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Me, lower right, blue shirt, white sleeves. 1986. Probably not thinking about Grandmom. |
There were some older dormitories and some newer ones, all built between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The little building in which we got our mail was tiny -- maybe the size of your living room. Every few days I would go down there and check for letters. Pre-email, the box usually contained nothing but campus life memos: pizza party here; don't put your bikes there; stop calling the pizza place and ordering fries to be delivered to the chapel... I'd get a few real letters, but nothing consistent.
Except for letters from one person: Grandmom Tancredi. Marie Antoinette Tancredi, from Northeast Philadelphia. She lived in a row-home on a twelve-lane highway that roared day and night. She lived alone (her husband [the grandfather I never knew] having died of a heart attack in his fifties) and she lived strong.
My grandmother had been forced to leave school during the sixth grade. She was needed to work and to help support a family of ten children. Regardless of this, later in life, she went to community college and she somehow managed to become a bit of a world traveller; she'd been to Jerusalem, Japan, Italy, etc... All her adult life she had owned beauty parlours and made a modest living. In her later years, I remember her giving manicures in my mother's home salon. Grandmom's husky voice would fill the house along with the chemical scents of her trade.
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The mailboxes. |
As I was growing up in my South Jersey home, I would watch -- eagerly as a child, nose to the pane; languidly as a teenager, sprawled on the couch -- through the front window of our house for her to get off of the train from Philly on Sundays. She'd waddle in our direction, usually wearing a weird, pointed, knitted hat with dangling woolen tassles that she got in some foreign place ("I'm gonna start a trend...") and come in the front door weilding a brown bag stuffed with bagels the likes of which I haven't tasted since. We'd sit around the kitchen table and eat..and eat... For me it would start with tuna on a bagel and then turn into three more plain bagels.
She always called me "Chrissy" -- something I allowed no one but her to do -- into my young adulthood.
When I got to Penn State, eighteen, scared and lonely, I remember going to the mailboxes and turning the combination (letters of the alphabet, not numbers, were laid out in a sunburst pattern) during the first week and finding a letter addressed in her angular cursive; the hand of someone who never wrote much; who had used her hands for more practical work since having left school so young. Hers was a careful and deliberate script that probably took her three times as long to produce than it would take the average college graduate.
I don't remember the exact text of the first letter, but I remember the emphasis: "I'm going to write to you because I know it's nice to get letters when you are away from home. But you are a 'young fella' (this was an exact phrase) with work to do and fun to have, so you don't have to write back to me."
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Me, 1986, in the dorm room. Responding to this post before it was written? Heavy. |
...except that none of it was more important than the little Italian grandmom who, once a week, probably spent hours at a time cobbling uninteresting, grandmotherly letters in order to stay connected with and to comfort her beloved grandson who was too busy having the time of his life to scratch out a simple, "Hi, Grandmom --- thanks for the letter. I love you." Just once. Just once, I could have written to her. ("But," says a mop-haired young me, sincerely shocked by the statement, "She said I didn't have to...")
Idiot.
It lives as a little black hole in my heart, now. How do I respect that eighteen-year-old me? It wasn't enough that it meant something to him that she wrote and whatever it meant to him; it should have meant more. He should have been a better man. Well, the man he has become would give anything, now, to be able to respond to a mundane, poorly-written letter from his grandmom. That much I know.
So, why not:
It took me 29 years, Grandmom, but thanks for the letters. I love you. Thanks for loving me with a kind of love I couldn't understand until now...
Love,
ChrisAnd, selfishly, I reap the warmth of her love, even years later. She is still giving while I take. But maybe that's the love of parents and grandparents, after all: the only true selflessness on Earth.
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