TheBanyanTree: Dominick

[LLDeMerle]

The kids' other grandpa died Saturday.  Not unexpected, he was 92 and had
fallen and broken his hip, last week.  The ex is all friendly and almost
cheerful, for Pete's sake, but then he has always said that his life got a
lot easier when his mother died and it would get even easier when his father
died.  True, old Dominick wasn't an easy guy, once you got to know him.  He
was tough on me, but when the ex's brother got married, his wife is so mean,
she made me look like a saint (which I *am*, of course,) so then he liked me
again.  Also, I'd produced a granddaughter, which put me on the A-list.
He'd always wanted a daughter, he said. A granddaughter was close enough.

It's not about Dominick being difficult which has the ex feels light as a
feather.  Not entirely.  It's about all sorts of dirt and debris knocking
around the inside of his psyche that I don't care to entertain now that I
have escaped the black hole of despair that *is,* in fact, his psyche.  He
inherited his father's social face...charming guy, but, once the party is
over.  It's really *over,* especially for the clean-up crew.

Dominick had been anxiously awaiting death a long time.  Twenty years ago,
he was ready to go and then when my mother died, he kept saying what a
terrible thing it was to grow old.  I'm getting that, now, though, at the
time it irked me to no end and I'd respond, "Better to grow old than to be
cut down in your prime, leaving your family shattered."  He politely agreed,
but couldn't relate to that, much, with 2 cold fishes for sons. 

Dominick had a hard life.  His father left his wife and children behind in
Palermo, Sicily, and came to build the railroads.  When they got into the
Catskills, he had enough money to buy a farm and send for the family.  A
second set of children was born, eventually totaling 9 or 10.  One of the
later children was injured during birth and died.  Nona went into a terrible
depression, which lasted years.  The house caught on fire when Dominick was
about 5.  He was trapped upstairs and tried to tie the doorknob to furniture
to keep the fire out of the room.  

Another time, when playing, a younger brother, 3 years old, fell out of the
upstairs window to the ground.  Tragically, he died.  The undertaker came to
the house and prepared the body right there, giving Dominick and his
brother, Calagio, a bucket full of their brother's insides and instructed
them to bury it in the yard.  Not long after, Nona gave birth again, and
this time, there were complications and she was in the hospital   Dominick
told of  how their mother asked for the children, so his father hitched the
horses up.  Dominick remembers the bonnet his young sister wore that day.
How she looked in it and what color it was.  The children made it in time to
say good-bye.  Dominick was only 7 and had already endured more sorrow than
I can imagine.  I think he stopped at 7.  Emotionally, anyway.  The subject
of his mother could not come up without him breaking down.  Still, life goes
on and even if you are stuck on 7, it doesn't stop your father from going
down to the docks at New York to bring home a new farm hand in the way of an
immigrant stepmother.  He bragged that she was ugly, but, boy could she
work.  It doesn't stop the Great Depression.  It sure doesn't stop World War
II.

Dominick tried farming on his own, but the farming life, by nature, requires
lots of hands, more than 2.  He lost his farm sometime around the depression
and worked for other farmers, sleeping in barns.  World War II broke out and
he joined up.  He was a cook for his company.  His war stories all ended the
same:  "I was afraid."    

Dominick came home and worked for the railroad.  His family and the family
of a young woman in Amsterdam, NY, put them together and they married in the
early 1950's.  Within a year, a son was born.  Four years later, a second
son.  They left the city for a little town, nearby, and stayed there.

Lillian went to school with Kirk Douglas.  I saw where he signed her
yearbook.  His name was Isadore Dempsey, then.  Son of the Jewish ragman who
lived at the bottom of the hill.  Nice looking young man.  Lillian played
the violin.  She endured the disrespect of her husband and sons. She died of
cancer in 1981.  Since then, Dominick talked about death.  The kids found
her handbag next to his bed, full of their wedding pictures.

The end of Dominick's long, sad, disappointing and torturous life on earth
has come.  May he finally know joy.



     LL