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Maria Mazziotti Gillan Page 2
All
His Life My Father Worked in Factories
Or
mills as we called them, back when Paterson
was the
silk capital of the USA and was known as Silk City.
When my
father was thirty he had a large tumor on his spine,
and
after the doctors at St. Joseph’s removed it
he
spent three months in the hospital and then a year
at
home. He couldn’t work and wouldn’t let my mother apply
for
welfare so we lived for a year on $300, and while $300
in 1943
was a lot more than it is now, it still wasn’t enough
for a
family of five to live on. We ate spaghetti and farina
and my
mother’s homemade bread every day. When my mother
was
dying, she worried that the year without money –
when
she couldn’t give my sister five cents to buy milk in
school –
was why
my sister got rheumatoid arthritis at thirty, a disease
that
progressed, eventually invading her lungs and eyes.
After
the surgery my father had a limp that became gradually
worse
as he grew older. He was no longer strong enough
to lift
heavy rolls of silk, so he got a job as a janitor
in
Central High School and when that became too much
for
him, he took a job as a person who watched the pressure
gauges
on steam boilers to make sure they didn’t explode.
All his
life, my father walked, dragging that dead leg behind
him.
All his
life, he worked menial jobs, though he did income taxes
each
year for half the Italians in Riverside by reading
the two
hundred page income tax book, and he could add,
multiply and divide in his head faster than an adding
machine.
He was
fascinated by politics and read news magazines
and
newspapers, and knew the details of world crises and
war.
When I
was a girl, I worked in factories during the summers
and I
moaned and complained about how boring it was,
how
dusty and tiring, how I’d shoot myself if I had to do
this job
for one
more day, and I think of my father with his sharp
intelligence,
forced
each day for fifty years to work eight hours a day at
jobs
so
repetitive they would have bored a mouse, and the way
he
never complained, never said I can’t do this anymore,
My
Brother Stands in the Snow,
1947, Paterson, NJ
Fifty
years later, my brother is still my baby brother.
I
imagine him in his woolen winter coat, tan-colored,
that
with his sallow face made him look dead,
and his
woolen hat that matched the coat. It had ear
flaps
that snapped under his chin. He is about four
and
looks wide-eyed and sweet and even then,
self-contained. I can see him standing in the snow.
It is
1947, that huge snowstorm where the snow is piled
almost
to my chest. Even fifty years later, my brother
who has
now been a doctor for more than thirty years,
is
still my baby brother. Though he is my doctor, though
I
admire
and love him, though his hair has turned gray,
I can
hear my mother’s voice telling me to watch out
for
him, as my sister watched out for me,
so that
even today, I can’t help worrying about him,
can’t
help reaching up to smooth down his thinning gray
hai
when it is rumpled and fly-away, as though he were
still
that
little boy whose hair I combed so carefully, wetting
the
comb first and parting the hair as my mother taught me
so he’d
look good when people saw him on the street
where I
dragged him behind me, held his hand
and
scolded him as we walked.
© Copyright, 2013,
Maria
Mazziotti Gillan. |