Forgiven: One Man's Journey from Self-Glorification to Sanctification Read Online Free PDF

never saw any of the other mothers do. She would place her hand — usually her right one — into her mouth and bite it as hard as she could.
    She claimed it was an Italian thing — but I never saw anybody, or anything ever act in that manner before or since. Not even in cartoons had I seen such a bizarre ritual, you’d think that Ren & Stimpy might have tried it once — but, never. I mean, my mother would leave her own teeth marks on her own hand. Is that normal? I remember one time when me and my friend Richie Misbach got my 17
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    Vince Russo
    mother so riled up that she went through the screaming, the blood-pressure bit, the hand-biting — and our sides were splitting with laughter. At that point, she grabbed a belt and viciously whipped Richie and I after she had trapped us between my bed and an adjacent wall. We were laughing so hard we didn’t even feel the pain. But, that was just my mother — always a flair for the dramatic, forever with teeth marks in her hand.
    Now I fully understand that the family was dysfunctional. Back then, you just lived with it — there were no counselors to go to. And, what proud Italian would go to a counselor anyway. No, it was much better to settle your differences by screaming from room to room and biting your own hands. Dr. Phil would have had a picnic with this unruly crew. Its only saving grace was the backbone that held the family together with spit, glue and farina pie — my grandmother, Anna Savarino.
    Man, I loved Nana. An extremely religious woman (she even let Jehovah’s Witnesses into the house), she was my everything. The kindest, sweetest, caring, gentlest woman you would ever know, she cushioned the chaos of the thunderous hailstorm. Just picture it —
    there was the Fruitinator biting her hand in the kitchen, my Grandfather demanding something in the dining room, my father hiding out, watching a game in the den — and my older sister probably somewhere on the phone talking to her six-foot-eight boyfriend otherwise known as the Goon (that’s a story for another time). But nothing fazed Nana, she would maintain control as the rigatoni boiled and the homemade sauce simmered. She was Edith Bunker, Andy Griffith’s Aunt Bee, Mother Teresa and your kindergarten teacher all rolled into one. She would affectionately call me her “doll baby onion pie,” which for some strange reason meant the world to me. She was the family rock — the most strong-willed female I ever knew.
    Without warning, my grandmother passed away from a heart attack when I was 18 years old; she was only in her 60s. The world as I knew it was never the same. The family as I knew it would also never be the same. I was raised on the ritual of going to my grandparents 18
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    Forgiven
    every Sunday for some form of macaroni (after Jim’s Sunday morning doubleheader, of course). Though we yelled and screamed and my mother did some occasional hand-biting, that house on 21 Poplar Street in West Hempstead, New York, was filled with the warmest love I had ever known. That’s the way it is in an Italian family. The yelling never superseded the love . . . never. But with the death of Nana came the death of tradition. Day by day, week by week, month by month, the family grew further apart. The glue jar was empty. Society and our culture were pulling us apart, and there was no farina pie at the end of the day to bring us back together. Years later, John J. would die alone in a nursing home. The stubborn, bull-headed Italian man never overcame the death of his wife. At the end of the day, Archie couldn’t survive without Edith.
    As my grandfather grew older and began to lose his senses, my mother kept telling me over and over again that I needed to go see him before he died. But I never could. This mountain of a man was my boyhood idol, and to see him weak and frail would have been too much even for me. When Granddad died I didn’t