The Summer of Love

     Paper eyelids covered his eyes.  The lines on the machine were a sonic dirge - like the sheet music of death.  My grandpa lay dying, my beloved Gemini and one true ally in this world.  He accepted me as I am, like a twin in love with his other self, and mirrored my rising hope that I could be a writer. 
     Breaking the quiet, I told him, “It’ll be okay, you’ll get better.”  I’d heard that a person in a coma could hear you speaking.
     “No, Chris,” Mom said and turned away.
     Tears slid down my cheeks.  I wiped them with the sleeve of my purple tie-dye outfit.  It was the Twentieth Anniversary of the Summer of Love - 1987 - and I obtained an English degree from the City University of New York.  I was supposed to get a job, move out and find my way in the world.  The music of my life was bitter and sad, as I flipped between the hospital and job hunting.  It was like changing the stations on a radio dial that had only one frequency.        
     I saw Grandpa lying there in his Sicilian skin, under the hospital gown.  Maybe he was hearing angels, if not my voice.  His lips twitched.  Was he trying to speak?
     “Grandpa,” I said, trembling. “Grandpa?”
     “He’s not here,” Mom responded. “He’s not here.”
     “Yes, he is.  He’ll get better; he has to.”
     I wiped my eyes on the tee shirt and Mom reached around to hug me.
     The sounds of my youth came back: “Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Joyful and Triumphant.”  It was Christmas Eve, and we celebrated the night with seven fishes – a nod to Nonna’s Neapolitan roots.  Grandpa beamed as he said, “We’re all meeting here tonight because of the essay Chris wrote.”  It was published in the Teen Literary Magazine of New York Public Library.  I still had a copy.
     “Let me quote,” he took out his own copy. “Lobster, shrimp, and fish are foods my family associates with Christmas Eve.  Dining on these is a tradition, as customary to my family as hanging stockings is to others . . . this night I will always remember, by looking at what I wrote and seeing once again in my mind everyone smiling and happy.”
     He singled me out.  I was saturated with happiness.  And of course, he sat at the head of the dining room table and I was on his right.
     Here Grandpa’s breath rose and fell in tune to the lines dancing in a fado on the machine.  “No, no,” I cried.
     I remembered him best in the espresso-color suit he wore to church on Sundays.  He was insightful and sincere.  Like Michelangelo, who could “see” the figure inside the marble and sculpt without using a wax mold, Grandpa could see into you and find the good.  You weren’t waiting to become someone; you were already there.
     Sorridi, bella,” he’d say, coaxing a smile out of me.  I was a tiny slip of a girl, sensitive to the words the other kids hurled at me.
     When I turned thirteen, the neighborhood girls – the ones with peachy lips and blue eyes and dirty yellow hair –bullied me.  “Here comes Cheese,” they laughed as I walked up to the bus stop. “Cheese, Cheese.” they shouted in a chorus and blocked my way.  The ringleader punched me in the stomach and kicked me to the ground.  After I was finally able to get up and walk on, those voices continued: “Cheese, Cheese.”
     In the cafeteria, and on the bus going home, they kept up their abuse.  At the end of the day, I was in tears and called Grandpa on the phone.  Mom was at her part-time job working for the interior decorator in our tiny Staten Island town.  He told me every time, “You’re beautiful, princess.  I love you.  Hold your head up high.  You’re better than those ordinary girls.”
     Taking refuge in my bedroom, I wrote poetry and short stories; memorized the definitions of interesting words in the dictionary.  Each day, I looked up two words and wrote them down, and the next day re-read them and chose two new ones.  While doing this, I listened to the FM radio.  Girls in school pushed me around because I liked rock-n-roll and they loved disco.  In my room, I was perfectly content to be left alone.  I rarely came out except to watch WKRP in Cincinnati on our new TV.
     Grandpa was my biggest fan.  That year I won a citywide, public school essay contest, and he drove with Mom and me to the awards celebration.  I held the striped ribbon to my chest.  He effused, “My granddaughter, the writer.  You’re going to win a Pulitzer Prize when you grow up.”
     His skin was now wax and the lines were near flat.  I made the sign of the cross and prayed.  It was seven o’clock in the evening.  A priest came in to administer the last rites.  I reeled in shock and staggered out of the room. 
     That’s when Nonna fainted.  My father had come, and took her in his arms.  She had lost weight, and was a skeleton of her former, mamma mia self.  Aunt Rose, my mother’s sister, huddled with us in the waiting room.  I slumped into a chair and closed my eyes because I hadn’t slept in weeks.
     Tonight I was losing my anchor, the one person in my life who loved me without limits, who didn’t press on me his expectations of how I should act and look.
     Ever since I was able to drive, I’d zip over to my grandparents’ house in Old Mill Basin, Brooklyn to escape Mom’s carping about something I did or failed to do.  She often had fights with Dad about money, or about one of her friends who flirted with him, and about my father’s garden center and landscape business.
     I’d arrive with a backpack where I’d tucked a journal, tee shirt and pajama pants, staying for the weekend and wanting them to let me live there forever.  Nonna would cook her Friday night pizza, which had sustained her children and grandchildren all the years of our lives. 
     “Mangia, mangia,” Grandpa urged, after we blessed the food and said a prayer.  He’d ask how I was doing, interested in every facet of my life, even my kooky job as a product demonstrator in supermarkets.  After dinner, he’d give me the bigger piece of an orange-flavored chocolate bar he unwrapped from blue foil when Nonna was busy cleaning up.  It was like a big secret.
     When he went back in the living room to watch TV, Nonna reached for her wallet and pulled out a ten.  “Don’t tell him I gave you this,” she said, pushing the bill into my hand and firmly squeezing my palm.         
     When Nonna went upstairs at eight o’clock to change into her robe, Grandpa came into the kitchen where I wrote in my journal.
     “Here’s a little something.”
     “No, no,” I pushed.
     “That’s okay, take.” Grandpa waved the twenty towards me. “Don’t tell your grandmother.”
     “Thanks.” I slipped it into my pocket.
     “I know the Old Bones only gives you a ten.”
     Pleased with himself, he went upstairs to get ready for bed, brushing his teeth, what was left of them.
     Staying up late, I listened to an obscure radio station on their transistor, writing down how I felt, and what was going on, documenting my life in the journal.  My grandparents’ marriage had outlived many boxes of pasta, was stronger than the balsamic vinegar though acerbic at times, yet the love always flowed like the color of Sangiovese wine, deeper and deeper over the years, something that approached the unconditional love that God asked of us, and so few deliver.
     Reluctantly, Mom and I rose from the waiting area.  We got in the elevator holding each other tight.  Outside it was a night without stars.