The simplified version of how my parents met was that my Dad, Paul, was a social worker and my Mom, Diana, was a case who showed up with a boy and three girls. My father ended up marrying Diana and he found a school bus that had been turned into a camper. My brother Ben was my Dad’s first born and I followed, four years later, his only other son. Many years later he would expand on that story. He was organizing a “Meat Share,” a kind of CSA where different families would go in together on a side of meat and divide it up. Diana showed up at the meeting and must have offered to take notes and so they met. Pretty different story. At the end of the day, it was the 1970’s and they were hippies.
As I came to understand growing up, there were different types of hippies. Some were into drugs, intoxicated by the music, open to love and free spirited. Others were driven by politics and social change. To the best of my understanding, my hippy parents were the granola kind. They literally made granola in the kitchen of someone they knew who owned a restaurant and sold it along with muffins and other things they would bake. I guess there were many other people, at the time, living like that and it wasn’t weird. What did seem a little weird, and something my Dad was guarded about, was that along the way the three eldest kids would get “dropped off” at communes or with other families. There wasn’t a lot more to the story that I knew. I heard of these siblings, and would briefly meet my older brother Tony when I was young before he passed away. Kristina, the oldest, lived near me in Cambridge when I was growing up and I remember walking by her on the street occasionally. I would say ‘Hello’ and walk right past her, each time wondering at how weird it was to say ‘hello’ to a sister as you would say to someone who was barely an acquaintance.
Many of my friends had divorced parents or single parents. I was the only one among my classmates, it seemed, who had family who were mostly strangers. I still to this day can only think back to two memories of my mom. I remember her showing up with a box of children’s books, a series of colorfully bound hardcovers called “Serendipity.” They were several years behind my reading level at the time. I hung onto these books simply because they were the one and only thing I can remember about my mom. She showed up one sunny afternoon outside our apartment and fished them out of the back seat of a car. I don’t think they were even wrapped, they were probably in the same box that someone had set them out on the curb in.
Later, when I was maybe thirteen, I remember meeting up with her in Harvard Square near the chess tables outside of what was the Au Bon Pon cafe. She had her youngest son, Andrew, with her. This was the only time I would meet him. I don’t really remember much from that encounter. I can’t even remember if we hugged though I assume we did. It was also a sunny day.
My brother remembers seeing her digging through trash and cardboard boxes in our neighborhood when she was living in a shelter nearby at some point. I had to fill in that empty space in my mind and heart with images of her from photographs and the few stories I would hear from my siblings or my Dad. The most frequently told story was of the weekend my Dad got us permanently, the weekend she went off to see the Pope.
My mother was Italian. Her parents were very Italian. Frank and Angelina. He drove a bulldozer and they were from Frozinone. Angelina wanted a new dining room table, and when Frank said there was nothing wrong with the one they had, she took a saw and cut their table in half.
By the time I was two and a half years old, after my parents had returned to the east coast, my Dad had found a small apartment and spent the next six months trying to regain custody of my brother Ben, my sister Lisa, and me. Mothers were almost always given primary custody of kids when couples separated at that time. My Dad, who was working in a nursing home as a cook, would take a long bus ride to pick us up when he had visitations. And on this one fateful day, when he arrived, my sister Lisa proudly announced that she had been taking care of us and feeding us Twinkies that she had stolen from the corner store downstairs. My mother was gone. She had left at the beginning of the weekend to go to New York City to see the Pope and only left a note. I was three, my brother seven, my sister thirteen.
This was finally enough for my Dad and he decided to take matters into his own hands. He packed up our things and we all got on the bus to Cambridge. Hearing this and the other tales he had recorded was enough for the judge to grant him full custody. As you can imagine, it was pretty easy for me to gather from that story that my mom was a bad mom and we weren’t very important to her.