Australian Adventures Con't - Nov 27&28

“All Consuming Fire Burn in Me”
Everyone likes to be challenged – tonight Uncle Nick, Aunt Kathy and Nathan (7) came over to join Lydia, Pop and I for dinner. It was a rare instance when we didn’t have mom here – the one person who links us all. Nick got hung up on the card game Freecell on the computer and Nathan was just loving playing Skipbo with Lydia and I – both of which were challenging for their players. I started thinking about the things that challenge me and how I thrive on conquering something as small as a game or as large as a relationship.

I feel empowered with the idea of conquering something that might be “too hard.” But sometimes, like yesterday, I fall into succumbing to the obstacles and struggling through it, rather than fighting. Yesterday I was SICK! I drank two bottles of water, went through an entire box of tissues, and was rotating through three different medicines. After watching one whole DVD of Gidget [an old 1960s sitcom with Sally Field] and taking a nap, I woke up feeling worse than when I started the day: unable to speak, a cough that shook my ribs, and congestion that made my nose feel like the Eisenhower tunnel. I even entertained the idea of calling a priest and asking for my final absolution!

“My faith is like shifting sand, so I stand on grace.”
It wasn’t until this morning in the shower, when I felt like a new person because I could breathe, that I thought about how I could have conquered my cold rather than submit myself to the feelings of desperation. In hindsight, it was nothing more than a nasty bit of the flu, but in the thick of it I couldn’t see the forest from the trees, or should I say the tissue from the snot!

It seems that far too often I loose hope at the sight of the trees. I forget about the health at the end of the sick; I forget about the joy at the end of the sadness; I forget about the new beginning at the end of an end; the life at the end of death; the glory at the end of the cross.

Not to mention that sometimes we only learn how to be grateful when something we take for granted is taken away from us – like the ability to breathe with snot! Ok I really mean our health. How often do you say, “I’m so thankful that I’m healthy this morning.” Maybe a great lesson for all of us.

“The altar of God – my joy, my delight and my strength”
Needless to say today was a much better day than yesterday. Besides feeling well enough to actually move from the bed, I got to enjoy an afternoon walk back from the clinic with my mom. She shared with me some of the “secrets” of her childhood. I call them secrets only because my mom rarely shares experiences about her childhood with us. As we are in Australia, in the house she grew up in (from the age of 4-23) and walking down the same streets she walked before she met my father, it seems only appropriate to discuss her coming her age.

Here’s the background: my grandparents were immigrants to Australia from Italy coming across on a ship where their ticket was a loan. They each brought one suitcase over and high hopes for their careers. You see the immigrants where the ones that labored away at factory jobs to build the economy of Australia. They knew not a lick of English and had no intentions of becoming CEOs or shareholders, but only knew the opportunity and pay here was far better than in Italy in their poor village of Toco. This area of Australia has tons of Italians. They might have been like the Mexicans that we see in the US…working their fingers off at any shift they can get just to send some money back home and make a better living for those they love.

“Listen to the prayers of a dying world”
My mom told me how hard my grandfather and grandmother worked – every weekday from 7am until 7pm and a half day on Saturday. They did the grocery shopping for the week on Saturday visiting the deli and the city’s market for fresh fruits and vegetables. Sunday was spent at church and home with the family doing all the house work and getting ready for another week of work. There was no drinking or going to pubs, and no going out to dinner or movies. My mom would come home every afternoon after school, take care of her brother, finish her homework and start dinner for her parents. She didn’t have slumber parties or friends over after school, no trips to the mall or dates on Friday nights.

There was no education for the immigrants – they learned the little English they knew from their children who went to English school, but spoke Italian at home. My mom raved about the sewing that my Nonna (grandmother) could do. She could look at a snag in clothing and figure out what stitch was used and replicate it. My mom loved wearing the dresses and shirts her mother made for her and swears up and down that with a little education Nonna could have been a fashion designer with all of her talent.

My grandmother (Nonna) passed the year before my family moved back to America (1990) – Dominique never got to meet her and quite frankly I don’t know how much Lydia and I really remember about her. But the sweet regard that my mom has for her I know that we would have gotten along with her. I know that Nonna would be proud of the strides that her daughter has made to provide for her three granddaughters.

It’s just strange being in the same house that my mother grew up in and feeling so disconnected from the way life was for her. Every day that passes here I keep looking at my mother, this woman that I have only known to be my mother, and see a new part of her – the years she took care of her younger brother, the times she was smaller and made dinner, the night she brought my dad home to meet her parents for the first time, the day she took a photo with her mom and dad in this living room in her wedding dress.

With the same awe I look at my Pop, a man that I’ve only known by the few words of broken English that he speaks two or three times a year on the phone. He’s a man that had the hope for something better, a man that knew the value of hard work and manual labor, a man that sacrificed for those that he loved, a man that has lived through the life of two generations of his family and the death of so many that were a part of the previous two generations.

When we all reach the end of our life, God will ask us one question: “How much did you love?” I know that both Nonna and Pop loved enough to get to heaven. I hope that I will have enough strength in my life to love like they did so that at the end of my life I will be able to say: “A lot. I loved a lot.”