La me famigghia (My family)

84-11 Grand Avenue, Elmhurst, Queens, New York

My father was a man of few words. He was never known to stay on the phone any longer than necessary, and would often enter a room and depart without speaking at all.  When I was a boy, my father would get up early, and leave the house before my brother and I would be awake.  He would drive six, sometimes seven days a week to work 12-hour days running the small family business, J & L Service Station, a small two-pump, one-lift gas station in Elmhurst, Queens. Dad would return home late, after supper, and if we were asleep, our mother would sometimes wake us so we could see and kiss him.  

Aunt Jo, my father, grandmother, and my grandfather holding me.

Sundays in my family meant Sunday School and services at Homecrest Presbyterian Church.  Only two short blocks from our house, it was here that my parents, Louis Cucinotta and Dorothy Lambon met and where they were married in 1942. After church was our time to be at home with DAD.  However, my father would often take our family to visit his parents, his sister Josephine and her husband, Salvatore Meli.  In their house nearby, first names were changed: my father became Ginu, and my aunt Jo and uncle Sal were Giusi and Turiddu.  As we ate a wonderful traditional multi-course feast, I would listen to their conversations but I couldn’t understand them, even if their sentences were peppered with an English word or two.  I was told that they were speaking “Italian”.  However, after beginning a college course in the language of Tuscany, Firenze e Roma, I still could not understand a word, nun una palora.  By then I knew that they were not speaking Italian, but Sicilian, sicilianu, in fact, a sub-dialect or parrati of this ancient romance language spoken by the people of Missina, La Città di lu Strittu where my grandparents, Giuanni and Lorenza were both born.  This early regional language of Italy contains words and sounds of many of the conquerors of Sicilia including the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and the Spanish who ruled the island for about 500 years.  My grandparents, li me nanni, could speak little English.  My dad who was born in Manhattan, on Carmine Street in Little Italy during the last year of WWI, would join in the often loud conversations, using what was apparently his first language, sicilianu. 

 As a little boy, un picciriddu, their foreign words would alienate me.  My brother and I were not included and I often felt ignored. We were outsiders.  Little or no effort was ever made to teach us how to be Sicilians.  We were just children, and we were the sons of my mother, li figlii di me matri who was not Italian, la miricana chi parra sulu ngrisi, the American who only speaks English. Few facts or details of life in Sicilia were ever discussed. Once again, all I learned from my father was that we were “Americans.”