Angelina and Donato

My mother's parents, at left—Angelina and Donato Fanelli. Fierce, humorless looking folk, eh?  I don't recall mia madre, Lucy, telling me anything about her mother beyond this—she'd been a seamstress and died when little Lucy was 16. Most likely from what we have—Neurofibromatosis Type 2. Only it wasn't diagnosed—hell, the docs back then didn't even know what it was.

As recently as the '70s, my mother was routinely told by her GP that her hearing loss and balance issues were due to 'pre-mature aging.' Lucy was 48 years old in 1975, the year she called it quits on the small town, under informed family doc. She came to Boston to see her cousin Carmel's neurologists at Mass General. They were miles and light years ahead of most of the rest of the world on NF2 research.

Lucy's father Donato was a laborer. Specifically, a bricklayer. The one anecdote about him that she relayed to me was from her fifth Christmas. Her one present was a small, metal wind up baby doll. She was playing with it out in front of their apartment building (this being within the close packed streets of the Italian ghetto of New Haven, Connecticut in the 1930s) when a car, barreling down the road, ran over it—crushing it. Donato, being the bearish, bellicose, dickwad that he apparently was, was wholly unsympathetic to the point of antipathy.

Even now, 82 years after the fact, I'm furious and feeling all protective. Over a memory. The memory of a memory. I never met Donato—he died when Mother was 18. 31 years before I was born.

Frustratingly and confusingly, I was named for him. Possibly there are familial nuances that I'm not considering here (gee duh, ya think!!??). OR I come by my occasional dickwadishness genetically and the resemblance was clear even during my gestation.

Probably a little of each.