Born to Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

you hit roadside pavement, in my family, WOMEN RULED THE WORLD! They allowed the men the illusion of thinking they were in command, but the most superficialobservation would tell you they couldn’t keep up. The Irishmen needed MAMA! Anthony, on his hilltop, needed Fifi, HOT MAMA! There was a big difference.
    Anthony had separated from Adelina Rosa, his first wife, from an arranged marriage, while they were in their twenties. She had been sent to the United States as a young girl from Sorrento to be an old-world bride. She lived for eighty-plus yearsin the United States and never spoke a sentence of English. When you walked into her room, you walked into Old Italy. The holy beads, the fragrances, the religious items, the quilts, the dusky sunlight reflecting off another place and time. She, I’m sure, unfortunately, played the “Madonna” role to Anthony’s other inamoratas.
    My grandmother suffered mightily from the divorce, never remarriedand had little to do with the world at large again. She and Anthony were never in the same room with each other for a long, long time. Not at funerals, not at weddings, not at family gatherings. Every Sunday after church when I visited my aunt Dora’s, she’d be there in her hairnet and shawls, scented exotically and cooking delicious Italian dishes. She’d greet me, smiling, with hugs and kisses, murmuringItalian blessings. Then one day, on the hill, Fifi died.
    Sixty years after their divorce, Anthony and Adelina reunited. Sixty years later! They lived together in their “mansion” for ten years, until Anthony died. After my grandfather’s death, in the summers, I would ride my bicycle from Colts Neck to Englishtown and visit. She was usually there alone, and we would sit in the kitchen, conversingin a smattering of broken English and Italian. She claimed she only went with the old man to protect her children’s inheritance . . . maybe so. She died peacefully and wit sharp at the age of 101, having seen the invention of the automobile and the plane and men walk on the moon in her lifetime.
    Anthony and Adelina’s house on the hill remained in a state of suspended animation for twenty-fiveyears. When I walked through it as a fifty-year-old man, it was exactly as it had been when I was eight. To the sisters . . . it was hallowed ground. Finally, my cousin Frank, the jitterbug champ, who taught me my first chords on the guitar and whose son, Frank Jr., played with me in the Sessions Band, moved in with his family and filled the house with children and Italian cooking again.
    Thepower of the “pinch of death” has been handed down to my aunt Dora, who has developed her own version, the “headlock of doom.” This little five-foot-two, ninety-year-old Italian lady could rip your neck into permanent whiplash or kick the ass of Randy “Macho Man” Savage should he be foolish enough to bend down for a kiss. While I no longer fear Big Daddy’s “pinch of death,” still, on many nights,right around eight thirty, Anthony lives . . . as the house lights go dark, the backstagecurtain opens and I hear that long, drawn-out . . . “BAAAARRRRUUUUUUUCE.”
    Work, faith, family: this is the Italian credo handed down by my mother and her sisters. They live it. They believe it. They believe it even though these very tenets have crushingly let them down. They preach it, though never stridently,and are sure it is all we have between life, love and the void that devours husbands, children, family members and friends. There is a strength, fear and desperate joy in all this hard spirit and soul that naturally found its way into my work. We the Italians push until we can go no further; stand strong until our bones give way; reach and hold until our muscles fatigue; twist, shout and laughuntil we can no more, until the end. This is the religion of the Zerilli sisters, handed down by the hard lessons of Papa and the grace of God and for which we are daily thankful.

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