Cousin, Cugina

I grew up in small town New England, the daughter of two large and extended families that could not have been more different or diverse.

My Dad, Charlie, was a native son, a Mayflower descendant, born and bred in the same town where I would also grow up. He was one of seven children in a close knit family that included aunts, uncles and cousins from both sides of his family. My grandparents were delightful, but especially so was my grandmother Sophie whose assertive and generous humor warmed our entire town. Sophie was blunt and forward and at the same time compassionate. She was one of those women you admired because she could say whatever she liked and no one thought her the worse. Sophie's brother, Joe, married Louise and they produced our Marie and Charles.

I have written before about my beloved Charles who gave me my best notion of what it was like to have a Dad, but it was Marie who really put the speed in my sails as a child. Marie was some years older than me and my sister Maureen. She was a "big girl" to we very small girls, and like her brother Charles she was very very cool. I think the word back then was "groovy", but we will not split semantics here. Marie wore pretty dresses and she was very beautiful. She still is beautiful today although she has stopped wearing headbands. She was gentle, kind, and patient with my sister, Maureen, and me. She would never yell at us when she babysat and she knew all the good WDRC radio tunes that played on our local rock and roll station. I loved her. My sister loved her. Me and my girlfriends all adored her and talked a lot about how when we grew up we would be Marie.

My cousin Marie, in the sixties, wore headbands. Headbands were not yet worn in my tiny neighborhood, so of course when she came on the scene, I wore headbands. My sister wore headbands and so did all my friends. They were tight and painful to me and my tiny ears bled from the pressure, but I wore them. I was going to grow up and be my Marie and silly ear bleeding would not put a stop to that. I was grateful when Hilary Clinton came along to continue the fashion. I knew it was the right head gear to wear.

As it is apt to do, life changes, Marie moved on and grew up. Maureen and I became old enough to babysit ourselves and we became consumed with ballet, gymnastics, piano lessons and school. We did not see a lot of Marie, although we kept wearing our headbands. Maureen and I grew up and away we went on our own journeys with rarely a look back to our hometown, the village green, and the lessons,memories and dreams of our young lives.

My mother was not native to suburban small town life. As the second daughter of Sardinian immigrants she could not have been more different than my father's family. My mother, Maria Francesca, was what I like to describe as a "do right" girl. Impeccably coiffed and dressed, she raised her daughters with strict Sardinian and Catholic values and dedicated her entire life to seeing us be whole, safe and healthy. Nothing was enough for her "jewel and her gem" as she would often describe Maureen and me. Mom was perhaps the only truly selfless human I have known,but her expectations were high for her daughters and so our lives were rough. She loved us so deeply and so well but she never got off our backs either. Our lives were never easy, rarely carefree.

Maria's older sister, Cathy, was involved in our lives even though she and her husband, dear Uncle Tuck, lived far away in Long Island. My sister and I refer to our aunt as "AC", "Big Cath" or just "Catherine Angela", which is just fine with us, so long as she never finds out. When my parents divorce got a little heated, I was shipped out to Southold on Long Island for a summer with Tuck and Cath.

Just around that time, Tuck and Cath had a baby boy, named Christopher, or Cristofolo, as my grandfather called him.

I was probably no more than five years old at the time and my aunt and uncle had a tiny rental a walk away from the beach in Southold. Down the hall my brutish cousins Thom and Dave ruled the roost and in between there was Cath and Tuck's room and further down the hall, a small alcove,where I slept, about two feet away from my infant cousin, Christopher.

There are some babies that are so beautiful you just sigh. Other babies are so homely you want to cry. Never has a child been so beautiful and so blessed with the biggest brown doe eyes and the most amazing eyelashes. To this day, Chris has these huge eyelashes that belie his manly status as an athlete par excellence. You look into Christopher's eyes and ya think, "Oh how much would I love those eyes".

I think that I must have tormented him as an infant in our shared small room. I soon learned that if I passed my hand into his small crib and drew his eyebrow over one of his eyes with my pinkie that he would flutter those huge lashes, wake up and laugh. I did this to him on a regular basis because I loved it no end when he opened those eyes and laughed at me. It never occurred to me that he might cry and that might wake my aunt and uncle. It never occurred to me that the baby needed his sleep. I just liked seeing Chris wake up and giggle. It made my little five year old world that this tiny creature existed and he slept two feet away from me all those nights. I saw a photo of him on Face book last week and the first thing I thought about was how huge his eyelashes still are. He remains, number one on my list of most stunning humans.

Chris, my sister Maureen, my cousins Dave, Thom, Doug and Greg and I all shared the same Sardinian grandparents, Nonnie and Nonno. Nonno, a huge bear of a human, could be surprisingly sensitive to his gaggle of grandchildren. Nonnie the singularly greatest cook in the universe, was a long suffering worrier, with a penchant for Lawrence Welk and Harlequin romance novels.

Naturally, one day we would all, at different times, travel to the "old country" to see the even larger extended Manca and Chessa families spread out around southern and northern Italy but mostly concentrated on the island of Sardinia.

Shortly before my first trip, my great aunt Mary, pulled me aside one day and had a chat with me. "Cathy", she said, "You are going to not like Sardinia very much. It is very primitive there and it is going to be hard to adjust. However, by the time you leave, you will love it so much, you will wish you could stay forever". My great aunt Mary was neither Sardinian or Italian. She was the marvel of my family, a German lady who was fluent in both Italian and Sardinian and had somehow gotten herself adopted by Sardinians. She grew up and married my Uncle Pete and remained life long best friends with my Nonnie. Aunt Mary bore a striking resemblance to Olympia Dukakis years before the great actress became known. I knew my Aunt Mary was a very sage woman because she put up with a lot of nonsense through out her life and would good naturedly laugh whenever it was pointed out that she was not native Sard. The poor woman had to put up with this pronouncement at every family gathering for years. When I finally reached adult hood I learned to wink at her with the wink of "this is the billionth time I have heard this story". She liked that part of me a lot.

And so it went. One day, the big airplane came and took my family and me to Italy. Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, Pisa and so many cities in between were heady and happy days for my sister and me. A look at the photographs today shows that my adolescent attitude was not the best as I glumly posed for family photographs. I had become lonely for companionship and everyone in my Italy world was either too old, too young, or too adolescent male to hold my 15 years old interest for my very long. Even the age appropriate Viscount my uncle Ettore was trying to contract me to marry bored me no end. Here I was, having been given this great gift of travel and I pouted. Silly selfish kiddo that I was, my days of angst would soon end but not before having learned a life lesson or two.

Our stay in mainland Italy was done and from Civitavecchia we boarded the ferry to Olbia on the first part of our trek to Sardinia. My "younger than me" cousins Gian Franco and Stefano accompanied us for the overnight trip on the huge ferry. Looking back, I must think that my mother was frightened out of her wits, traveling alone with four children on this big boat. I know that we took one short pass on the deck and the next thing we knew, my sister, cousins and I were locked into our bunk-bedded stateroom while Mommy stacked up luggage against the door three feet high. Mom sat on the tower of suitcases and chain smoked Marlboros all night long. Apparently some of our fellow passengers were not quite up to her standards.

My cousin Gian Franco took advantage of my mother's preoccupation to teach me a little song in Italian that addresses how one would proposition a prostitute in Italy. Ya just never know when you will need to learn this and I was a most dutiful student. We sang and we laughed and clapped while plumes of smoke circled my mother's head. She would not budge all night long and watched over us as we slept away the Mediterranean Sea.

From Olbia we boarded a rickety train for the trip to Sassari province. My grandmother had schooled me well when I relentlessly questioned her about why Italy was on the wrong side of World War II. She told me that she liked Mussolini because he "made the trains run on time". I expected faster, slicker and better trains than the one that would carry us across the island and just around that time, my heart began to sink. The landscape of Sardinia, while achingly beautiful is also quite harsh. Craggy and mountainous, with very few clear vistas, you just cannot help but feel that you are moving toward an unforgiving destination.

After our train trip, we were met my one of my mother's 96 first cousins (yes the family is prolific and they live long lives too) and packed into a little car for the trip to Siligo. Rumbling over unpaved roads in the heat and listening to my mother chat with her "cugino" in the pressured speech of a native daughter come home did not a thing for me. As we moved further and further away from civilization as I knew it my stomach knotted and I found a lump in my throat. I missed my nice suburban Connecticut town, my friends, my ballet lessons and the "same ness" of my very limited life. I tried hard to remember great Aunt Marys' words but I was just too young to make that leap just then.

Eventually we arrived to a throng of family and friends, but mostly family. I would only learn as an adult that the Manca and Chessa families make up most of Sardinia, so throw in a Casu or Serra or two and basically I am related to everyone south of Corsica. It was both exciting and scary. Petted and hugged, kissed and gushed over, my sister and I were overwhelmed with the welcome. "Its like a thousand Nonnies", my sister whispered to me.

Somewhere in the mob was my Stefania. I knew her very well from her pictures and envied her madly. For her Holy Communion she wore a long white gown that I thought so much nicer than my little white dress. When she made her Confirmation she had heels on her chic Italian shoes while the best I could do in my little life were the pink fish net tights I had to beg for months to wear. I knew her from the time I was old enough to recognize the faces of my family from the numerous photographs that filled the drawer in my Nonnie's parlor.

From the start we amused and delighted one another. My cousin is an effusively affectionate and warm creature. Her heart is huge and she balances my rather cool stoicism quite well. We made each other laugh with a look or a sigh and we laughed all the time. Inevitably we found trouble. We liked to gab quite a bit, we both enjoyed the stolen Marlboro cigarette, and we snuck off to gab and smoke with two local boys from the next town. My mother and my great aunt spent that summer screaming at us. Chores went undone, giggling was heard all day and night and we were oblivious to everyone around us. We could never remember where we were to be, that we should be dressed and ready, or that we should be polite enough to converse with anyone but ourselves. It never occurred to either of us that we were two not so polite teenagers. We had a lot to discuss because parents, boyfriends, rock n roll groups, school and siblings were the front and center concerns of our teen aged lives. It mattered not where we were, or whom we were with, we laughed and snorted and cried and howled at one another. Of course Stefania speaks not a word of English and I spoke about five words Sard. Did not matter. We could not understand a word the other said but we did not care. We had each other and we were crazy about each other.

Thank you Facebook for my glorious cousins Marie, Charles, Chris, Dave, Thom, Doug, Greg and Stefa, Domenico and all those I have missed. (more than a hundred). I love them all.