Italian Anglais

"Will you be civil!" --Nicholas Marinelli, Sr.

Fathers and daughters invariably disappoint each other. As an undergraduate, I had to do some forging on ahead with vocational services when padre could no longer afford the tuition. I doubt yanking vocational services along as I did in the mid-eighties would be possible today as it was then. My education was expensive, as my old age will be even more so. I told myself not to get my hopes up when I heard "looking for a new place," before my aging parent's cell phone went dead, but leaden despondency vanished.

My father hates me. You may say I exaggerate, but he attempted abandonment of all his children, even his dead son, when my mother divorced him; he hates the fact that I am a cripple, hates the fact that I am slovenly via biological inclination; I hate my father, but always loved his elegance, sense of style, his drive for material acumen.

I have been trying to make him proud of me for 50 years, and my grief for my sociopathic ghost of a brother is mainly through his eyes. He loved little Nicky, loved Italy. Gandolfini's sudden death was a story in my head I am writing in irony before it became an obituary, much like Pacino's ...And Justice For All was an episodic soap opera in the foment of his Godfather arc. The former film is not a Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece, but getting past the fact that Justice is a situational argument about jurisprudence, it is actually a very dark rendition about the dirt that goes on in the criminal courts, and how the law grinds people with a civic sense of decency into a pulp, and favors sadists, which John Forsythe's one dimensional demeanor adapts to conveniently, in this instance.

It was some years ago now. Padre may have been 69 or 71, still handsome. I was lowered on the hydraulic Paratransit lift, growling about the driver's incompetence, before my sister and I ruptured into civil war, appearing for my usual compulsory holiday visit, and I was admonished. All whites are racists, but they hide it behind whatever vinaigrette you'd like me to list: veneer, condescension, affluence, ripping off (immersion in) black culture, belief that Barack Obama is a demi-god, or one of my favorites, paternalism toward the Sudanese in relation to the eradication of the guinea worm.