Taking A Long Road Home

Sample Readings

Chapter 1

Wine-Making in a Dirt Floor Basement

“Life must be lived forwards
but can only be understood backwards.”

—Søren Kierkegaard

Dressed in my salt and pepper, uniform corduroy pants, I came home from third grade at Sacred Heart School in Oakland to witness the inter-family wine-making event. A block away I could see the stained wooden grape boxes from my cousin’s place in the country piled empty along the sidewalk. My heart leapt at the sight. I ran with my book bag swung over my navy cardigan sweater. Sister Claudine would not have approved my hanging around with Italian immigrant forebears sipping last year’s Dago Red from stubby, chiseled glasses in the dirt floor basement of my grandfather’s house. But I was now beyond the border of rules.

The old men were bragging about last year’s vintage as their rubber boots stomped the fresh grapes in large wood tubs. Then they poured the dark brew into a manually operated crusher. The pungent smell is still vivid. The old guys outdid each other with stories in “Genovese” dialect, some from the old country, others from their experiences in America. The place reeked of crushed grapes, the latter used by a few brave souls to produce grappa, a distilled liquor made from remains of the winepress. My uncle John’s amateur radio system strung with thrown-away speakers crisscrossed the basement, supplying background music from hit tunes of the twenties and thirties. But the music was poor competition for the voices urging on the two men who turned the screw of the crusher round and round like figures from a Bruegel painting of harvest time.

No one begins life with a clean slate, a tabula rasa. Only later, of course, did I realize how immersed I was in an ethnic Italian-American culture. Even they were not generic Italians, but paisani, neighbors, from the countryside in Liguria and Tuscany with their specific habits. On that wine-making day, I would never have thought that someday I would come back to this basement to find clues for authentic living. As an eight-year-old altar boy, I assigned religion and God to the Holy Name nuns who taught me. They were mostly Irish women who bespoke discipline in their long black robes and starched white coifs that hid their hair and foreheads. I took it for granted that someone so specially attired was also special to God. For me the spiritual realm was connected with convent corridors that I waxed and the dark high wainscoting topped by somber portraits of mothers superior long gone.

Religion had to do with the priest house and serving Mass in black cassock and white surplice, carrying wine and water for the great ritual, ringing the little bell for the Sanctus and the consecration of the host, as well as the Latin prayers: Introibo adaltare Dei… (I will go in to the altar of God…). It had to do with the sacristy where priests put on liturgical garments. It had to do especially with the confessional with its heavy drapery and sliding door and recitation of sins and dark pews on Saturday afternoon where we said our three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys in reparation for the week’s sins. Such formal confession was a prerequisite for receiving communion on Sunday.

These aspects of a Catholic childhood enfolded the context of my early life, but they were not its deepest roots. That dirt basement and the key players around it on 42 nd Street in Oakland, California really formed me. Gertrude Stein spoke of Oakland as a place with “no there there,” but for me it had great on-the-ground salience or “thereness.” My maternal grandparents lived right across the street from us. Luigia Mangini, my Nonna, an intellectual of sorts, stretched her limited formal education to read the Italian newspaper every day with her Woolworth reading glasses. In her big wedding picture, she was strong and quite good looking, wearing a wool sepia dress sitting next to Nonno, my grandfather, in dark serge with a heavy mustache. Of course, that’s a later judgment of her looks. In childhood I was more interested in her cooking and banter as she held forth on everything. I provided an audience for her. Nonna was opinionated. She hated Roosevelt for opposing Mussolini and getting us into World War II, but she gradually developed more tolerance toward Eisenhower whose name she pronounced “Ou-zenhourah.” At her heavy, wooden kitchen table, where family life took place near a wood-burning stove, I learned by a kind of osmosis that reading was important. Of course, she never lectured on the value of reading. That came indirectly through the feel and smell of pasta dough that she would powder and roll and toss and roll again.

That table was important because there I watched her make from scratch the world’s best ravioli which I looked forward to eating with the abandon of youth. The smell of her mushroom sauce simmering in that small kitchen is still with me. Nonna’s house was also a main comfort zone when the Sturm und Drang of my own home across the street became overwhelming. Nonna went to church, but expressed independent judgment about clerical foibles. She voiced a more benign judgment, for example, of my second grade teacher, Sister Anne Marie, who ran off with a mechanic, a scandal of cosmic proportions in 1938. “The poor thing was unhappy in that dark building,” she would say in Genovese. I remember holding my grandmother’s hand on the way to semi-annual Italian missions (intense preaching events with loud off-key congregational singing of Noi vogliam Dio, ch’è nostro Padre “We want God who is our Father”) at nearby churches. On the way home we would collect mushrooms in empty lots and gather eucalyptus pods whose scent was thought to ward off bedroom varmints. I remember her, pitchfork in hand, turning the soil to plant vegetables. And I see her in a long brown overcoat with fur collar holding a large purse with both hands in front of her. As an altar boy, I saw this classic country immigrant stance replicated many times.

John Mangini, my uncle, who never left home (except for a stint in the army during the “good war”), contributed more to me than I ever realized in youth. In addition to his tinkering with old radio parts and stringing speakers around the property and messing with old cars, he was a professional house painter. He was tall and well built with straight hair that he kept dyed dark all his life. The color depended on which drug store product he was using at the time. Italians have the strangest nicknames. Some people referred to him as John or Gianni, but for the most part, he was “Cooka.” The provenance of that one remains a mystery. But he, too, was a master of nicknames. When I would flee the familial turmoil at home for the saner clime across the street, he would ask me what “ Lucca” or “Il Re diLucca” (the king of Lucca) or “GinoBianchiGino” was up to in the zone of fury. And he had his secret nicknames, known only to his special initiates, such as “Gambing” (“stick legs” with accent on “bing”) for a friend’s wife on the block. Cooka was complex and simple at once. Never an academic performer, he didn’t finish high school. Most everybody liked him, but people would speak to him as though talking to a child or a simpleton with that special inflection in their voices. He was generous to a fault, sending money from his meager resources to questionable religious charities, a habit I could not talk him out of, even in my heady Jesuit days.

Cooka built his own chapel in the chicken house that had been part of our Victory Garden during the war. His shrine consisted of holy pictures, rosaries and other religious memorabilia placed in wooden niches. Cooka had recurrent nervous breakdowns, the biggest happening in 1943 at Camp Carson in Colorado. It eventually got him discharged from the army. I recall the day in 1942 when the family walked him to the nearby Santa Fe station to return to Camp Carson, while Carling, one of the elder wine-makers, was showing him how to crouch behind boulders to avoid bullets. Hardly the remedy for his nervousness.

As a younger man, he was racked with scruples, a condition exacerbated by the sin-guilt mentality he encountered at our parish church. After painting a hall for the Italian Catholic Federation, for example, he would crucify himself with worries about leaving lights on because this might cause a fire. His “Chapel of the Gallinah” (Genoese version of “Chapel of the Chicken House”), as I called it, seemed to serve as his place of worship when he no longer went to Mass. Cooka had an explosive side, ranting on about those sons-of-a-bitch priests and nuns who, he thought, scared him into scruples as a child. Like Dante talking with Virgil, he would assign special torments and places in hell to these religious professionals. Such tirades, often with a touch of humor, usually took place around the old well, dug by my grandfather. We would sit on an equally ancient bench behind the iron pump handle, as we looked out on fava beans, onions, potatoes and apricot trees. Of course, he would recognize one or other kindly priest or nun who attempted to assuage his scruples. Father Varni was okay. In a quiet voice, this priest would say, “John, don’t worry about those things. They’re not sins.” Cooka replaced visits to church with private devotions at some Native American burial grounds along the bay. He felt strongly about honoring these bones. Stray cats became part of his community. He couldn’t deny them the benevolence of food and some shelter, despite the hygienic mess that two dozen felines made.

I was unconsciously learning a lot just being with my uncle. Without explicit language, he was teaching me about the brokenness of life. It was a slow immersion in the limits of our desires and of life in general. I was letting Cooka’s pain and sadness seep into me over time. He was helping me grow into the lacrimae rerum, the tears of existence. I didn’t realize it then, but I, as the son he never had, was receiving Cooka’s tenderness despite his dirty overalls and unshaven face. I was giving him a chance to be fatherly. He developed a term of endearment for me, “Putiti,” when I came into view. He would often turn “Putiti” into a chant of repetition. I don’t know how he conjured up “Putiti,” but it might have been from sounds I made as a toddler. He called my brother, George, “Tofoleti.” This derived from a childhood incident concerning slippers (pantofola).

When he had some money, he would buy me gifts such as my first electric train. This was during the Depression. He first walked me to the nearby hardware store to see if I liked it. He was proud of his work as a house painter and would regale me with stories about the elegant homes he painted in Oakland and Berkeley. He was particularly proud of his abilities with gum finish, a glossy protective coating on woodwork. In the late forties, I accompanied him to Fresno in a Santa Fe (he pronounced “Fee”) steam-driven train to an Italian Catholic Federation meeting where he proudly played the clarinet in a marching band. In his better moods, he would bang out John Philip Souza on his harmonica with great gusto.

Another poignant phase of Cooka’s life was his longing for a woman. Yet his neurotic, depression-oriented personality and his child-like simplicity kept him tied to his parents. His tastes in women were certainly integrated long before that would have been common in a working class area that saw substantial white flight after the World War II. His pin-ups were frequently attractive African American women. When I pointed out his spirit of “integration,” it wasn’t hard to detect his frustrated desire. It may be that out of his pain around scruples and loneliness, he was able to develop an amazing kindness of spirit toward me and my younger brother. Cooka might be fulminating against those no-good Italians who abandoned the neighborhood, his right fist pounding into his left hand, but I could always detect a note of humor in the recitation. He would sentence the runaways to hanging and end the soliloquy with a loud “pong!” as the trap door sprung. However crazy Barba (dialect term for uncle) Gianni might have been, his nephews felt at ease around him, enjoyed being with him, sensing that they had his unconditional acceptance.

Antonio “Tony” Mangini, my maternal grandfather, Nonno, was already an older person when I was a child. He was relatively short and wiry with a handlebar mustache and a mellow personality. Nonno didn’t say much, even in the hurly-burly of wine making, although his English was somewhat better than Nonna’s which was virtually non-existent. She could live surrounded by paisani who spoke either dialect or regular Italian. I remember three tableaus of Nonno. The first is that of my grandfather on an old bicycle (he eventually traded up by using my discarded bike) riding down to Emeryville and returning up 42 nd Street, walking the bike with a large load of long thin oak castoff strips from a lumber mill poised precariously – so it seemed to me – over the handle bars and the seat. The bundle was always tied with old strips of cloth from discarded clothing. He came to the area in 1895 taking a job picking strawberries near Half Moon Bay. Nonno saved money and started a horse-drawn garbage business with a paisano in Oakland in the first decade of the last century. He was tying up the horses one day when he spotted my grandmother in a relative’s yard. Nonna said that he leapt over the fence to present himself. I may have inherited some of his venturing spirit in a number of life decisions.

A second picture of my grandfather is of him sitting in the doorway of his dirt basement, using natural light to guide his hatchet into the kindling wood he had carted home. He seemed to always wear the same outfit: black denim pants hitched up by thick suspenders over a long sleeve, faded blue work shirt. I would appear on Saturdays to beg a dime for a movie. He would sink the hatchet in the chopping block and dig into a front pocket for a deep leather purse with silver fastener. Cooka, who stood over six feet, used to criticize the old man for not digging a deeper opening to the basement, especially after my uncle banged his head on the low top. That gave rise to a commentary on his parents’ frugal ways, “not wanting to spend another God-damn nickel on things.” Yet it was precisely this frugality that allowed Nonno to save enough to build not only his own house, but also our house and a four unit apartment adjacent to it. One had to have “cashy” in those days. It wasn’t easy for an immigrant, who started his own garbage business with horse and wagon, to persuade bankers to make loans. But I could also sympathize with Cooka when I, too, bumped my head on the low opening.

The third tableau of Nonno is especially memorable since I would become a priest and teacher of religion. After retiring at age sixty, he spent the next thirty years as a vegetable grower to our neighborhood. In friends’ empty lots, he cultivated row on row of beans, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, Swiss chard and all manner of other ingredients that went into Mediterranean cooking. Walking to school, I could see him going meticulously from plant to plant holding a long pole with a watering can at the far end. When he could, he pumped the water from a well into a large container and scooped it into manageable buckets that he toted to the end of rows where he had dug irrigation ditches. He sold the produce informally for very little, or he would give it away. During the Depression, his vegetables kept food on our table when my father was out of work for years. Nonno’s last regular job was in a linoleum factory where the fumes made him sick. He retired in 1930, the year of my birth. Getting outdoors was healing for him and it brought him back to his roots in the earth of Fontanarossa, a small mountain town outside of Genoa. I made a pilgrimage there years later to scout out the humble ruins of what was called “u bosco,” the grove, where he was born in 1870, the year of Italy’s unification. I stood by the grave of his own grandfather and looked up toward the terraced produce gardens and fruit trees. Closeness to the soil and its fruitfulness were his real religion.

Of course, as a somewhat pious young boy, I didn’t understand this. One day on my way home from school, a walk of only three blocks, I stopped off at one of his lots. He was taking a break, sitting by the hand pump and chewing some kind of foul-smelling Italian tobacco that produced ghastly brown spit and turned teeth maroon. I asked him why he didn’t go to church, except on Christmas or Easter. I must have been worried about the salvation of his soul, since the nuns and priests insisted on us attending Sunday mass under pain of mortal sin for which we could go to hell forever. And I remembered vividly how Monsignor Sampson at high Mass on Christmas, striding to the communion rail, his huge gray-topped head and deep-set eyes trembling, would berate men like my grandfather standing in their one good suit of clothes at the rear of the church. Why, he thundered, did they come to church so rarely? Didn’t they realize that the Baby Jesus came down for them? How could they reject him by not going to Mass? He insisted that they come every Sunday. Perhaps, I thought, these contadini with limited education just didn’t understand the Monsignor’s English with an Irish brogue. Back at the lot, Nonno spat, chuckled and looked up at me. “Jewjing,” (that’s how he pronounced “ Eugene”), he said, “sono cattolico e religioso ma non sono fanatico.” (I’m Catholic and religious, but I’m not a fanatic.)

When he said he was a Catholic, he claimed allegiance to his Italian culture, steeped in centuries of religious monuments, rituals and sensibilities. His use of the word “religious” pointed to an honest way of living, an ethical life style, that all religious traditions encourage. Perhaps my father, the notorious Natale Gino Bianchi, summed up this dimension in his own quaint way when I would ask him about confessing his sins to a priest. He would pause with a look of amazement on his pinkish, round face. Why did he need to go to confession? Then he would proclaim his oft repeated response: “I haven’t killed anybody. I haven’t robbed anyone. I haven’t done anything wrong.” (Of course, he was oblivious of his treatment of our mother.) As far as Nonno and Pa were concerned, they were living decent, ethical lives and saw no need to follow the confessional habits of women and children. If the latter wanted to recite peccadillos through the sliding door of the confessional, it was just the way of priest-ridden women and the kids they coerced into the discipline. If the practice kept wives in good humor and held the children in line, all the better. One could claim that the men were just lazy regarding religious duties. But when they saw themselves as not “fanatics,” they were saying something important. What counted were the hard daily realities of putting bread on the table and treating others decently in the process. It was the gritty theology of working class Italian men transferred to the new world. Involving themselves in many church rituals seemed fanatical. If God were to be found, it would have to be in the daily rounds.

Freudians sometimes refer to the interactions of parents and children as the family romance, surely an ironic term given the interplay between our common idea of romance and the dramatics of real families. And Tolstoy, hardly a paragon of familial success, said that all good families are good in the same way, while bad family relationships are bad in their own peculiar modes. As I think about the house at no. 933, 42 nd Street, I find both Freud and Tolstoy pertinent. The Bianchi household evidenced no perceptible romance between husband and wife, and it was a “bad” marital environment in its own peculiar ways. I place “bad” in quotes because a relationship between father, mother and two sons over decades is too complex to be characterized as simply bad. We have to look at positive aspects, too. But on the whole, our family interactions would never qualify for a Dr. Phil manual of the successful unit.

Yet out of this textbook case of wrong moves came two reasonably healthy sons, each carrying his own wounds from childhood in different ways. Without trying to answer the underlying problem of genetics and environment, we can agree on the mutual influence of nature and nurture. Even the experts haven’t figured out the intricacies of this interplay. Perhaps the best way to get a fix on my family milieu is to look at the older actors first and then the responses of my brother and me.

Natale Gino Bianchi, after forty-four months (that’s how he always started when telling war stories following ample wine and food) in the Italian field artillery during World War I, migrated by rapid stages to Oakland. In the retreat from Caporetto, made famous for English readers by Hemingway in A Farewell To Arms, my father said that he rode two horses to death trying to escape. He would point to a scar on his forehead where a bullet grazed him while he was sleeping against a tree. Like other immigrants, he had family relations in the Bay Area, mainly his older sister, Cesira. Gino was a terror to live with….not all the time, but most of the time. He was built like a small silo with a round face and ruddy complexion. When I later met his brother, Giorgio, in Italy, I recognized the body type.

My brother and I inherited the lankier physical shape of my mother’s family, although George’s disposition was closer to Gino’s. “You’re just like your father,” Ma used to say to George when he displeased her. It’s interesting how good and bad roles, repeatedly prescribed by parents, become durable markers of personality. We tend to live up to these given roles. Even later when George became a lawyer and president of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, my mother could not give up the habit of comparing her sons negatively to the good boys in the neighborhood. She was very short on any compliments to us, except when we were “very, very good.” She might say this only when we conformed to the ways of those she esteemed as paragons of goodness. In my mother’s convoluted mind, such negative sketching was a kind of humility, lest in the classical Greek sense, the gods strike us down for hubris. But it was also an extension of her own need to be a victim. Victims are not supposed to win or boast about winning.

Life with Gino in a frame, four room house, was frequently nerve-racking and sometimes hellish. He was a bundle of easily ignited fury. In later years, George and I engaged in what we called “shrinkology,” speculating about “the citizen’s” (George’s nickname for Gino who proudly became a naturalized U.S. citizen) early formation in the rural village of Tofori outside of Lucca. Did his over-burdened (eleven children) mother have no time for him in the dawn to dusk work routine of tenant farmers? Did the long stint in World War I brutalize him? Did he just learn among peers that straightforward bullying worked? There was nothing indirect or passive-aggressive about Gino. He was pure in-your-face aggression. He didn’t sulk for hours or days building up a temper tantrum. Provocations brought immediate responses. At least we didn’t have to hold our breath in anticipation. I feared him in his bad moods, but also saw him as a pillar of security. He made a living for us and would defend us when necessary. When a grammar school boy and his brother jumped me on the way home from school, Gino lost no time knocking on that family’s door with tough talk.

The chief catalyst for his explosions around dinner time (and we always ate well, thanks in part to Nonno’s vegetable gardens) was the volatile mixture of my mother’s highly-developed victimhood and Gino’s well-honed talent for victimizing. I remember so many episodes in which subtle and overt exchanges lit the fuse. He would come home from work as a welder in federal navy yards carrying his black metal lunch pail. After washing his face, he would emerge into the kitchen area. The radio on top of the refrigerator declared the nightly news. Gino was a news junkie, something I carried on. My mother, Katie or “ Chieti” in more ethnic circles, had prepared dinner and was ironing clothes on a pull-down ironing board. I was seated at the swirled green Formica table with silver, pipe-like legs, an art deco standard of the thirties and forties. I was very hungry after playing in the school yard, and the smell of an Italian fish or meat stew was killing me. But I could sense a major blow-up about to happen.