CHAPTER I Post # 4

I know now that our family did not have a monopoly on familiar dysfunction. But we wore it on our sleeves as a badge of honor. That’s probably Italian. My father was first generation Italian American. Both my paternal grandparents, Grandpa Francisco or “Cice”and Nona Teresa were born in Castel Morone, a village a few miles outside of Caserta in the hard mountains above Naples. It was from Castel Morrone that the father of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood art movement, emigrated to England. My grandmother was a Rossetti. The Italian ran strong in my father though I found later it ran stronger in me.
Love was never absent in our family, though at times it was well disguised. My father instilled a strong sense of family, expounding ‘the Family this, and the Family that.’ “Never repeat what is discussed here to anyone,” he’d say. What goes on in the Family stays there and in the end it is always the family you can rely upon. Friends, lovers and even husbands and wives come and go -- the Family remains. Dad showed his love by being a good provider. We never wanted for anything. Mom gave us children a mother’s unconditional love for as long as she could. Then she went away promising to return but she never did. I had a hard time forgiving her for it. But that was my story. The truth, I’m told, lies elsewhere.
My father believed in strict division of labor. The women had their chores and the men theirs. Growing up, I accompanied him every weekend to work on his real estate projects. These were mostly three and five family apartment buildings that he renovated, rented for a number of years then sold at a profit. He had a good eye for real estate instilled, he said, by my grandmother Teresa. I painted apartments, cleaned out basements, and learned to lay tile, repair plumbing, sheetrock and do minor electric work. I also raked dried condom-filled sludge from acre-sized septic filter beds of a forty-one unit complex Dad owned in Sagamore, Massachusetts -- a job none of the workers wanted. At home, except for taking out the trash, I was not required to do any house work. That was the realm of my two younger sisters, Carol Jean and Susan. Outside work was delegated to me; I mowed the lawn and racked the leaves, washed the cars and painted the house every five years.
Grandmother Teresa, or Nona died when I was seven. She was a shrewd woman, owned real estate and ruled her family with an iron hand. In a weak moment my father said, she had nagged my grandfather Francisco to death after he had been injured in an accident that left him a partial invalid and unable to work.
Grandpa Francisco played the guitar. He was also the president of the Lincoln Credit Union that served as a bank for the local Italian community,
A hard woman or not, death had marred Nona Teresa. Early in her marriage she had returned to Italy with her youngest child, a year old daughter who like her had blond hair and sky blue eyes. It was winter and cold in the Appennini Mountains that surrounded Castel Morone. The oversized floor-level fireplace that kept the house warm was blazing with wood gathered that afternoon in the fields and forests that surrounded the town. Nona Teresa and her baby slept on the floor near the hearth to keep warm. During the night the baby rolled over into the fire and Nona Teresa watched her baby burn alive. Her next child was a boy she named Nicolas, after another child that had died. Still mourning her lost daughter she dressed him in girls’ clothing and kept his hair in long curls until he was twelve. Nick was her favorite.
Nona Teresa was fickle and would change her will as one of her children would fall into or out of favor. Perhaps hurt by the injustice of a parent playing favorites, my father never openly said any of his children were his preferred. We were treated equally. Of course I was the male and had close proximity to him, a wide and wildly swung two edged sword. In the end any inheritance was equally divided between the children as per his often stated instructions. My father was a man of his word. If you got it in writing.

Chapter 1 Post # 3

Braintree might be an odd name for a town with few distinguishing characteristics. In fact Braintree was bland. Two presidents were born there, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams – since we started numbering presidents, that would be number two and number six. Even that fleeting fame was taken from it when North Braintree ceded and became Quincy. Years later in a thirty-foot dugout canoe shooting rapids on the Caqueta River through guerilla controlled territory in Colombia, three American friends and I spotted a grove of trees on the far bank with branches in the form of brains. My gringo companions finally seeing the proverbial light said “Ah Braintrees.” I also lived part time in a Cape Cod village curiously called Buzzards Bay, named by the first European explorers not for the corpse eating turkey vultures but the hordes of ospreys that crammed the skies and fed on the fished filled bay. Fish Hawks are called buzzards in parts of Europe. Though for twenty-three years I spent most of my summers on Buzzards Bay it was not until 1986 standing on the deck of my cottage overlooking the Chesapeake Bay to the south that I spotted my first osprey. The Buzzards Bay ospreys and the abundance of fish that had given Cape Cod its name had vanished years before through over fishing and pollution. Both Braintree and Buzzards Bay are in Massachusetts, itself peculiar since I spent a good part of my life leaving the Bay State.

If I had to explain my life in a literary way, I’d say it’s cross of Robert Frost’s A Road Less Traveled and Miquel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. Like Frost, I too have taken the road less traveled and it has cost me. I have also, like Quixote, charged against the improbable if not the impossible. It too has taken a toll.
It was love that saved me.

THE WOODS BEHIND MY HOUSE Chapter 1 Post # 2

It was the woods, the woods behind my house, that were to shape a good part of my life. At least they shaped my love of nature and things natural. They were never the Dylan-esque ‘haunting frightening trees’ where lost children fell victim to flesh-eating witches. Those woods would come later. My woods were, in essence, a large over grown garden where the only boogie was poison ivy.
If I’d had my way I’d never leave the woods. Entire days were spent exploring its wonders until either hunger, my favorite TV show or winter cold to finally coached me home.
“Where have you been?” my mother asked in her courtly southern accent. “I’ve been calling you all afternoon.”
My standard answer, “I was in the woods.”
“Well don’t go so far the next time. You’ll get lost.”
While my mother’s wise advice went unheeded, I did enjoy sharing my discoveries with her. From fields, streams and ponds, I’d proudly bring my mother back captured trophies; frogs, turtles, bird eggs and once a live four foot brown rat snake I’d managed to snatch while it was sunning itself on a stone wall. Being a country girl she copped well with my prizes.
“That’s nice, Bobby, now take back it outside.”
Trouncing through the forests of backyard Braintree or the Orinoco River Basin, I never felt lost. Surrounded by trees and their ancillary animals, I was immersed in the comfort and protection of their cool dank darkness. The woods were my womb. There I could give birth to my imagination, feel alive and reborn. The woods, I learned, would never hurt me. Most of all, the woods were where I could go to be alone, free from the hubbub of humanity. I discovered very early on that I did not like people.

THE WOODS BEHIND MY HOUSE

In a place called Braintree, not far from Boston, in a county whose name I can’t remember, I grew up believing in gods. Don’t misunderstand, every Sunday I went to the nine o’clock Mass and Sunday school right after. I memorized the catechism and tried, with some success, to sit quietly enough to avoid the red-knuckling rulers the black robed nuns carried like cattle prodders. Part of my spiritual dichotomy may have arisen from my parents; one was Roman Catholic and the other Lutheran, a union considered a mixed marriage in those days. As a firm believer in the First Commandment, I held none of the other gods before God. Yet, at an early age I was aware that an impressive array of deities, spirits and imps followed close on my heals creating a barnyard of wonder and havoc in their wake.
For a young boy, growing up in the early 1950s, sub-urban Braintree was Paradise. Or so it seems through my airbrushed eyes a lengthy half century later. We were a solidly middle class family. Our home was a white, three bedroom expandable Cape Cod with black shutters, two dormers, a one car garage and an unfinished basement. There was even a white picket fence. We lived on Liberty Street, a farm-to-market road that meandered in a lazy north south direction across brooks and dales from Weymouth Landing to South Braintree. The two lane causally paved road had no markings and was lined by a hodgepodge of small ranch and Cape houses with neat yards that stretched to the woods behind them. Liberty Street was a safe place, a healthy place, a place returning World War II veterans and their brides could try and make up for lost time. It was a good place to grow up young.

MOSTLY WHAT I LIKE

MOSTLY WHAT I LIKE is a way to live.

I'm back from 2 weeks in Colombia, trecking through the southern and northern ends of the Sierra de la Macarena and Cano (one day I'll learn to write the n ~ together) Cristales or the Crystal River called the river of seven colores or the most beautiful river in the world.

The expedition was made up of Oliver L. (OL), Gustavo V. (GV) and yours truly. From Bogota we drove to Villavicencio, Meta, then flew to the town of La Macarena. There was heavy military presence in the town and a couple of Hercules aircraft were parked at the end of the air strip. After checking into our clean, comfortable hotel we took a 30 foot dugout canoe powered by a hundred horse outboard and motored up the brown Guayabero River to a rocky landing area for the bouncy jeep ride and walk to the Crystal River. Along the road we passed by four cement bridge structures that were built by the FARC guerillas as part of a road they were constructing in the middle of the National Park.

The river was clear but low and the mosses were only red and purple. At their height they bloom in seven different colores. Oliver took hundreds of photos underwater of the fish and may have discovered a new fish species.

The diving was superb, the water clear and the day hot and sun drenched, fantastic for underwater photos.

We spent a week in the Llanos grasslands around San Juan de Arama and the jungle area of the Sierra de la Macarena.

I have gotten a lot of writing done on WALKING TO CRYSTAL RIVER: A Pilgrimage To The Most Beautiful River In The World.

A brief but life changing trip.