Imagine our horror when we stumbled onto this movie yesterday.
Al Pacino? Scottish fur trader? Colonial New York?
Luckily, The Godfather was playing on AMC and all was forgiven.
This past week we've had mobsters coming out the culo.
Watching the first season of The Sopranos over three days led me down that familiar path of wishing that I was part of the romanticized Italian underworld. Well, perhaps not the underworld -- just part of an extreme Italian-American family.
I am one quarter Italian -- from my grandmother. Her parents came from Calabria and Naples and settled in Cleveland in the early 1900s. They were the usual hard-working no-nonsense sort of immigrants, the kind of people who put responsibility over recreation.
My great-grandfather ran a bar where my grandmother worked and where she met my grandfather. She married my grandfather because she was tired of all those "loud-mouth Italians." Unfortunately for her, some Poles are just a loud.
Perhaps if my grandmother married another Italian, I would have had an even stronger Italian upbringing. Of course, I also wouldn't exist if my grandmother married someone other than my grandfather. But even with the mixed marriage and the fact that I was born seventy years after my great-grandparents came to this country, I still felt the influence of the Old Country.
Living with my parents, grandparents and great-grandfather afforded me a chance to live in a four-generation household, a household familiar with customs and odd superstitions.
I grew up quite aware of and fearing the malocchio and even my grandmother's attempts to ward off the "evil eye."
And the fear of the old and foreign also caused me to be frightened of my great-grandfather, Papa. He was quite the fire-cracker, dating until he was in his mid 90s. My grandfather and him often clashed and it was many an occasion that I saw Papa raise his cane to hit my grandfather (in a loving, old Italian sort of way).
Papa didn't like living with us and often tried to escape from our house. Unlike Livia on the Sopranos, Papa loved living in a retirement home. When he came to stay with us because of the trouble he was causing at the home, he was a bit resentful. He even went so far as hitchhiking down Topanga Canyon back to his old retirement home.
He was a headache for my grandmother who was constantly trying to please him and keep him happy. But Papa was rarely happy and often complained of the "woo woo woo" noise I made.
What's a "woo woo woo" noise? I honestly can't say. I believe that is was simply an
onomatopoeic amalgam of the noises I made as a child at play.
My relationship with Papa was the closest thing to sibling rivalry. We both competed for my grandmother's (who he called Manie) attention and affection and were both tattletales.
Me: Papa is mushing his food together again.
Papa: Manieeee. Manieeee. She's a makin' the noise again. Woooo woooo.
Me: Papa didn't flush!!
Papa: She's a stolen the remote.
I'll never forget the day he left, though.
We were both upstairs in our different bedrooms and my grandparents were downstairs entertaining my great-aunt and great-uncle. I was watching television when I heard Papa making his usual screaming sounds (He'd scream to get my grandmother's attention). I got up and closed my door because I didn't want to hear his noises for once.
About an hour later my grandmother came upstairs and found Papa lying on the ground. It turned out that he had fallen out of his chair. They had to take him to the hospital and, eventually, a convalescent home.
I felt so guilty for ignoring Papa but he was like the boy who cried wolf -- we were all accustomed to his antics and had difficulty taking him seriously. He held on for a few years after that but died in 1990 at the age of ninety-nine.
I'm sure that if I had been older and more mature, I would have better stories about Papa.
But in truth, he was a hard-ass.
That's okay, though. Every Italian family needs a real figlio de cagna.
And we had our Papa.
