It was going to be a quick visit – twenty minutes, twenty-five at the max. I still had to hit the grocery store – I’d promised the kids a pizza for dinner as I’d wrestled derelict zippers and paired mittens that morning – and if I was fast enough, I could swing by the strip mall on the way out of town and check out the home and bath accents store.
A quick visit, in and out. I glanced at the time before I got out of the car: two o’clock. I’d be back on the road by half past.
I found him in the living room, stretched back in the recliner, a red fleece blanket draped over his legs. Though the lights were off, the twinkle in his eyes when he saw was me was unmistakable. He grinned widely as he struggled to sit up, to right himself in his chair. “Come, come,” he said, motioning for me to sit down. His voice was thick, gravelly. “How you do it?”
I stood in front of him, took his hands – two dense, calloused mitts – and leaned in to kiss him; one cheek, two. “I’m good, Nonno,” I said, a bit louder, a bit slower than usual. “How are you?”
“I am in pain,” he said as I settled in to the loveseat beside him. He grimaced, gestured to his right arm, slung limply across his lap. Beneath the bulky sleeve of his well-worn knit sweater I could see the brace’s bulk, the result of a fall last month. He refuses to take anything for the pain.
We sat together, me and my husband’s grandfather – the family patriarch – in his dimly lit living room, and like so many afternoons before us, we found ourselves talking about when he came to Canada. Rather – he talked, and I listened as he regaled me with snippets of his life, a life so incredibly different from mine (and my own grandparents’, too) it sounds, at times, almost like fiction. He told me what it was like for him to leave his family for a new country; a better life. About arriving in Canada fluent only in Italian, facing the daunting task of learning to adapt to life and work in a new language; a new country.
A new life.
He told me about leaving his wife, three children and the only home he’d ever known for a place where everything was unfamiliar. “I come to Canada,” he said – familiar words, important words. “I come to Canada for my family, for a better life.”
Until he could find work, he stayed with his sister and her husband, who had two years of foreign soil under their belts by then. Though it took months, he eventually found work; the horticulturist position he finally secured would be the one he’d retire from decades later (his front garden and backyard, a small orchard in its own right, is proof positive of his talent, his dedication; his life’s work).
He told me again about the death of his father – when he was just a young boy, all of nine – and how his life changed overnight. There was little choice but for him to trade his third-grade education in favour of work in order to provide for his family – his mother, younger brother and sister. Like I have many times before, I tried to imagine what it must have been like, trying to fill a grown man’s shoes when he was just a child himself.
“I work so hard, out there in the field, crying, crying for my father. What I gonna do for my family, for my mother, my sister? I work, I work.”
He paused. His eyes were faraway and distant; behind them he was a young boy in Italy again, working in the fields, mourning his father. “Everything I did, I did for my sister,” he said softly.
He leaned forward in his chair and looked at me with misty eyes. Nostalgia hung in the air between us, curling thickly around our heads like smoke.
“I love her,” he said softly, and my mind flickered briefly to the withdrawn, disoriented version of his sister, the only one I’ve ever known.
“I know you do,” I said gently.
He sighed, sat back in his chair, favouring his braced arm. “I don’t know if it was right for me to come to Canada. I could have gone to Australia…”
“I’m glad you came here,” I smiled.
“I come to Canada for my family,” he said again.
I never made it to the grocery store that afternoon, never swung by the linen store on my way out of town. I pushed my visit with Nonno to the last minute; listened to his history for as long as I could.
I come to Canada. Those words are the keys that unlock a rich and precious tapestry, one that I never get tired of hearing about.
18 Comments, Comment or Ping
Oh, what a wonderful story!
December 3rd, 2009
THANK YOU for sharing that story! Very awesome.
December 3rd, 2009
I wish the elderly people in my life had talked more to me about their lives. I know my great Uncle Dick, long passed away now, remembered when the Titanic sank – remembered everyone in Halifax knocking together coffins out of whatever they could find. But he never talked about it to me. I only found out from others after he passed that he had this memory.
My grandmother is in her nineties, and has talked about the time the axle on the family wagon broke on the way to church, and has shown me the little date book where she writes people’s birthdays – a book she got when she was only 12. She shows me how she wrote her name, followed by “New Port, Nova Scotia, Dominion of Canada, North America, the Northern Hemisphere, The World, the Universe.” She talks about how it was Dominion of Canada back then, and I marvel at how similar it sounds to something I might have written, as a child…
December 3rd, 2009
Nice writing.
December 3rd, 2009
beautiful
December 3rd, 2009
Great story… both the details themselves (losing a father at an early age, coming to Canada for his family to have a better life) and the manner in which he speaks remind me a lot of my dad.
December 3rd, 2009
Simply beautiful…it brought tears to my eyes. Bravo!
December 3rd, 2009
That brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful story and piece of family history.
I can’t even imagine how terrifying it must be for someone to leave their home for a land where they can’t even understand the language. So much courage.
December 3rd, 2009
What a grand old man! And it says a lot about you that you think so. Well written!
December 3rd, 2009
Lovely story, beautifully told. Thank you.
December 4th, 2009
Nice. I like that one. You made my day.
December 4th, 2009
What a story. It’s nice that you know his story – bittersweet as it is. We waited too long to try to find out my grandparents stories and now, sadly, they’re gone. It’s nice that you wrote it out for all of us to share.
December 4th, 2009
We take for granted that the lives of those older than us were unextraordinary before we met them, but if we listen, we can learn so much.
December 4th, 2009
Jesus…this was moving as hell! Simply beautiful!
December 8th, 2009
That is such a wonderful story.
December 9th, 2009
I absolutely love this post. I was lucky enough to get stories like this from some of my own relatives – one from Scotland (who came to Canada first, then came down to the States), some from Hungary, some from Italy.
December 11th, 2009
My Italian grandparents had such a similar story. My grandfather leaving his wife and son behind, working 12 years (in horticulture!) to establish himself and bring them over. My mother, the first one born in America. My grandfather dealing with the New York Mafia, which eventually forced him to close his flower shop and work as a gardener on the estates of Long Island. When I was in Rome, I was about 20 miles from the village where my grandparents had come from. Tried to find a bus or some sort of transit there, but nothing went there. I never knew my grandfather and my grandmother died when I was 12, but I remember asking her if she ever missed Italy. She said something like, “All I remember of Italy was the hunger in my belly.”
December 15th, 2009
ohhh…write it down, write it all down or record him… Don’t lose the story. One summer i sat with my grandfather to go over the family tree – i didn’t write it down and he is 93…the urgency of this and all the little stories of my Irish side are closer and closer to being lost. Don’t lose your history…your children will need it one day, i’m sure, as i’ve needed to know things….
Like the fact that my Irish Catholic great-grandmother married an Irish Protestant man and after being disowned by her family proceeded to name her children after her brothers and sisters so that she would never forget her family (!!!).
Write it down….and record. Younger generations need to know what it took to form this country…to form the family.
THank you for sharing Nonno’s story…
December 15th, 2009
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