Great Barrington area Swing Left/Indivible group. She and her husband, Richard, reside in Great Barrington, MA. Slutzky was able to secure tickets to be at the campaign event for Calm a La on Saturday, July 27, 2024.

CREATION STORY, a la CALM a la Harris

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 12:23:00 +0000

“On the first day, God created LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS. On the second, He created the sky. Dry land and plants were created on the third day. On the fourth day, God created the sun, the moon and the stars…

And on the First Day, Sunday, July 21, 2024, which happened to be a magnificent FIRST DAY day, a highly principled and very likable but aging statesman named Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.,

who had been President of THESE UN United States since January 20, 2021, posted a letter saying he would not be seeking reelection.

The 81-year-old incumbent, a gentleman and A TRUE STATESMAN, who cares for his country so enormously that he was willing to step away from the Highest Office in the Land, declared that he would step out of the race for the Democratic nomination for President. (Unlike, the DUMP, running as the Republican, who would never in a billion years do anything so unselfish.)

He, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., who grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, poor and stuttering ("it's remarkable, isn't it," he himself said, "that I could become President -- only in America!" He said that in a rather low key manner in a speech, sitting in his Oval Office.)

Anyway, Mr. Biden on the First Day quickly as in the same FIRST DAY endorsed for the Democratic nomination his Vice President,

a SHE, she she she she she a BLACK WOM/b/an

Vice President CALM a la Devi Harris, the FIRST BLACK WOMbAN VICE PRESIDENT OF THESE UN-UNITED STATES

AND IN SO throwing the nomination Calm a La's way, Thus began unfolding

A NEW CREATION MYTH, a PHENOMENA, of a distinctly female/feminist cast. Some Americans of course were/are/will not be happy about this, about her, perhaps one out of three Americans (or more) is downright AGHAST at the idea of a BLACK WOMbAN PRESIDENT. Some objectors immediately started in on social media harassing and haranguing HER

oh my what is with these WEIRDO's, berating and belittling her for being this and that, or doing this or that, or for NOT doing this or that, as in,

because she didn't from her own body birth children, and then, oh are they really seriously belittling her for her LAUGHTER?

Which would be a real laugh, except for the fact it isn't funny at ALL because there is running against Calm a La, the DUMP who is forever drooling filth, his trash heap knows no limits. And if there ever were a danger to our democracy, it is from HIM HIM HIM HIM HIM that will have no name except DUMP.

On the Second Day, Monday, July 22, 2024, a seemingly calm CALM A LA raised a STUNNING $250 MILLION in large and small donations, setting a record! Pundits here there and everywhere — as well as creeps in the OPPOSING PARTY, were almost SPEECHLESS -- but not quite because they are never speechless (on Fox or everywhere else they speak). They were already on the attack like drooling wolves with blood dripping from their fangs.

On the Third Day, Tuesday, July 23, 2024, Vice President Calm a la spoke from her new (President Biden’s OLD) Delaware headquarters and SHE gave her first campaign rally speech. Thanking her staff, she said: "In the days and weeks ahead, I, together with you, will do everything in my power to UNITE our Democratic Party, to UNITE our nation and to win this election."

And then she hurried out to Wisconsin, a battleground state, where she rallied thousands of exuberant Democrats, saying “The Baton is In Our Hands!”

On the Fourth Day, WEDNESDAY, July 24, 2024, speaking from the OVUM, no, excuse me,

the OVARY,

no, excuse me, the OVAL office, President Biden, that real statesmen as opposed to the

TRASH HEAP OF A DUMP WHO IS RUNNING AS A MAGGOT

STATESMAN BIDEN made it official official, after weeks of speculation, that he would formally said step away. “I have decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. That is the best way to unite our nation…”

(Hey did any of you happen to notice that CALM a LA referred to the BATON IN OUR HANDS and Biden referred to the TORCH, and both of them are shaped…well, you know)

ALSO ON THE FOURTH DAY the dreaded opponents DARE I NAME THEM

of course they are MAGGOTS?

They were drooling, like I said, flashing and gnashing their razor sharp teeth, as opposed to their minds which are dull dull dull and full of shit,

They kept saying all manner of UGLY UNTRUE and also hilarious things about HER

CALM a La. My college roommate, Cathie M, who lives up in beautiful Maine, kindly sent this

Also on the Fourth Day, I learned that by some miracle, Calm a La would appear in Pittsfield, MA, the small Berkshire County city that is 45 minutes from my home in Massachusetts. OH CALM a la, how I hungered to go, but NO way all the tickets were long gone. And the event netted almost $2 million!

On the Fifth Day, The Berkshire Eagle

a fine newspaper based in Pittsfield, MA, heralded the donor event saying it would be grand and historic and it was, with people lining South Street waving signs in support of CALM A LA. These folks were sorely disappointed that Calm a La's 24-car motorcade scooted in the back door of the Colonial Theatre.

On the SIXTH Day, July 26, 2024, that being Friday,

Shabbat begins always on Friday nights in the Jewish faith. And so it is.

And so too did Presidential historian Heather Cox Richardson, who also attended the Pittsfield donor event, confirmed on THE SIXTH DAY something that I have dubbed the “CALM a LA Phenomena” it happened OVERNIGHT: “the national narrative as a whole has shifted,” Heather said, writing calmly in “Letters From an American.”

On the Seventh Day, I observed SHABBAT and did no posting. THANK THE GOOD LORD BECAUSE I a tad exhausted after all that writing!

Last week had to be, almost certainly was, right up there, ONE OF the MOST

no, perhaps the MOST HISTORIC

No, THE MOST HERSTORIC

weeks I have ever lived through! And I’m 71, I lived through Woodstock (and didn’t go!)

No matter what your faith, no matter whether you are a believer in God, may you believe in the NEW CREATION according to CALM a la,

and peace be with you! AMEN!

Chapter Four, "Dear Noah, How Do You Know What You Know?"

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 13:37:00 +0000

Chapter Four: “Noah, How Do You Know What You Know?”

The date of course doesn’t matter because time doesn’t exist, but for the sake of argument make the date July 3, 2024. That means it is today. This morning. But today and yesterday and tomorrow all of that can fall away.

Anyway, it dawned cool and bluebird clear and sunny like the sunflower, and the hummingbirds

are battling it out at the feeders and sucking at the beebalm.

This morning, I struck a deal with my son, who is visiting from Colorado.

I told Noah that I would make another attempt to read Journey of Souls, Case Studies of Life Between Lives, published exactly 30 years ago, a date which of course is meaningless. In return, he would read the new novel I am writing. I call it "Fi and Me," but really the title is "Finding Filomena." It's the true but made up story of my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who had a baby "OUT OF WEDLOCK" -- oh thank God that term is almost dead! -- in 1870 in Calabria in southern Italy.

Anyway it seemed like a good deal that I was proposing. Reasonable.

I’m not sure whether Noah has read any of my previous four novels. When I have asked him in the past, he has always smiled and said that his best friend Chris from college never read any of his mother’s novels either and well, hey, she was a really famous writer. Unlike me. :)

By the strangest coincidence, Chris recently purchased a home ten minutes down the road from us in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. He also owns an elegant apartment in Manhattan. So yes it does make a difference if you manage to sell your novels, like Anita Shreve did. (Sadly, she passed away from cancer in 2018 at the age of 71.)

Two days ago, my husband Richard and our dog Poco and Noah and I sat with Chris and his lovely wife and their son in Chris' backyard and out of the blue Chris turned to me and said he wants to plant a young sugar maple at one end of the yard in honor of his six-month old son. He asked me what I thought of sugar maples.

I was astonished, and I started to chuckle. Had Chris secretly read my first novel? :) “Oh well, I really really love sugar maple trees,” I said.

At which point Noah piped up and said, “My mom’s first novel is all about maple trees, it’s called "Dreaming Maples." That book, published in 2002, took me ONLY :) five years to complete -- during which time I dwelled in an imaginary sugarbush in Vermont with a group of aging women artists.

So maybe Noah does know my work.

But all this is really irrelevant, as in, IT'S NOT IMPORTANT.

What is important is that this morning he said to me, “Mom, you really should read 'Journey of Souls,' -- because I believe that you and I were souls together in previous lives.”

I blinked. I inhaled.

I know when my son is leveling with me. He is. Was. Completely serious about this.

“OK, honey. I’ll try again. But then you have to promise to read a few pages of this story that I am writing about your great great great grandmother Filomena Scrivano who gave birth to our venerable ancestor, your great great grandfather Pasquale Orzo, in southern Italy in 1870.”

So we made a pact and that morning, meaning this morning, he took the blue folder and started reading my story and instantly he made improvements in the opening paragraph. It's amazing what a good writer he is. But that is really not the point either.

The point is that suddenly I realized that Noah

is going to be part of the book that you are reading, because he is so immersed in thinking about past lives. For the past six or seven years, Noah has been informally studying with a rather remarkable healer in Longmont, Colorado, a wizard of a man that we all refer to as Dr. A. He is a functional medicine doctor.

Noah convinced both me and my husband and my daughter to see Dr. A (in person and via Zoom) and just as Noah promised, he has helped with a variety of difficult health issues. Part of his success comes from the fact that he often focuses on the emotional underpinnnings of illness. Dr. A is the person who introduced Noah to the book, "Journey of Souls."

Past lives is a subject that has long fascinated me. It figured in my third book, Sister Mysteries, which took me ONLY 23 years to write. It was a haunting story about my life as a nun, Sister Renata, in California in the late 1800s. I wasn't able to finish the novel until I underwent Past Life Regression Therapy with a practioner in New York City.

So yes, I have had at least one past life that I know of, living in a stucco convent tucked into a golden hillside, surrounded by bay trees, the sun blazing down on the old blue and white tiled courtyard. But still, reading "Journey of Souls" has been challenging for me. The book has been sitting on my nightstand for who knows how long.

So today I said to my son:

“The outer story I am trying to write honey is all about the soul… and maybe its journies. I realize that you are trying to teach me about the soul just the way you have taught me about so many other spiritual and health matters. So I am going to write about you in the book -- if that’s OK with you. “

He was sitting on the couch, legs propped on the coffee table. He was busy working on his laptop -- he is a consultant to solar energy developers around the U.S. The issues he works on are highly complex. He was, at the same time, listening to an audio by the famous spiritual leader, Ram Das. He told me he wasn't actually absorbing Ram's words. He just liked the sound of Ram's voice in the background. "It really relaxes me," he said.

How he manages to do two things at once I’m not sure but that’s not the point either.

He paused, and looking up at me. He smiled. “Cool, Mom, just be nice to me in the book, will you?”

Knees Burning, I Pray

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 13:50:00 +0000

The little black words

were kept in tiny boxes.

We each got our own box.

We made sentences.

The boxes were handed out each morning by the

teacher: a scary nun shrouded head to toe

in black.

How I loved the feel of those smooth little words beneath my fingers, each word contained in its own tiny rectangle of stiff paper.

Oh how I loved making SENTENCES!!!!

and oh I was so good at it.

I was so so so good.

see me there standing BESIDE THE VIRGIN MARY?

on the other side is

my cousin Lorry.

It was MAY,

MARY's month.

A bounty of flowers honors Our Lady.

I love(d)

Mary. I still do, pray to her.

You have no idea how good I was

at pressing my soft palms together in prayer.

But then there were those awful hot days in spring when the nun, that bitch, led us outdoors and told us to kneel down on the scorching asphalt the grit making my knees bleed. We needed to kneel in order to say the Stations of the Cross.

She didn't burn her knees, of course, only we first graders did.

WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A CHILD OF SIX KNEEL ON HOT ASPHALT WITH BARE KNEES? WHY WOULD THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HURT -- KILL -- SO MANY CHILDREN IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS? I will never understand this. PLEASE MARY I KNOW I shouldn't call the nun a bitch, I should pray to you instead, I say "Hail Mary, full of GRACE..."

BUT WAIT, Mary, I DON'T KNOW THE MEANING OF the word GRACE.

I opened the Oxford English dictionary this morning, the heavy one that my DAD and MOM gave me after I earned my Ph.D. in English, and sadly, it had no definition that I could feel in my fingertips or in my knees as I was kneeling in meditation on a soft pillow.

Dr. A says "Grace is love and acceptance amidst imperfection."

I close my eyes, hold my hands in a proper prayer position. I breathe.

I focus on

each

of

the

words

he

is

teaching

me.

Ragazza Pazza (Crazy Girl)

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Sat, 25 May 2024 18:16:00 +0000

Mangia!

Non.

Per favore, mia cara ragazza, per favore, mangia un poco! (Please, my dear girl, please, eat a little!)

Non. Non voglio. (No. I don't want to.)

Ma perche? Che suchere ragazza cara? (But why? What's the matter dear girl?)

Non me piace mangare. (I don't like eating.)

Ah, ma e pazzesco! Per favore, mia cara ragazza pazza, piluccare un poco, per favore, prova! Per favore, prova a mangiare come quel dolce uccelino sull'albero.

(Ah but that's crazy! Please my dear crazy girl, nibble a little, please! Please try! Please, try to eat like that sweet little bird up there, singing in the tree.)

NON! Te l'ho detto che non i piace mangare! (No, I told you, I don't like eating.)

Ecco, prova questo, mangia questo uovo! (Here, try this, eat this egg!)

NON! Non voglio uovo! (No, I don't want egg.)

Ah! ragazza pazza! Almeno provalo, prova questo pane! (Ah, crazy girl! At least, try this, try this bread!)

NON, non voglio il pane! Lasciami solo! (No, I don't want bread. Just leave me alone!)

Non vuoi il pane? Per l'amor di Dio, e pane! Mangia quel dannato pane! (You don't want bread? For Christ's sake it's bread. Eat the goddamn bread!)

NON NON NON NON NON NON! Non voglio il tuo dannato uovo! Non voglio il tuo dannato pane! LASCIAMI SOLO! LASCIAMI IN PACE! LASCIMI IN PACE! (No No No No No No No! I don't want your damned egg! I don't want your damned bread! LEAVE ME ALONE! LEAVE ME IN PEACE! LEAVE ME IN PEACE!)

VA BENE, STRONZA, ALLORA VAI AVANTI, MUORI DI FAME, PROPIO COME FACEVANO I TUOI DANNATO ANTENATI! (Fine, YOU BITCH, then go ahead, just starve, starve, just like your goddamn ancestors did!)

Come to Me Fi, Show Me the Way

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Wed, 15 May 2024 23:43:00 +0000

I sit here, watching her. Waiting. Feeling so impatient that at some point, I begin squeezing my left hand, making a tight fist beneath the table.

I am trying hard to read her expression. But that face is a mask. It reveals so little.

What I am proposing, going forward, is rather novel.

No one has ever heard of a rescue like this before. Certainly, not where Filomena comes from.

And since it was my idea, or at least I think it was, it is only right that I give her the chance to weigh in.

“I know it might sound … a bit radical,” I said when we first sat down. “So…what do you think?”

Naturally, she can shoot the idea down. And then, if she does, what choice will I have? I certainly can’t force her to take the story in this direction.

Or can I?

More than anything I just want her to speak to me. Because I care so much what is going to happen. To her. And to all of the other women who, like her, fall in love and end up getting pregnant -- without being married.

But she just continues to sit there. Sipping her espresso in silence.

Which is really rather infuriating, because she is the one who insisted that I meet her. Again. Here at the stylish Café Gambrinus, in the

Piazza Plebescito in Naples.

Such a monumental space, the piazza. It’s the place where I fell in love with myself and my Italian heritage.

I am deeply grateful to Fi for all that. But she has me to thank too.

As I sit searching her proud face now, I realize that all along, I thought I was in control. But really, she has called the shots since day one.

Day one.

It isn’t every day that your great-great-grandmother arrives. In a vision that you cannot distinguish from reality. She asks you to tell her heart-wrenching story. And so of course you do. Or more accurately, she tells it.

Through you.

But now, as we close in on the ending, who’s in charge?

*** Note to reader: This is the an excerpt from my new novel, "Finding Filomena," the story of my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who had a baby, my great grandfather, out of wedlock -- OMG I am so glad that term is almost dead -- in 1870 in southern Italy. Filomena, like hundreds of thousands of Italian women, was forbidden to raise him. Most of the babies born to "UNWED" mothers died!! Miraculously, however, Pasquale Orzo, my great grandfather, survived. What or who saved him???? That is the mystery my novel will answer!!!!

I have NO idea where I am going but I have already arrived!

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Thu, 09 May 2024 17:36:00 +0000

I am writing this morning with absolutely no idea where I am going. I am staring into the blue blue sky outside the window and I hear the birds making a joyful racket, filling the air with twills and chirps and bleating and the haunting cries of the red-shouldered hawk.

Is that the sweet song of a cardinal? a robin? a Baltimore Oriole? A song sparrow? a tufted titmouse?

I want to write the way the birds sing, out of a deep instinct or intuition!!!

Perhaps I should ask GOD for inspiration. I have already prayed to the Divine Feminine, otherwise known as the Virgin Mary.

Per favore, Madre Divina, posso per favore avere l'ispirazone per scrivere? Please Divine Mother may I please have inspiration to write?

After I finish praying, however, I am still left with the problem, HOW DO I BEGIN when I DO NOT/KNOT HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT OR WHERE OR HOW?

Perhaps I can just ask FILOMENA to COME TO ME,

Per favore, caro bis bis nonna, io parlo en italiano perche voglio

Please, dear great great grandma, I am speaking in Italian because I want to

I want to see you come alive again!

Voglio vederti riviere!

Perhaps you will come out of hiding if I do what I do sometimes when I paint by simply throwing paint on a white canvas!

Getto semplicemente la vernice su una tela bianca!

So perhaps if I just

throw black words on a white screen?

Lancia parole nere su uno schermo bianco?

I have seen you so often before, dear Filomena, first as a young girl in Paola, and San Lucido, with Giovanni,

and later in the Cafe Gambrinus in la Piazza Publica in Napoli where you were much older and you kindly met me for coffee.

But now I am not there and neither are you here. We are nowhere together.

Right now as I am writing without any idea where I am going, it feels impossible to position you and me anywhere!

I DO NOT SEE YOU!

NON TI VEDO!

I have to place you and me in one space and time, talking or somehow interacting but how????

JUST WRITE THE WAY YOU PAINT!

Propio come dipingi tu!

JUST PLAY WITH WORDS THE WAY YOU PLAY WITH COLORS!

Gioca con le parole nello stasso modo in cui giochi con i colori! Perhaps then I will SEE YOU Filomena! JUST THE WAY I SAW THE HEART IN THE CANVAS I PAINTED LAST WEEK!

*******

It is exactly 1:18 pm on May 9, 2024 and once again I am trying to jumpstart my writing the way I

jumpstarted the painting I did a few days ago.

I began with a scrap of paper, a tiny section of a Colorado hiking map that read "Closed Area," which for some reason made me a bit angry and that gave me sufficient energy to begin slapping paint on the canvas without any regard for what it looked like.

The assignment from the synagogue's creativity group was to do a new piece of art focused on the notion of "closure."

I didn't really want to do a NEW piece of art.

about closure.

But then I reread the Rabbi's words regarding there being no such thing as closure in the TORAH...his ideas resonated in my mind or was it my subconscious or was it my superconscious?

Anyway, he pointed out that the last word of Deuteronomy (which is the fifth and final chapter of the Hebrew Bible, the TORAH) is a LAMED. Immediately after that chapter ends, we take a breath and immediately begin reading the first word of the first chapter of the Bible, which is of course Genesis.

The first letter of Genesis is BEIT, which is the first letter of the word Breishith which means "In the beginning."

and together Lamed and Beit spell LEV,

which means HEART.

So when I was throwing paint on the canvas and suddenly out of nowhere I saw a HEART, I was

completely astonished!

And then I started seeing hearts all over the painting and then it became a collage!

AND THEN I WAS DELIGHTED I WAS DOING A NEW PIECE OF ART ABOUT CLOSURE.

*********

So perhaps something similar will happen here with my writing, as I am throwing words on the screen suddenly

I will FIND MYSELF WRITING A NEW CHAPTER ABOUT FILOMENA AT THE END OR IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS mishmash

Could it be a scene between Fi and Nunzi as they are helping other women to save their babies from the deadly ozpizias?

Could it be a scene between Fi and Nunzi as they try to share taking care of Pasquale?

I don't know if the jumpstarting process that works with painting also works with writing...

With paint you can proceed without any rational plan or idea

but don't you need an actual idea in order to write?

"Well no, Claudia, not necessarily, not if you are FREEWRITING."

[who said that?]

So officially now I AM FREEWRITING, but not exactly because with freewriting you just keep writing whatever s**** is in my/your head without stopping or without worrying about how stupid it sounds.

Freewriting would be perfectly wonderful, IF, as my writing buddy Peg once said, there were such a thing as "freepublishing."

But that is a diversion.

Just as I can sometimes fool around with colors until I discover a pattern or a design element that makes the whole painting come together,

perhaps I will also at the end or in the middle of this writing discover

I WOULD LOVE TO SIT WITH FILOMENA AGAIN.

[well then just DO IT!]

I would love just to catch a glimpse of her as she works with Nunzi, saving babies! When would this scene take place in relation to all the other chapters? How would I position it in the NARRATIVE TIME AND FLOW OF THE NOVEL?

Maybe it's just not the TIME to write that chapter. OR ANY OTHER CHAPTER!!!! Perhaps it is time to stare at that pair of tree swallows that have been hanging out on the lawn chair!

********

Last week, I brought my collage painting to synagogue to share it with the creativity group. During that session, the Rabbi, who happened to be holding the Torah in his arms as he spoke, said that the Jewish notion of TIME IS A SPIRAL. He didn't say anything else on that subject, and oddly, I couldn't find much of anything on-line. But what I think he means is that we Jews live six days each week and then on the seventh day we celebrate Shabbat, the holy day of rest. So around and around we go each week, being in our DOING mode for six days, and then in our BEING MODE on Shabbat.

This circularity is everywhere in nature, in the regular change of seasons. In the way the birds keeps coming back year after year. The Baltimore Oriole arrived a couple weeks ago, dining at the hummingbird feeder before I had a chance to hang the Oriole feeder

!

"The concept of time was created for humanity in Genesis 1:14-19. However, God is LOVE, spirit and light and there exists in/at the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein's "Theory of Relativity," at the speed of light THERE IS NO TIME, just eternity or infinity."

Just GOD?

*******

I like to picture Fi this way: wearing a long, graceful dress the color of tender spring dandelion leaves. The fabric is rare, a silk you can almost see through.

Giovanni has been dead for more than three years when she is wearing this dress.

Perhaps she will never wear this dress, except here in the garden of my mind, where the bright green leaves look like they have pure light glowing inside them. It is the kind of green seen here:

It glows, it is almost electric. And so hard to describe in words.

Once I wrote:

I thought I was done writing novels until that day in May when I arrived at the remote Tuscan villa at sunset. A vista poured out in front of me like an elegant green language that I absolutely knew I had to learn and get down on paper.

But then I erased that paragraph and subsituted this one:

There was a view once, like none I have ever seen. Gentle green hills extend to the horizon, hills planted with olive groves in one direction, and vineyards in the other. And beyond those hills lies the sea, azure blue in some moments and then at others, a sparkling lime green that you can see through.

It beckoned me, that view, that paragraph, and my eyes came to rest there.

*********

So now I see Filomena dressed in one of her unattractive sacks, it has no shape whatsoever, and she is bent over, a basket swinging from one arm. With her right hand she is picking tender young dandelion leaves. Her mother will cook this greenery in olive oil and garlic. During the springtime, Filomena and her mother eat dandelion greens as often as they can!

*******

HOW DO I RESOLVE THE CONTRADICTIONS IN MY LIFE, ie the fact that I am Jewish but that I continue to pray to the Virgin Mary? OK I will try to lay it out.

I believe that you can be more than one thing at a time in life. You can be Jewish, but you can also practice Buddhism, like renowned meditator teacher Jack Kornfield. You can be Jewish and Italian. (There are approximately 45,000 Jews who live in Italy.)

I practise Judaism and I know quite a bit about the TORAH.

But I also firmly believe in the power of the DIVINE FEMININE!

And when I need inspiration, I politely ask her for it. And when I am in a tight spot, I say Hail Mary's.

When I was ill with cancer in 2002 and 2003, I frequently prayed to the Virgin Mary, especially when I was suffering or terrified about what was going to happen. SHE ALWAYS ANSWERED MY PRAYERS...(there are posts about that Peg, should I resurrect them? OY!!!! LOL :)

Also, it is important to point out that worship of the Virgin Mary is considered a feminist practise! THE VIRGIN MARY IS WORSHIPPED BY INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS AND MANY MANY OTHER GROUPS AROUND THE WORLD. The Catholic Church, dominated by MEN, tried to erase the worship of the Virgin Mary. They failed!

I do not practise Catholicism! I am a feminist, like many of those who worship Mary! I am writing this novel about Fi in part to expose and to CONDEMN THE HORRIBLE PRACTISE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES: CHURCH "FATHERS" TOOK HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BABIES AWAY FROM THEIR MOTHERS (IN FI'S TIME AND BEFORE AND AFTER) STICKING THEM IN THE DEADLY OSPIZIAS, where wet nurses transmitted disease from one infant to another! MANY MANY MANY BABIES DIED!!!!

In the time and place where my great grandfather was born, Cosenza, ITALY, 1870, approximately 93 percent of so-called illegitimate babies died before their first birthdays!

IT IS A MIRACLE THAT MY GREAT GRANDFATHER SURVIVED! I am so so grateful to whoever it was who saved my great grandfather!

SONO COSI GRATO A CHIUNQUE SIA STATO A SALVARE IL MIO BISNONNO DALL'OSPIZIO!

*********

So maybe I have already written the chapter that I can't seem to write.

I mean maybe this is the chapter? Or is it? (I will have to consult my dearest friend and decades-long writing BUDDY, PM "Peg" Woods.)

Meanwhile, as I have been writing this blogpost, I discovered through a circuitous route, a chapter called "A Perfect V!" in which Fi is reflecting on her difficulties "sharing" Pasquale with Nunzi.

I posted "A Perfect V!" on February 17, 2023.

So, maybe the headline I wrote before starting this piece is true: "I have NO idea where I am going but I have already arrived there!" Or, "Non ho idea di dove sto andando, ma ci sono gia arrivato!"

I am now revising "A Perfect V." I believe it will appear as Chapter 34 of the novel in progress, called "Finding Filomena."

Isn't it curious that in a way I am writing the Fi story in a kind of spiral! I wrote several chapters early in 2023, and then in March of 2023, I wrote the "first" chapter, and then I wrote about 30 subsequent chapters, and now I am circling back to one of the very first chapters I wrote, a chapter which comes toward the end of the book!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: "Longing to Belong!"

noreply@blogger.com (Claudia R) — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 17:46:00 +0000

One of the fears that has dominated my family is that you aren't "safe" if you stray too far away from...yes, the family -- la familigia! Italian American immigrants, like so many other immigrant groups, tended to cluster together, at least at first. My mom grew up in a small neighborhood populated by people she knew. So did my father.

When my father moved our family from the family hub in Bristol, Connecticut an hour and a half away into New York state, my brother and sister and I

felt a deep loss. I remember we moved the day before my 8th birthday.

On my birthday, I tried to run away. We had moved into a plain Cape Cod style house in a subdivision. Because my parents were financially strapped buying the house, the second floor wasn't finished off. The walls consisted of bare wooden two by fours, and in between, long layers of pink insulation. It was spooky!

I remember leaving by the back door that led out from the garage. I don't remember where I went, or how long I was gone. Try as I might, I don't remember anything more about that day except that I was upset. Angry. Confused. Needless to say, though, I returned before evening. I learned to live in the new house. Eventually, my dad put up sheet rock and finished off the two bedrooms for me and my siblings.

I'm thinking about that sad day in November of 1960 today, as my husband and I prepare to move back to our house in Massachusetts. For the last three months, we have been living in Denver, near our son, Noah, as well as our daughter, Lindsay, her husband, Geoff, and their precious little boy, Monte.

We've had a great stay. I've had the chance to babysit for my grandson several times. We have loved the weather, and have taken lots of wonderful hikes in beautiful places. There have been many days when I thought "oh heck we should just move here."

Ah, but then, just as soon as I think that, I remember: we have beloved family in Boston, and elsewhere back east, including our daughter Jocelyn, her husband, Evan, and our darling grandchildren, Ronen and Dani.

I feel torn apart. My heart aches when I think about leaving Monte and my children next week.

I keep telling myself to grow up and accept reality. I keep telling myself, "you know exactly what you should do: focus on being grateful for all of your blessings. Live mindfully, staying in the moment, appreciating the myriad joys that happen all through the day."

But part of me refuses to buy into what I know I need to do! This recalcitrant -- childish -- part of me is a persistent voice but also, sometimes it feels like a bodily sensation. It's almost as if my ancestors are all lurking somewhere, deep inside my brain, or they are out there in the cosmos calling to me: they are the angels who keep whispering in my ears. The message from these ancestors -- "questi antenati" -- is crystal clear: when you return to your house in Massachusetts, you will have no family living near you! You will go back to that feeling you often have there, that you are lonely, that you don't belong there! You will feel like you don't belong anywhere!

Before I know it, hearing these messages rumbling around in my mind, I feel incredibly sad. This longing for family upends me completely and sometimes I find myself in tears!

And so it is that I am captive of a very old family script, one that says you aren't safe or happy or complete when you don't live next door to your loved ones.

Back when I was 8 years old, my parents and siblings and I drove from our house in New York State to Connecticut to see our grandparents. We did that almost every weekend! It never occurred to us not to! For one thing, my mom missed her mother and father. And we kids missed our grandparents.

By the time I went off to college, however, I was delighted to get away from home, escaping what felt like a stifling (and old-fashioned) family environment. Over the next few years, I traveled here, there and everywhere. I worked in Boston, then went to graduate school in Berkeley, California. Then I worked in Chicago, and after that, New York. At one point, my mother counted 21 different addresses for me.

Not too long after I married my husband Richard in 1978, we both decided that we wanted to move back East so that our (future) children would know their grandparents.

After some 15 years of moving here there and everywhere, I settled with my husband in an old farmhouse in rural Columbia County, New York -- ironically, it was only an hour away from my parents and the home where I grew up. Rich and I lived in that farmhouse,

and raised three children there, for the next 30 years!

As our children left for college and set up their own lives, one thing became clear: none of the kids intended to live close to our old farmhouse. All three of them eshewed the rural lifestyle in favor of city life.

Like so many families, we are spread out.

Do other people feel the way I do? Do they feel lonely, and like they don't belong anywhere? Or is it just me? Is it because of my ancestry that I feel so...disconnected?

My rational side keeps trying to convince me that there is only one solution: stay riveted in the present moment, no matter where you find yourself! Accept what is. And don't give into the longings that characterized your ancestors.

Yes, yes, I know all that. But now that I am a grandparent I want to live close to my grandchildren, just like my parents and grandparents did before me!

Curiously, my sister Holly and I were talking about our family situation recently. She lives in the same Massachusetts town as our sister Karen, Karen's husband Dale, as well as Karen's daughter, Lauren and her family (including two adorable little ones, Lily and Scarlett.)

Even though Holly lives close to these family members, she confided that she too often feels lonely. She finds herself asking "what am I doing here?"

We decided that the last time we didn't feel that loneliness was when our Mom and Dad were still alive, and they occupied their cozy brick house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. We can't let go of our desire to gather at that house, the way we used to for all the holidays.

As I add this photo of Mom and me in her Pittsfield kitchen, Christmas of 2010, I can't hold back tears. Recently, I told someone in a condolence card that I don't think I will ever stop missing my mother.

*******

I stepped away from writing this piece a few minutes ago because Noah arrived; he was having dinner with us here in Denver, as he has several times since we arrived in January.

We eat fried fish, baked sweet potatoes and bok choy, and we watch part of a movie. Then Noah says it's time for him to leave.

"When will I see you again?" he asks, just before he drives off in his truck.

"Not sure," I say. I mumble something about maybe seeing him for his birthday in June. I'm feeling fine when I go to bed but the next morning, I find myself missing him. And feeling...lonely. Ugh.

That's when I hear my mom, who passed away in 2015, reminding me that for so many years, she and my dad were constantly looking forward to the next time that they would see us kids.

I didn't really get it in those days. I was busy with my work, my writing, the kids, and our lives separate from our parents.

"In those days, we missed you all the time," Mom is saying, "just the way you are missing your own kids. Now you see what your dad and I went through. You know the old saying, 'what goes around comes around!'"

*******

So what does all of this loneliness have to do with healing?

Everything. As medical anthropologist and modern shaman Alberto Villoldo says, "The mind can heal you or it can kill you."

The brain serves up stories of all kinds, some of them as old as time, like this story supplied by my ancestors -- the intense need/desire to live physically close to one another.

After my grandfather Claude, my mother's father, left Italy in 1896, at the age of 16, he never saw his mother again. He and his brothers settled in Connecticut, where I was born. Back in Italy, his mother, Domenica Rotondo, wailed continually about how she had been abandoned by her sons. Her daughter, Lauretta, who remained in Italy, visited her mother every Sunday; for years, Lauretta listened to her mother moan about her sons' leaving; Domenica earned the nickname "abandonada" for herself, abandonada meaning the "abandoned one."

Dr. Villoldo would say that this story of abandonment is one that has trickled down through the generations, landing in me. In therapy through the years I have repeatedly identified my own tendency to feel abandoned -- there was my mother who "abandoned" me at the age of four when she was too sick to take care of me.

There was the abandonment I suffered when two of my children moved to Colorado.

There is the feeling of abandonment I can feel whenever I say goodbye to my children.

Dr. Villoldo would say that this story of abandonment doesn't serve me. He would tell me that it is part of a limiting belief system, an old-fashioned world view all tied up with fear that is not at all useful or healty.

I need to tell a new story, he would say, one that will empower me spiritually and psychologically. One that will take me out of the worn out belief systems of my ancestors, one that can propel me confidently into the future.

Villoldo would say that in order to be happy and healthy, we must deal with all of the fear and anxiety we have. For me, it's accepting the reality that I can't possibly be in two places at once. I am bound to miss one set of children or grandchildren, no matter if I live in the East, or out here in the West.

We must accept these facts of life. We must face the fact that things continue to change. People move around. Kids grow up. We get older and we lose loved ones.

It helps too to think about what my spiritually-minded therapist Mary always used to say: you carry your loved ones in your heart all the time, including the ones who have passed on. To get in touch with them, all you need to do is close your eyes and feel the love you have for them, and the love they have for you! Concentrate on that love, and let the glow keep growing until it envelopes you completely.

Mary is a big believer in unconditional self-love, too. Whenever I would complain that I was missing my children or grandchildren, she would tell me that I needed to "love myself more," that is, I needed to immerse myself deeper in positive feelings towards myself. Part of that involves immersing myself in activities that bring joy and fulfillment to me as an individual. Don't give into feelings (or stories) of loss, scarcity or insecurity, she would say. In this way, she echoes Dr. Villoldo.

*********

There are on average 300 sunny

days a year in Denver. Combine that with the steady inspiration offered by the Colorado mountains and well, it feeds my soul. It feeds my painting muse as well.

No matter if there is a huge snowstorm one day. The next day, or the day after, all the ice and snow in the streets is GONE!

"It just keeps being sunny."

That'a the sentence that popped into my head just now. So often back East, the day begins bright and sunny but by afternoon, grey clouds move in.

Not here. It just keeps being sunny. All day. And that keeps me sunny too! Living here has been given me the strength and inspiration I need to challenge my ancestors' stories. It's as if a giant lamp has been turned on, illuminating my life fears.

Hiking and walking every day are part of the Denver equation too. The more I walk and hike, the more I want to walk and hike. I remember a time not too long ago when Rich would suggest we take a hike and often my reaction was, "oh, what, that again? You mean I have to huff and puff my way up another hill or mountain?"

But I don't have that reaction anymore.

I know that the more I walk, the better I feel.

*********

Ironically, the clouds have moved in this morning. I have to laugh -- it's almost as if I'm getting a taste of the weather I have to face next week.

Oh well. A couple hours ago, after meditating, I wrote down the word "ACCEPTANCE" in large letters in my journal. And then I wrote down the Italian translation: "Accettazione."

Enough. Time to grow up. And now, go for a walk.

p.s. OK, so I thought I was done. But as I was finishing writing this piece, feeling so sad, I asked my mom to send me a sign.

Well, I'm not sure Mom is responsible, but the next thing I know I am staring at this photo in my iphone: four generations of women!

Me on the left, 33 years old, (pregnant with daughter Lindsay), then Jocelyn, almost two, Grandma Michelina, age 85, and my Mom, age 60. We are sitting in Grandma Mish's living room, in front of a painting (done by my Aunt Marcella) of Grandma's ancestral village in Italy. This photo, almost 40 years old, is one of my all-time favorites. I will get a print out and add it to those I keep by my meditation space. And then this photo pops up on the iphone: Jocelyn's daughter, Dani, looking so much like her mom.

Looking at these photos, I'm smiling thinking, OK, so I do belong somewhere. I belong here, in this cozy line of women. I see myself becoming...one of a long line of ancestors!