A Senior's Day

For those who think Senior citizens have nothing to do all day, below find a guest post from my brother Joe about a typical day. Joe is 81 and a retired NYPD sergeant. After his wife Anita died almost 11 years ago, Joe found a companion in Norma. In the process he adopted her family, or they adopted him. Bri and Matthias are Norma's great grandchildren who are both doing well at Joe's high school alma mater, Msgr. McClancy in Queens. I retain Joe's unique spelling and grammar.

 Here is a run down of my day’s activities.

I start off the day by checking my iPad, first for my sleep apena results. Note today’s reading 0.9 great. Next I have some oj and cherios with raspberries and blackberries as blueberries are weigh too high. They have a new gimmick as they pack the blue berries in a larger container but it’s really the same 1 pint. At $5.99, come on, man.

Next I have a teleconference with my sleep apena Dr., the modern wonder as you don’t have to go to the office and wait. She goes over my results with me and says the machine and me are working very well. I ask her to go over the setting on the machine as I had to adjust the humidity, since it seemed I was getting water boarded. You're doing great she says see you in 6 months. Pay co pay later.

Norma's son John will take us to 14th and 4th ave, union square for her therapy session at 1230. Afterwards I will take Norma to the Polish bakery for coffee and a roll, ok I cheat and have a danish, best prices in Williamsburg.

So far so good, as I await Bri softball game which will be played in Staten Island at 430 pm. I am going to watch it on my iPad as traffic is horrendous at that time.

Suddenly, I get a call from Bris father, Richie. Game canceled, he is not happy. He informs me that Brianna will be going to Cheerleading from 6-8pm and could I pick her up as he is taking Matthias to a college fair. Ok.

I now go early to the school hoping that they finish early. As I have about 3/4 of an hour,I start reading my book on Auschwitz. Note, almost finished the authors 5  years in captivity is over, but not his post traumatic ordeal. It’s now 8 pm and no signs of the kids, I call mom and ask her if she picked up Bri? She says Bri knows you are picking her up. Terror. Finally at 825 pm Bri says she coming out. These cheerleaders practice more than the soft ball team. In January, they will be going to Disney for a tournament. Bri get in and as usual asks if we can get something to eat, as she no longer likes Mcds, we go to her favorite deli by her house for grilled chicken sandwich.

Matthias come out and asks me about Columbia, I wanted to tell him you don’t go there to play baseball but say that’s where my friends nephew went before transferring to Vanderbilt, note he went on to play 10 years in majors. One good thing about it being 9 pm is there is no traffic.

I now go home and Norma says where have you been? I change the channel to see the Phillies lose in the 11th, 2-1. As I am now eating a cup of yogurt, I check my emails,Trump is upset that I don’t respond to him, I never should have bought that hat in 2016. Next I see that the kids mom, Antoinette, has sent me two emails re first marking period and except for an 89 in Bris algebra all 100 and 99s. Are the teachers at McClancy judge fans with the 99s?

Question how many women other than Antoinette Funicello do you know with that name? After all these years, I am a 5 year old boy upstairs at 4911 69st and mom is making me sunnyside up eggs, I loved the way the end was crispy. Never was able to do that.

Well, almost finished, but before that I check to see how the Giants are doing against The eagles. What they beat the Super Bowl champs, now that’s another story.

I almost forgot that some where between all this , I took Norma to bank and tried to have her son put on her account, even though I know her passcode. Prior to this at another branch the female rep said technically I was not supposed to do her banking.Funny the ITM machine, never said you are not Norma. Can you imagine Baba going to an itm machine. Different world.

It’s not over as Norma ask I could stop at the pharmacy to get her non diabetic cough syrup.

Ok, with all this when did I take my 9 pm meds? I carry backup meds in my wallet

Now that I have either amused or bored you , have a good day, as Richie for now is picking up the kids today. If you think this is too much, Remember, the Lord only gives you what you can handle.

Forgot, as I was driving to school, the song Forever Young came on the radio as Brianna must have switched the channels.

Ps . 15 days to Daemen first gave, October 25, the day I joined the NYPD. Going to be hard to watch without # 3 in lineup.

Bri softball coach gave her #20 shirt, she was always #1 but will have to wait until his daughter graduates. At least unlike Matthias she is playing.*

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*Matthias is a Senior with an "A" average who also pitches for the Varsity baseball team. Bri is a Freshman who made the girl's Softball Varsity team.

My Grandfather

                                             

My younger brother Joe just reminded me that today, May 3, is the birthday of our paternal grandfather, Joseph or Giuseppe DeStefano (Baba). Every March 19 the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Joseph, the stepfather or surrogate father of Jesus, but Joe's reminder made me recall a post I had written some years ago. I think it might be of interest to some of my own grandchildren.

Surprisingly, St. Joseph was largely neglected during the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity. He played an important role in Scripture during the early days of Jesus but was completely absent during the adult or public life of Jesus. If you just page through Dante’s Divine Comedy, you will be hard pressed to find any sinners or saints called Joseph or Giuseppe. It is obvious that in the year 1300 Italians did not name their children after the husband of Mary. 

For a variety of reasons St. Joseph only entered the spotlight in the fifteenth century after the Black Death had devastated Europe. He was finally given a feast day in 1479 by Pope Sixtus IV, a former head of the Franciscan order. After that St. Joseph became more and more popular and he was eventually named patron saint of the entire Church, not just of one country or city.

At the same time, artists of the Renaissance began to depict him in a different manner. Previously, he had been depicted as a sleepy old man off to the side or in the background in depictions of the Holy Family. In the gospel of Matthew angels bring messages to Joseph while he is sleeping. However, during the Renaissance artists like Raphael depicted him as a younger man, virile and muscular enough to protect not only his family, but also the entire Church.

Eventually, Joseph, Giuseppe, or Jose would go to the top of the list of popular names for children. Both of my paternal grandparents were named after St. Joseph. Although we called them Baba and Nana, he was Giuseppe or Joseph DeStefano, and she was christened Josephina Maria Naclerio. I don’t want to neglect my grandmother, a great saint in her own right, but I would like to spend the rest of this post writing about my grandfather. 

Joseph DeStefano was born in 1880 in the town of Agerola, a little town up the hills from the city of Amalfi on the famed Amalfi coast of southern Italy. His father died when he was young and he came to this country with his stepfather when he was only a teenager. He had hardly any schooling and must have immediately gone to work with relatives in the fruit and vegetable business. He was the kind of immigrant that no one wants today. He was not an engineer or a physicist but he was one of the wisest men I have ever known. 

He must have been a hard worker for he soon had his own stand in a kind of supermarket. My grandmother, who was twelve years younger than him, told me that he would not consider marrying a woman who was not from his own village of Agerola. She was born in 1892 in Agerola and came to this country in 1906 to work in her uncle’s sewing factory. She was the oldest child and left home never to return. I suspect that there were too many mouths to feed back home, but she claimed that she came to find a husband because she didn’t like the young men in Agerola.

Of course, she lived with her uncle’s family and one day Joseph DeStefano was visiting after dinner. When he saw this beautiful and hard-working young woman from his hometown, it was love at first sight for him. She was not so sure but he persisted and, according to her, he made sure that other suitors kept their distance.

They soon married and she worked the store with him even after she began to have children. Eventually, they moved out of Manhattan to the borough of Queens where they bought a three family house to live in as well as provide rental income. They opened a new store in Jamaica, where they served the well to do nearby community of Jamaica Estates.

They quickly had four children, one of whom died in infancy. In true American immigrant fashion, they all were upwardly mobile. Their eldest daughter married an engineer whose parents had emigrated from Italy to open a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. Eventually, they came to New York and opened a restaurant on the East side of Manhattan coincidentally called, “The Original Joe’s”. Their son, also named Joseph, studied engineering at Manhattan College. The younger daughter married a New York City policeman of Irish German ancestry. Their only son, my father, worked in the store until the outbreak of World War II when he left to work in the defense department of the Bulova Watch company.

My grandparents had to close the store on the departure of my father. They never learned how to drive a car or truck and without my father they could not go to market or make deliveries.  My grandfather retired at the age of 60 and spent most of his retirement caring for a garden that included a cherry tree, a prized fig tree, a grape arbor, and a large vegetable garden. He thought that grass was a waste of good ground. 

Like most Italian men, my grandfather never went to church except perhaps for special events like weddings and funerals. Also, like many Italian men he did not like priests. I went to Catholic school and he warned me to do what the priests say, but not what they do. Nevertheless, I believe that he was one of those millions of un-canonized saints in the true selfless tradition of his namesake. 

My mother died in 1950 when I was only eleven years old. My father was forced to move me and my two younger brothers next door to live with my grandparents in their modest ground floor apartment. My grandfather was 70 years old at the time and my grandmother 58. Only after I had children of my own did I realize how hard that must have been for them. Never, ever did I feel unwelcomed or unloved. Like St. Joseph my grandfather became a foster father to me. We made wine together. We built a coop for the chickens together. I helped him with the constant work in the garden but I never could match his inborn skill and knowledge. He could barely read English and I never learned Italian but now I realize that both Baba and Nana taught me what it meant to give up one’s life for others.

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Saint Joseph and My Grandfather

                                            

Every March 19 the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Joseph, the stepfather or surrogate father of Jesus. Actually, the feast day is now largely neglected in America especially since it is so close to March 17, the feast day of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. There will be no parades or parties to honor the carpenter who took the Virgin Mary into his house.

Surprisingly, St. Joseph was largely neglected during the first fifteen hundred years of the Church. He played an important role in Scripture during the early days of Jesus but was completely absent during the adult or public life of Jesus. If you just page through Dante’s Divine Comedy, you will be hard pressed to find any sinners or saints called Joseph or Giuseppe. It is obvious that in the year 1300 Italians did not name their children after the husband of Mary.

For a variety of reasons St. Joseph only entered the spotlight in the fifteenth century after the Black Death had devastated Europe. He was only given a feast day in 1479 by Pope Sixtus IV, a former head of the Franciscan order. After that St. Joseph became more and more popular and he was eventually named patron saint of the entire Church, not just of one country or city.

At the same time, artists of the Renaissance began to depict him in a different manner. Previously, he had been depicted as a sleepy old man off to the side or in the background in depictions of the Holy Family. In the gospel of Matthew angels bring messages to Joseph while he is sleeping. However, during the Renaissance artists like Raphael depicted him as a younger man, virile and muscular enough to protect not only his family, but also the entire Church.

Eventually, Joseph, Giuseppe, or Jose would go to the top of the list of popular names for children. Both of my paternal grandparents were named after St. Joseph. Although we called them Baba and Nana, he was Giuseppe or Joseph DeStefano, and she was christened Josephina Maria Naclerio. I don’t want to neglect my grandmother, a great saint in her own right, but I would like to spend the rest of this post writing about my grandfather.

Joseph DeStefano was born in 1880 in the town of Agerola, a little town up the hills from the city of Amalfi on the famed Amalfi coast of southern Italy. His father died when he was young and he came to this country with his stepfather when he was only a teenager. He had hardly any schooling and must have immediately gone to work with relatives in the fruit and vegetable business. He was the kind of immigrant that no one wants today. He was not an engineer or a physicist but he was one of the wisest men I have ever known.

He must have been a hard worker for he soon had his own stand in a kind of supermarket. My grandmother, who was twelve years younger than him, told me that he would not consider marrying a woman who was not from his own village of Agerola. She was born in 1892 in Agerola and came to this country in 1906 to work in her uncle’s sewing factory. She was the oldest child and left home never to return. I suspect that there were too many mouths to feed back home, but she claimed that she came to find a husband because she didn’t like the young men in Agerola.

Of course, she lived with her uncle’s family and one day Joseph DeStefano was visiting after dinner. When he saw this beautiful and hard-working young woman from his hometown, it was love at first sight, for him. She was not so sure but he persisted and, according to her, he made sure that other suitors kept their distance.

They soon married and she worked the store with him even after she began to have children. Eventually, they moved out of Manhattan to the borough of Queens where they bought a three family house to live in as well as provide rental income. They opened a new store in Jamaica, where they served the well to do nearby community of Forest Hills.

They quickly had four children, one of whom died in infancy. In true American immigrant fashion, they all were upwardly mobile. Their eldest daughter married an engineer whose parents had emigrated from Italy to open a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. Eventually, they came to New York and opened a restaurant on the East side of Manhattan coincidentally called, “The Original Joe’s”. Their son, also named Joseph, studied engineering at Manhattan College. The younger daughter married a New York City policeman of Irish German ancestry. Their only son, my father, worked in the store until the outbreak of World War II when he left to work in the defense department of the Bulova Watch company.

My grandparents had to close the store on the departure of my father. They never learned how to drive a car or truck and without my father they could not go to market or make deliveries.  My grandfather retired at the age of 60 and spent most of his retirement caring for a garden that included a cherry tree, a prized fig tree, a grape arbor, and a large vegetable garden. He thought that grass was a waste of good ground.

Like most Italian men, my grandfather never went to church except perhaps for special events like weddings and funerals. Also, like many Italian men he did not like priests. I went to Catholic school and he warned me to do what the priests say, but not what they do. Nevertheless, I believe that he was one of those millions of un-canonized saints in the true selfless tradition of his namesake.

My mother died in 1950 when I was only eleven years old. My father was forced to move me and my two younger brothers next door to live with my grandparents in their modest ground floor apartment. My grandfather was 70 years old at the time and my grandmother 58. Only now that I am in my seventies do I realize how hard that must have been for them. Never, ever did I feel unwelcomed or unloved. Like St. Joseph my grandfather became a foster father to me. We made wine together. We built a coop for the chickens together. I helped him with the constant work in the garden but I never could match his inborn skill and knowledge. He could barely read English and I never learned Italian but now I realize that both Baba and Nana taught me what it meant to give up one’s life for others.

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