A Lilly

Johnnie and Lilly, Queens NY

I walk along the water every day when I’m home. Down the East River starting at the Brooklyn Bridge and up the Hudson a bit.   I do it for the exercise.

The exercise of passing the Statue of Liberty and remembering how one man and one woman passed that almost a hundred years ago.   My grandparents.

They were separated.  But not by today's definition.

He sailed into New York harbor first.  My grandfather was going to make enough money to send for my grandmother and their oldest son, Joe.  But The First World War started and they would have to wait five years before to be reunited.

Lilly is their youngest child.  Lilly and I always talk about getting together.  She’ll bring her memories of my youth – and hers.   I’ll just show up to bask in her unconditional love. 

Lilly is eighty-four now. Even as a kid, I felt maybe she’d be more comfortable in the old country. Where she would have been born had her parents not taken a chance and taken that trip that must have been like going to the moon in those days.  For a better life.  

I wonder if they ever thought about the better life they were giving to all the grand kids, their great grand kids, and great-great grand kids they’d never know.

And so, last week, Lilly and I met for lunch.  She came in from Queens.  I didn’t have far to go. I live downtown.

I made a reservation. 

We agreed to have lunch where we could sit outdoors - look out at water, the sailboats, the statue in the harbor and have the same southern Italian dishes my parents, their parents and their parents grew up on.  The dishes Lilly cooks at home to this day.

It was wonderful. Laughs.  Remembrances.  Wisdom.  Lots of wisdom.  Like when my aunt told me her secret  - I try to enjoy things, I walk, and what I can’t control, I pray on.

Lilly brought old photographs.  One scalloped-edged, black and white photo was a group shot.  Forty or so eight-year-old kids all in white. First Holy Communion, 1957. 

White dresses and white veils on the girls.  The boys wore spotless white suits, white shirts and white ties.  White shoes all the way around.

Come to think of it – all the kids, themselves, were white. 

One of the boys in the picture in the back row wearing a dark blue suit.  A blue suit?  It was me.

That explains a lot. 

But enough about me.  My me generation thing is showing and, let’s face it, we’re talking about the greatest generation.

As our lunch was winding down.  That’s not fair: we were having coffee.  Our lunch never really wound down.  It was that good.

“Johnnie (that’s me to people who knew me way back when), I know you like capellini”.  And from a plastic bag she took a box of uncooked capellini and gave it to me along with a plastic lemon.  The kind you buy at the supermarket with the 6 ounces of lemon juice inside.

“I know you’re not eating carbs but just a little.  Put a little lemon on it.  Maybe with some broccoli rabe.  You can have broccoli rabe, you like broccoli rabe.”

The love, the generosity. The family, God and country – in that order - that Lilly spoke about at lunch.  It was all there in that gesture.

A few days later, Lilly phoned me to tell me something I was already thinking.  “Johnnie, it was the best afternoon of my life”.

“Me, too”.

And that says it all.  No need to gild a Lilly.