There’s a uniqueness to Italian-American families, of claiming relations who are not related. I suspect it has something to do with the long hangover of their immigrant status. Or perhaps it’s to do with the fluid sense of family that comes from fleeing fascism with friends and neighbors or the high birth and high mortality rates of the 20th century. Maybe it’s a phenomenon unique to my Italian-American family. Or maybe it is not unique at all. All I can tell you is that I have an Uncle Mike. He was my dad’s best friend in college. And he is not now, nor was he ever, related to me. (It turns out his name isn’t even Mike, but that’s a story for another time.) And yet, I dutifully refer to him as “Uncle Mike” even though I’m 40 now and by all accounts a grown up.
I refer to all my uncles—the blood relations and the not-so-related ones—as “uncle.” It’s the same with my aunts. There were three in particular. (I’m referring to aunts now. Please keep up.) My dad and his brothers (my “real uncles”) used to debate which of them was the craziest. Probably not the most appropriate conversation to have with a seven year old, but what did they know about little girls?
My three aunts: they were like Macbeth’s witches, ceaselessly cackling, chattering, and pinching my cheeks. They seemed impossibly old to me when I was little. (They must have been in their fifties; heaven help me if I think 50 is old when I get there.) I thought for sure I would end up in the lasagna if I crossed them. Not literally of course, because it was impossible to cross them. They laughed easily and thought everything I did was delightful. Every time I slammed the screen door to the kitchen, ran to the beach barefoot, dropped wet towels on the patio, my grandmother shrieked at me. And the aunts would chuckle. Every visit, I was commanded to stand before them and report on my goings-on. I felt like a performing monkey, bracing myself against the inevitable pinching. Once they had their fill of abusing my cheeks, I would race away, leaving them to their high-pitched gossip.
There was crazy Aunt Marianne, crazy Aunt Tina, and Aunt Rose. I don’t know how Aunt Rose escaped the insane appellation with which the other two were labeled. In truth, none of them was crazy. Well actually, Aunt Tina was kind of crazy. But I’m not sure any of them deserved the designation. And anyway, it was a sobriquet spoken with fondness.
Aunt Tina was an illustrator when her hand was steady and her eyesight was sharp. Best known for Mommy, Where Do Babies Come From? and The Littlest Snowman Rescues Christmas, her work was dark, but highly emotive and beautifully executed. She lost her teenage daughter to an infection and never recovered from the grief. We did think she was a bit crazy, but it was a cracked, eccentric kind of crazy, stuck like a thorn in her broken heart.
Aunt Rose looked after Aunt Tina. They lived near each other but apart. They traveled as a set, crazy Aunt Tina and Aunt Rose, visiting my grandmother as an inseparable unit. I don’t remember ever seeing one without the other. It occurs to me now, they were so much together, perhaps we referred to them together as well. When we said “crazy Aunt Tina and Aunt Rose” we only had to say “crazy” once because of course we were talking about both of them.
Crazy Aunt Marianne traveled alone. There was nothing at all crazy about her. She was sharp as a tack and always supportive of my grandmother. Her regular visits to my grandparents were a wonder given that no restitution was offered for her long drives. We never went to see her, which was shameful and bordering on tragic because we saw very little of her or the other two aunts after my grandmother died.
The lesson I learned—I think we all learned—was that family would come to us. We needn’t go to them. This is hardly a recipe for long-term family-relationship success given the inevitability of aging and our lack of self-driving cars to chauffer ailing aunties to family gatherings. After my dear uncle died last year, I resolved to be better about accepting invitations to family events, making the drive no matter how inconvenient, going to the party even if it’s for a barely-known cousin. You only get one family so accept the invitations while they’re forthcoming. Because if you say no too many times, the invitations dwindle and dry up. And what could be better than becoming known as the crazy auntie who always shows up?
Visualizing Shakespeare 