The Book My Father Wanted Me To Write
I think this is the book my father wanted me to write, or at least the start of it. And he wasn’t the only one.
He knew me pretty well. He knew I’d come around to it some day.
The rest of them must have sensed it from me, all those relatives from the five boroughs who wanted me to write it. (Four boroughs, really. Staten Island has always been and will always be a mystery to me.)
I don’t know what they sensed. The bookishness. The interest in history. In a good story. “You should write this down,” they’d say.
By “this” they meant their fading world.
Very few of them ever wrote anything for themselves. They were not a literary or artistic or musical or cinematic group. With very few exceptions, they were uninterested in…anything really, other than family. But I must have been wearing some kind of sign, even as a child, because I heard it all the time: “You should write this down.”
I heard it from my father most of all. He liked the idea that his suburban son could straddle cultures, could understand the foreign land he came from and to which we returned every weekend…the old, shitty, tragically unhip Brooklyn of my youth.
I’ve written this before: We were not “Italians” and had not been for three generations. The Irish nuns beat the Italy out of my grandparents, and none of us who followed could have survived a day in the Old World. We were Brooklyn Italians, which is its own thing.
And I was a Long Island kid who spent way too much time in Brooklyn, for many many reasons, good and bad. I also lived on an unusual block, even in my commuter town, a little street of identical houses with little backyards that was almost entirely populated by Brooklyn and Bronx Italians who, like us, did not even know a living Italian Italian anymore.
So I perfectly positioned to be the straddler, the note taker, the bridge—a walking, talking Belt Parkway. And I’ve been writing about these experiences, if only for myself, for well over three decades…and they have appeared, here and there, in my previous books.
And so…
One day I was thinking about Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance writer whose greatest work, Cane , is a combination of short stories and poems. That’s not unusual for me. I often think about Toomer. But on that particular day I mentioned to the wisest person I know that I’d love to write the way Toomer wrote, in a mix of genres. And she said, as she often does, “So do it.”
And I thought…from a certain perspective, I’ve already done it for over three decades. I’ve written pages and pages of interrelated poems and fiction and nonfiction….all about my family.
Which is why this book, Sometimes I Still Pray (https://amzn.to/3N9REnh), came together in a flash and jumped the queue of upcoming Tessitore publications. Just in time for Father’s Day!
It is not my last word on the subject. Far from it. But it’s a start.
And it is dedicated to my father, who died four years ago knowing full well that I’d write a book like this some day. Just like he wanted me to.
He knew me pretty well. He knew I’d come around to it some day.
The rest of them must have sensed it from me, all those relatives from the five boroughs who wanted me to write it. (Four boroughs, really. Staten Island has always been and will always be a mystery to me.)
I don’t know what they sensed. The bookishness. The interest in history. In a good story. “You should write this down,” they’d say.
By “this” they meant their fading world.
Very few of them ever wrote anything for themselves. They were not a literary or artistic or musical or cinematic group. With very few exceptions, they were uninterested in…anything really, other than family. But I must have been wearing some kind of sign, even as a child, because I heard it all the time: “You should write this down.”
I heard it from my father most of all. He liked the idea that his suburban son could straddle cultures, could understand the foreign land he came from and to which we returned every weekend…the old, shitty, tragically unhip Brooklyn of my youth.
I’ve written this before: We were not “Italians” and had not been for three generations. The Irish nuns beat the Italy out of my grandparents, and none of us who followed could have survived a day in the Old World. We were Brooklyn Italians, which is its own thing.
And I was a Long Island kid who spent way too much time in Brooklyn, for many many reasons, good and bad. I also lived on an unusual block, even in my commuter town, a little street of identical houses with little backyards that was almost entirely populated by Brooklyn and Bronx Italians who, like us, did not even know a living Italian Italian anymore.
So I perfectly positioned to be the straddler, the note taker, the bridge—a walking, talking Belt Parkway. And I’ve been writing about these experiences, if only for myself, for well over three decades…and they have appeared, here and there, in my previous books.
And so…
One day I was thinking about Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance writer whose greatest work, Cane , is a combination of short stories and poems. That’s not unusual for me. I often think about Toomer. But on that particular day I mentioned to the wisest person I know that I’d love to write the way Toomer wrote, in a mix of genres. And she said, as she often does, “So do it.”
And I thought…from a certain perspective, I’ve already done it for over three decades. I’ve written pages and pages of interrelated poems and fiction and nonfiction….all about my family.
Which is why this book, Sometimes I Still Pray (https://amzn.to/3N9REnh), came together in a flash and jumped the queue of upcoming Tessitore publications. Just in time for Father’s Day!
It is not my last word on the subject. Far from it. But it’s a start.
And it is dedicated to my father, who died four years ago knowing full well that I’d write a book like this some day. Just like he wanted me to.
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