Thanksgiving, Lite

This morning I sat in an oversized leather chair in my in-laws’ living room, crocheting a scarf for my husband, enjoying the warmth from the nearby fireplace and listening to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and then the football game my brother-in-law was watching.

I have too many things to be thankful for. I’m celebrating nearly nine months of marriage to the best partner and friend I could ask for. I’m enjoying the company of my in-laws, who are amazing people whose family I am grateful to have fallen in to. I spoke with my brother and sister-in-law this morning, and am happy that they are happy. I’m grateful that my brother will no longer be associated with the military, even though it’s proving to be a bump along his path. I haven’t talked with my parents yet (that’s next on my list) but I’m sure they’re enjoying a meal with Mom’s side of the family, and probably stopping by Dad’s oldest brother’s house some time today. They are looking forward to having the kids home for Christmas. I’m taking a break this week from work (I’m too busy, but try to remind myself that it’s much better than being bored). I exchange texts today with friends as they celebrate thanks with their families.

I looked out over the Black River, and looked through the bar tree branches to watch the clouds roll by. I missed the ducks and geese, which were reportedly ruffling about and making noise before I paid attention. I sipped warm coffee in a colorful mug, sweetened with holiday-flavored creamer. After our mid-afternoon dinner, I’m sitting on the couch with a black kitten cuddling against my leg, settling into her afternoon nap.

San and I own our home, we’re both well employed. I love my work, and am exploring new hobbies this year. San occupies his free time making up projects with friends. Just last weekend we were able to enjoy an art gallery showing accompanied by music and poetry reading, plus a play. We’re more comfortable than we need to be, and grateful for that contentment and luxury.

Taking a break from the commercialism that will crash into us tomorrow, I look forward to the rest of the holidays and spending time with family and friends. Perhaps we’ll plan a holiday party in the next few weekends, squeezing it in between work parties and travel. Life is bright and looking up.

Eulogy for My Grandfather

Unbreakable Love

by Markisan Antonio Naso
Read on October 8, 2011


Thank you everyone for coming here today. Seeing this sea of faces; seeing all of you who knew and loved my Grandfather is just tremendous. I know he is smiling down on us from the cosmos, puffing away on a Heavenly cigar, thankful that we are all here to celebrate the time we got to spend with him in his life.

[Holds up pocket watch]

Nearly 20 years ago my Grandfather gave me this pocket watch. I was just 17 and had graduated from high school. I remember he took me aside one day. There was a great glimmer in his kind eyes when he held out his hand and told me he had found this watch when he was young. I’m not even sure how old this watch is now, but he held on to it all those years… a remembrance of another time.

I will never forget when he put his hand on my shoulder and told me how proud he was to be my Grandfather. I was his very first Grandchild on the way to making my mark in life, and he wanted me to know that I was special.

I remember how thrilled I was when he placed his watch into my hands, but I have to admit I didn’t really understand everything this relic meant.

But today, at age 36, after nearly four decades of spending time with my Grandpa, and admiring him beyond measure, I think maybe I know a little better now what the gift of this watch truly signifies, because I know who my Grandfather was.

Tony Torrelli was a mountain of affection, humor, and undeniable Italian swagger. He was a soldier, a Christian, a volunteer firefighter for U-Crest Fire Company and a mason. But most importantly, he was a man who loved and lived for his family every single day of his life.

Grandpa grew up in Buffalo, one of four children. He dropped out of school after 8th grade to help support the Torrelli family business, laying concrete as a member of the local 111 Mason’s Union. He was drafted into the Army during World War II, where he served as a cook in 785th Military Police Battalion for nearly two years – 13 months of which was in the Pacific Theater. Before I even knew him, my Grandpa was busy being a hero.

After he came home, his little sister Rita introduced him to her friend, Alice. According to my Aunt Linda, this was the beginning of “the Greatest Love Story.” And if you ever saw Alice and Tony together you know just how much they adored one another. Alice soon became Mrs. Anthony Torrelli, my darling grandmother, in 1948.

For many years, you could find my Grandpa and Grandma celebrating their love on the dance floor whenever they could, waltzing to their favorite crooners, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. They were completely devoted to one other for over 60 years. In fact, they would have been married 63 years next month on November 25th.

This love they’ve had is something that even death can’t defeat. Yesterday, Grandma revealed that Grandpa was a great kisser and that she had once promised to give him 450,000 smooches. She said she wasn’t able to give him all those kisses while he was here with us, but she has plans. The rest will be delivered by starlight.

My Grandpa was happiest around his family. He was tremendously proud of his four children – John, Susan, Linda, and Mark – for doing what made them happy and successful in their lives, whether it was my Uncle John opening his own racecar building business, my Uncle Mark’s knowledge and passion for motorcycles, my Aunt Linda’s unwavering dedication to taking care of her family or my Mom’s hard work to get through Physical Therapy School.

Always the gentle giant, Grandpa never raised his voice at home and loved to be around his children. Once when Grandma was away, he lifted his kids on the counter and made them milkshakes for dinner. Grandpa also enjoyed teaching what he knew. He taught his sons the masonry business. He taught my mama how to lay tile in her bedroom on High Street. He encouraged each of his kids to stand up for themselves and for their family, and he always championed the mantra of Old Blue Eyes – “I did it my way.” My Grandfather did everything he could to love and support his children while allowing them to grow up as unique individuals.

He did the same for his Grandchildren. He would light up whenever he saw his grandkids: me, Joe, Melissa, Matt, Derrick, and Cindy; and more recently, his Great-Grandchildren: Sofia, Brooke, and Gabriella. I remember how he would drive his riding mower and take us along for long rides on his lap. He always made time to come watch us play sports or whatever else we competed in or participated in, and he would always be the first to let us know how great we did. He loved to be the center of family parties, eventually settling in just to watch the festivities with a cigar and a great big grin on his face. When he wasn’t telling stories or playing with us youngsters, you could often find him tinkering in his garage or with Uncle John and Uncle Mark at Torrelli Pro Cars. Working with his sons started with a simple lunch request, then came an offer to help clean up the shop, and finally Grandpa just became a fixed part of the crew making cars. Uncle John said no one could wield a bandsaw quite like my Grandpa.

In my Grandfather’s later years, when his health began to wane, he knew he could count on his kids to be there for him as he was for them. He would often threaten to sic his daughter “Dr. Sue” on unruly doctors and nurses. He was forever thankful for Linda, John and Mark for taking care of him and Grandma. In fact he called My Aunt Linda “The General“ because she would walk into the doctor’s office with a binder full of records, always ready to tackle any problem that arose. As my Grandfather supported and loved his family, they supported and loved him in return.

[Holds up pocket watch]

So, standing up here with this watch my Grandfather gave me, looking back on his life and who he was, the reason why he gave me this gift all those years ago is so much more clear. This watch is more than just a cool trinket for a teenager. It’s a symbol of his legacy.

My Grandpa wore many hats in his life, but none of them would have fit right without his family. He believed in passing down the best of what you’ve learned in your lifetime to those around you. He knew the value of love and making all the little moments matter… Like helping build a race car with his sons because he wanted to be around them more. Like showing you how much his heart swelled whenever he watched you accomplish something that mattered to you. Like finding the love of his life and making each and every day at her side feel special. Like finding a pocket watch as a kid and passing down his great childhood discovery to his eldest Grandson.

Grandpa, you were the heart and blood of our family. You were everything that a father, Grandfather and hero should be. Thank you for giving so much of yourself every time I saw you, and for showing me how important it is to not only surround yourself with family, but to stand by them and to let them know how much they matter. I already miss your good nature and your encouragement. I miss your nicknames and your mammoth hugs.

When I look at this watch I know exactly what you instilled in your children and their children in the time we were lucky enough to spend with you. I know your legacy of unbreakable love. And I will do my best to ensure the generations that follow know it too.

Goodbye "Wario." I love you.

Confessions on Happiness

When I was a teenager, my stated goal in life was to be content. Later in life, someone told me that most people’s stated goal in life was to be happy; however, most of them were remarkably discouraged with their lives.

I think of myself generally as a positive, happy person. Materially, I have a great job, a great husband, a great home in a great community, and great friends. I volunteer time with a non-profit theater company, play the piano, and am exploring the world of photography. I have two cats who like to cuddle at their discretion. So OF COURSE I’m going to be happy, right? Well…I am, but maybe not for the obvious reasons.

I once made a statement that got an unexpected reaction. I simply said, “I really have trouble remembering to not slouch, I have to think about it constantly.” My friend listening to this statement expressed surprise. I’m not sure whether she thought that I slouched constantly and was therefore failing miserably at my effort at good posture, or that she thought that my good posture was effortless. Regardless, the episode pointed out to me two things. One, our individual experiences are unique. Others don’t intuitively know our successes or trials, and we don’t know theirs. Two, we are more alike than we often admit. I don’t believe that people are successful or even happy without exerting effort. We may just not be privy to what effort is actually involved.

I firmly believe that my approach to life is the key to my happiness. The popular sentiment is often repeated that you make your own happiness, or that you choose to be happy. I believe this, too.

I take a strong lesson from Buddhism: to be mindful. To think of the path of everything and everyone around you. To remember that the disposable plastic bowl that is used at a picnic began as oil, mined from the earth, distilled in a factory, extruded into the shape of a bowl, packaged in a plastic sleeve, packed in a cardboard box, driven to a warehouse and distributed to your local grocery store, unpacked onto a shelf, picked up and purchased, driven home and then to the picnic, soiled, thrown in the trash, driven to a landfill, and finally buried in a concrete-lined hole in the ground. I appreciate the effort and the transience of my world. To remember that you don’t know what happened earlier in the day to the person who was absent-minded or rude to you while walking down the street. I don’t and can’t know other people’s perceptions of the world, and I must respect that. To remember that every decision you make will impact the people around you, and to be conscientious of unintended consequences. Respect your travel mates in your journey through life.

I also have a strong practical lesson that I learned quickly as an adult: don’t take it personally. Essentially,”it’s not all about me.” The choices that I make impact others, and the choices of others impact me. I have control over the first, and I have no control over the latter. Just because something bad happens, it doesn’t mean that harm was meant towards me, or that I did something bad to deserve it. I accept this and deal with the consequences of living, which generally means that shit will happen. If someone seems to live a blessed life, it probably just means that they encounter said shit, and took a minute to shovel it out of their path rather than wading in it. Bad things happen to everyone, but we all handle the situation in our own ways, with different outcomes.

And finally, I love the concept of karma. I don’t believe that if you do ill, that a cosmic being will smite you, or that there is a karmic bank in the sky where you deposit and withdraw good and bad credits. Instead, I believe that the community remembers when you are kind or well intentioned, and they remember when you are dismissive or downright malicious. I also believe that they will treat you in kind, and that is how community balance is achieved. Tied to this is the idea that you get what you give, not only with regard to intent, but also to effort. If you actively participate, you have a say in where you are and what you are doing; if you passively let things happen to you, you place yourself to be influenced by the whims of the world and its billions of inhabitants. Take responsibility rather than shifting it elsewhere.

Last night I was reminded to shout my intentions out to the universe. And so here is a piece of them. As I enter my 30’s, I remind myself that I want to continue to make myself a better person, in part by making life easier for everyone I contact in whatever way I can. I can share how I make myself content, in hopes that someone else might find an idea that applies to their life, and makes them a little happier. I can smile at a stranger and wish them good morning, hold a door for someone with their hands full, or pick up something that they dropped. I can refrain from being annoyed at a perceived wrong, thereby preventing an unpleasant situation from escalating simply because my pride was bruised. I can do my best to keep life in perspective: of what’s really important, and the impact of my action or inaction.

NOLA

I love cities that are of themselves: they have accepted who they are, they embrace themselves, and they make no apologies.

Enter New Orleans.

Our hotel was in the Warehouse District. Walk out the front door of the Hilton Garden Inn, and to your right is an interstate flyover. And some warehouses. To your left is a dive bar, with yummy po-boys and beans and rice, where you will share a lunch table with strangers.

Walk towards the river and you’ll find the convention center and the elongated but air-conditioned Riverwalk Mall. Walk away from the river and you’ll find buildings that, according to the flaking advertisements painted on their great masonry walls, housed durable goods in a past life. The behemoths have recently been resurrected and divided into homes for hipsters. Continue walking and you can look through the windows of art studios and galleries, and the posh World War II museum.

Walk from the hotel to the French Quarter. You’ll smile at your reflection in the glass storefronts of banks, offices, and restaurants that are only open for lunch Monday through Friday as you pass through the Central Business District. Museums, Harrah’s Casino, and signs pointing to the Aquarium greet you on Canal Street as you navigate the streetcar tracks. Fortune-tellers, street artists, musicians, and performers fill the streets around Jackson Square. Boutiques, galleries, restaurants, and coffee shops fill the first story windows of the streets of the French Quarter. Shuttered windows behind porches full of greenery mark the second-story residences. You will pass churches and a convent. The doors and windows of Bourbon Street open up at night, illuminated by the neon signs and the promise of entertainment. Later, music will spill out, either from karaoke or a cover band. (They say to go to Frenchmen Street for jazz.) Grocery stores sell food for the residents, and the permanent half of the French Market displays local produce and food stalls. Local “arts and crafts” fill the tables of the flea market in the back half.

You won’t really remember the smell of the city, because your nose goes a little numb. Fish, piss, river, beignets and coffee all schmooze together with the humidity.

Hop the Canal Street streetcar line. Ride it out of the city center, towards the SuperDome. Remember Hurricane Katrina, and realize that until now there has been no other reminder of her…

Note that only tourists use the public transportation. Also note that the timetables are whimsical suggestions, assuming that you can actually locate one. Tourists mustn’t have deadlines or people to meet. Those tourists must have somewhere else to be.

Continue to City Park. En route, see the boarded up storefronts, the well-maintained employment office, and the faces staring up at the tourists riding the streetcar. You may witness some New Orleans natives actually enter the car and sit near you, distant from the French Quarter. If you’re lucky, someone might hand you a poem to read while you pass the time screeching along the track. Once you reach the end of the line and enter the park, appreciate the groomed botanic gardens, the resident rooster, the misplaced Japanese Garden (at least the weather is authentic), and the soggy cacti. Enjoy the sculpture garden, and consider visiting the art museum.

Ride another streetcar down Saint Charles Street. The trees and cast iron balconies are draped in strings of plastic Mardi Gras beads. Tangles of them. Webs of them.

The Garden District does actually have a coffee shop and a restaurant. You can walk past both of them if you like, so that you can stop and stare at historic homes. Huge houses with iron lace curtains adorning the porches and doorways, with great cast iron fences, with stained glass windows, with gilt details, with mature trees and flowering bushes, with letter boxes and lion’s head door knockers. The corresponding grocery stores and luncheries are on Magazine Street. If you head that direction, you will pass through the neighboring neighborhoods, where people drive Fords and keep Mother Mary statues in their front yards. The houses are no less colorful and much less shuttered. You might be lucky enough to say hello to a man as he “walks” his half-paralyzed dog, or an elderly woman as she carefully tends her front gate. You may see a Victorian home peeled back as it ages, displaying the layers of roofing and siding and broken windows that frame the heavy old door. As you pass a decrepit old masonry building with fascinating detailing, you will realize that it is not abandoned when you turn the corner and spot the new Free School sign behind a freshly painted fence.

Cemetery walls enclose forgotten tombs where a pile of bricks that was once a wall and marker hugs the exposed steel vault, a mere foot away from an immaculate granite mausoleum fronted by a weeping angel that evokes a requiem and breaks your heart. Stillborn children and toddlers share gravesites with their great-great grandparents. The magnolia trees shade a piece of broken wall, where the mason’s initials have been exposed in the formerly hidden mortar.

New Orleans wears its dichotomies on its sleeve: the rich and poor living and socializing just a hair’s breadth apart, the clean and the dirty separated by a street corner, the tourist brushing the shoulder of a local, the impermanence and perseverance. Sailors, traders, soldiers, clergy, criminals. The spirits are still there to see and to hear. You can almost perceive the ghosts, as you tread the same paths and feel the same desires. Work hard, play hard, witness and partake in the spectacle. Live.

And then place your luggage in the back of a cab. The cabbie will check his log, and ask you to guess how long he has been waiting at the cab stand in front of the hotel…almost three hours. He is quite happy to take you to the airport, where you can enjoy a warm beer and wait for United to take you home.

Honeymooning

Here’s my confession: I’ve been composing at least three blog entries in my head in the last week. But I’m too embarrassed that I haven’t posted anything in ten months. So I will offer a recap blog, in hopes that I can pick this up again. So…where have we been since last fall?

San and I last checked in when we got engaged last September. Yes, back in 2010. Moving on…

September through March consisted of wedding planning. As most everyone who could possibly be reading this blog probably knows, we tied the knot at Starved Rock State Park. It was a lovely day in the 50’s, our closest family and friends generally made the journey to support us and celebrate, and we had a blast. Oh, and we ended up married. No more cohabitation, yo, we’re husband and wife!

In that time, we had Thanksgiving with the Naso’s in New York, and I finally visited Canada. We had some French-ish food, bought tea, and watched as my father-in-law was accosted by a stranger who tried to convince him that he looks like he is Native American. Despite, FIL’s protests, the stranger proceeded to thank him for his services in fighting off the Americans during some unspecified past war. I met another soon-to-be Aunt and her boyfriend, and fun, food, and love were shared all around.

Next up…visitors! Ashley came to visit, and also to convince me that I really should buy a real wedding dress. She was sweet enough to drag us both out into a snowstorm (major kudos to the California girl!) to try on some dresses, eat tapas, and then drop the dough. We actually made out with a deal, and my wedding pictures look pretty fantastic.

Christmas was with the Smith’s, but in North Carolina rather than the traditional home in Kentucky. It had a bit more excitement than usual, since my dad was still reconstructing my brother’s bathroom. We also experienced the Great Christmas Blizzard that shut down the eastern seaboard, complete with a rescue mission to retrieve my cousin who made the unfortunate mistake of flying on that particular day. We also managed to pimp out the trip with first class upgrades both ways, thanks to my business travel excesses during 2009 and 2010.

Spring passes with flying colors, culminating with the aforementioned hitching. After many weekends of crafting, including assembling invitations, table decorations, and programs, our bff Holly performed a handcrafted ceremony, which San and I both cried through. We then treated everyone to dinner and dancing. Soon after, San and I spent five days in Santa Fe and the surrounding area, loving every minute of our honeymoon, trying to adjust to addressing each other as “husband” and “wife.”

We languished through the remainder of the neverending Chicago winter. We wrote our thank you notes (I admit that I think a few still haven’t been mailed yet….) We hosted a small derby party the first weekend in May, trying to uphold a shaky new tradition. I failed to make derby pie, but we did have hats!

San made his annual trek to the Superman Festival in Metropolis, Illinois in early June. Josh and Kay visited us one weekend, and played with us in the city. The next weekend we spent in New Orleans, which deserves its own blog entry. (San was working at a conference, but I wandered around the city, partially making it into a photo-vacation.) And that brings us to July.

So here we are, entering summer in Chicago. It didn’t arrive until late June, when the seasons switch flipped from Frost Bite to Heat Stroke. We grilled out with friends for the Fourth of July, enjoying the long weekend. Unfortunately we missed the fireworks, due to interference from some large trees. Just yesterday a storm passed through the area, which everyone tells me was pretty impressive. I happened to be in a basement during the exact 45 minute period when it let loose. Our power finally came back on at 1:30 am this morning. It was a muggy and uncomfortably warm evening until that point.

And so life is happening, which is usually what happens when a blog/journal/diary is abandoned for a length of time.