IN HONOR OF GRANDPARENTS’ DAY 2014 My Grandmother Asunta Ferini came to the United States with her parents and brother when she was 3 years old. In Italy they were essentially sharecroppers and lived in a 2 room house – they cooked, ate, slept on the upper room, and the animals were in the lower room. They came to America for the dream of land/home ownership. They achieved that dream with a few acres of land in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. When Grandma started Catholic school, the nuns told her she needed to learn to speak English without and accent and she needed an American name – so they called her Susie Ferry. With her flaming red hair and freckles and her new name, many people thought she was Irish. She loved school, but family resources only allowed her to attend through 8th grade and then she had to go to work. She did all sorts of odd jobs and eventually worked at Woolworths as a cashier. Many times as a child I heard her tell the story of how she was promoted to shift supervisor because her till always balanced out to the penny. It was a great source of pride for her (and for me) to know that she was the first female in her store to hold this honor. At 17 Grandma met Quinto Benedetti who was 10 years her senior. When they married she quit working at the store. They had 5 children together (my dad was #4) and Susie spent her days growing an enormous garden, making her famous spaghetti, and teaching her kids how to work hard and be respectful. Because her husband was older and he passed away at a relatively young age, my Grandmother spent approximately 3 decades as a widow. While her health permitted, she stayed quite active in some senior social groups and went on cruises and other trips. Even though she was living in Columbus at the time she also stayed connected with her cousins and friends from Mt. Vernon. She was in her 70’s when I was born. During my Kindergarten year, my parent left the Catholic Church and our family became deeply immersed in a fundamentalist religious community that taught – among other things - that girls should be quiet and meek. This was a great source of struggle and challenge for me as anyone who knows me at all can tell you. So often I felt like a failure before God because I could not seem to work up an attitude of “sweetness.” I tried, I really did, and let me tell you, there is pretty much no emotion more depressing for a teenage girl than the combined, twisted feeling of being both fake AND a failure at it. Nearly every Saturday afternoon after church we would drive over to the “Home for the Aged” where Grandma lived (there was wrath to pay if you dared refer to it as a nursing home). By then she was nearly blind. I would sit on the footstool by her chair and listen while she talked with my parents. At the end of the visit she would ask me a few questions about school, and then remind me that my older cousins were smart girls worked hard and had gone to college and I should work hard and do the same. During these impressionable years when I was constantly being admonished to “be more sweet” Grandma B regularly whispered in my ear in a thousand different ways that a woman better be smart and tough too, and figure out how to make life work her way. And she didn’t just talk it – she lived it. When she wasn’t resting in her room, Grandma was out and about the facility, tending the little plot of land she had convinced the Administration to let her have for a garden, occasionally picking up a broom to help sweep the sidewalk, and always taking an interest in others and dispensing advice to help them be more effective/successful. When I got older, I would sometimes take the bus across town to visit her on my own. She would tell me stories of her childhood. Sometimes she talked about regrets she had, and she would always conclude those stories with a sigh and say, “You just never know about life, Peggy. You just never know.” But she didn’t just reminisce. She was also conversant on current events and often had a joke to tell. She told me that when she was in her room by herself she kept the tv or radio on so she could be knowledgeable about the world. She said, “Too many people who live here complain about their health. I appreciate when people visit me so I have a responsibility to have something interesting to talk about when they come.” Also, she had learned 3 languages in her lifetime – Italian, English and Spanish, and she demanded that I practice my high school Spanish with her because she wanted to keep her skills up. In this way, one of the greatest gifts Grandma B gave me was that she made aging seem interesting, normal, and even powerful. My senior year of college I took David home to meet her. I knew she wanted me to marry an Italian, but I had fallen in love with man with a Swedish/English heritage. At just over 4” tall she was so tiny, yet she reached up and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him close, inspected his face as closely as her eyes would allow and said, “You LOOK Italian!” And that was that. David quickly became one of her favorite people. When we married and moved up to Minnesota and I would call her, she would talk to me briefly and then say, “Put David on the phone!” She loved to regale him with the latest joke or pun she heard and hear him laugh. Grandma B passed away a few years before Joy was born. I think I have been a better woman, and a better mother to my daughter, because of the things my she taught me. I know she would have LOVED Joy and just reveled at how smart and tough (and so very kind) she is. And I can only imagine how much fun it would have been to see Joy sitting on the footstool by her chair, hearing Grandma challenge her to practice her high school Spanish, and regaling her with the latest pun she heard! So this Grandparents’ Day, thank you Grandma B for teaching me to be tough, smart, a little more fearless!
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 19:29:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015