I am a, soon to be, 54 year old mother of 4 grown children. No, that can't be right, can it? Sigh. It always surprises me when I think in these terms, but that is how I am recognized. I am the lady who volunteers at the local elementary school library, I am Joe, Marilyn, Jackie's, Mike's...Mom. I'm that girl who plays violin. I'm the one who sings in that jazz quartet or community choir. I am Jim's wife.
I am all of these and more. But who do I think I am? Now that's a tough question. My earliest memory of thinking of myself, was as a musician. I always imagined I'd grow up to be a famous singer. I sang along with everything I heard on the radio. I harmonized everything, all the time.
One year my good friends and I attended a day camp at Jefferson Park in Chicago. The counselors there taught us some spirituals with harmonies. My friend, Linda and I wowed the kids on the play ground with our rendition that year at school. They would request us in class all the time, that year. It was probably my first memory of realizing how much I loved performing.
I grew up in a Roman Catholic, Italian American household. Both of my parents grew up in Italy, although my father was born in Rhode Island. He came to America to escape Mussolini's tyranny and joined the American Army. He lied and told them he had worked in a hospital in Italy and served as a medic in a hospital in London during the war.
My mother's father abandoned her family in the Tuscany region of Italy when my mother was about 3 years old. She had an older brother and younger sister. It was up to her, her brother and her mother to run their farm so that they wouldn't starve. Her father rarely sent them money and they worked hard to scratch a living. Her brother took extra jobs to raise enough money to get himself to America and then worked even harder once he got here to send enough money to bring his sisters and his mother here. My mother was 17 when she arrived in New York and hadn't seen her father since she was 3.
I loved listening to my mother's stories of her hard, hard life in Italy, because she always had a way of making it sound like an adventure and she always ended each story with, "but we were happy.". I am sure I will have more blogs about my mother's stories as they are a part of who I am too.
My parents' were pretty old when my sister was born, around 31 and 32, in 1951, but by the time I came on the scene, in 1957, they were nearly ancient, at that time, for having their second child. I remember my father constantly telling me to shut up, in Italian and always asking me to be more like my sister. I think he meant he wanted me to act 6 years older than I was. If you have siblings, I'm sure that you are nothing like any of them and this was certainly true of my sister and me. Since Dorothy was older than me, I idolized her anyway, so it was a double whammy to have my father constantly reminding me that I fell quite short of the mark all the time.
When I was around 9 years old I begged my parents to play an instrument. I wanted to play piano, but my father wouldn't spring for a piano. I was willing to settle for the violin, which my father could rent for me from the music school where I was going to go for lessons. I think I wanted to play an instrument, because the boy next door played the piano and the violin. Yeah, I had a crush on him until high school.
The Berning School of Music was located on the Northeast corner of Milwaukee and Lawrence Avenues on the second floor of the building on that corner. I remember, vividly, walking excitedly with my mother up Lawrence Avenue on the way to my first lesson, where I would receive my rental violin. As we approached and came around the corner up to Milwaukee, it became evident that something terrible had happened. The Berning School of Music had had a fire the night before and my violin was burned in the fire. I would not be getting a violin that day, or a lesson.
To say I was crushed is putting it mildly. I was beside myself with worry that my father would use this as an excuse to nix the whole idea of my playing violin. My father would do anything to save a buck and I'm sure he felt that this would be a huge waste of money and that I would give up the violin not too long after I began. What he didn't know is that I had a burning desire for music. It really is a defining point for me and is part of the essence of who I am.
I fought tooth and nail and I'm sure I was unrelenting. The boy next door took lessons from an old nun at St. Constance, where he went to school. I went to St. Robert Bellarmine school. It was odd that our neighborhood had two Catholic churches. So Sr. Amadea, of St Constance Catholic Elementary School, agreed to take me on for lessons and rent us an instrument. I took lessons from her for about three years and learned a lot from her. She became ill and had to leave the school.
My father, trying to save a dime again, found a piano teacher at a local music school who agreed to give me lessons. I believe I was in my last year of grammar school at that time and took lessons for roughly a year from him. The best thing he taught me was the cycle of fifths, which gives you the basis for key signatures. It was probably the only thing I ever learned from a violin teacher about music theory.
So that is a little of my early history. Ok, maybe it's a lot! Still it answers some of the question of who I am.
This is great, Carol! Keep writing!
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