Rich and Noble
Wisdom from a Sicilian-American Ghetto

Mike Aquilina
From the Sep/Oct 2009 Issue of Lay Witness Magazine

Calogero Aquilina, my grandfather, arrived on America’s shores on April24, 1909. He had made the long voyage by sea from Caltanisetta, Sicily, on the S.S. Finland.

He crossed the Atlantic in overcrowded steerage. And why? For the great privilege of working in the coal mines. Such jobs were plentiful. They were also dangerous and dirty-long hours for poverty wages. They were jobs that American citizens were not eager to fill. So Calogero landed at Ellis Island, like hundreds of thousands of others, and found immediate employment.

Those were the years before the unions had made their impact. The air in the mines was damp, dusty, and barely breathable. The corridors were infested with rats.

At the end of the day, the miners joined their families in one-room houses. They cooked and they ate in the place where they slept.

Calogero worked in the mines for a solid decade before the dust took over his lungs and turned them black. He came down with the inevitable shortness of breath and chest pains. He had black lung, and so he had to leave the mines for janitorial work, which he took up with gusto. In 1926 he caught tuberculosis, for which there was no cure, and, since his lungs were weak, it killed him quickly.

The family lived well below what we would call the poverty line. And yet my father grew up convinced that they were titled nobility.

Why was that? After all, Calogero had left his wife with no money and seven children to raise!

But he had left them something more valuable. He left them the memory of seeing their own Papa give himself willingly. Give himself happily. Give himself gratefully. He was thankful that his coming to America, and his hard work, would enable his children to have a better life than he had known in Sicily.

Calogero gave himself for the sake of others, for the sake of my dad-who was only ten years old in 1926-and that’s what my father always remembered about him.

In the neighborhood where my father grew up-a little Sicilian-American ghetto-Calogero was one of the few immigrants who could read and write, and he could read and write in both English and Italian. Thus, he was the man who could help families with their immigration papers. He was the man who could write letters home to Sicily. He was the man who could read the letters his neighbors received from the immigration authorities. He was the one who could help them fill out all the frightening forms. My dad said that his father never refused to help a needy neighbor.

Calogero’s children knew from an early age that a life of self-giving could confer a certain nobility, even upon the poorest of the poor. Their father owned nothing, but he was a man of stature in the coal patch. When he died, his funeral procession (according to newspaper reports) included 73 cars and more than a thousand people. Five full cars held only flowers.

And, long after Calogero died, grown men would tip their hats whenever my father or his siblings walked by.

Like his father before him, my dad worked most of his life for the same coal company. He had an easier time of it, though, because he was a skilled laborer. Pop was a welder, and he could do body work on heavy machinery. He worked hard and had the injuries to prove it.

When I was born, my dad was 47 years old. He was missing an index finger, and he had chronic back pain. And he still had another 30 years of working life ahead of him.

What impresses me about my grandfather and my father is that-against all odds, and in spite of some imposing obstacles-they managed to preside over happy homes.

Not wealthy homes, mind you. My father was a little better off than his father had been. We lived in the same little Sicilian ghetto, but my generation occupied an apartment that had two bedrooms: one with a bed for the four girls, and the other with a bed for the three boys.

My parents didn’t have a bedroom, but what would they need a bedroom for?

My father and my grandfather had nothing, really, that they could put a price tag on and sell on eBay. They had physical pain, but the doctors put the price tag on that. They had nothing.

And yet they were able to live with a remarkable degree of happiness and die in peace. In 2001, the year before he died, my dad wrote to me that he was "richer than Bill Gates."

Again, what made my father rich-and what made his father noble-was not their money in the bank. They had none. What made them rich and noble was a capacity to love that they acquired, through habit, through sacrifice, and through the Cross of Christ.

It’s easy for me to conjure up my earliest memories of my father. I was probably around 3, so he was 50 years old. He worked long hours at his job, and sometimes he had to travel to distant mining sites. Sometimes he came home late, and usually he came home exhausted. I’ll bet he wanted nothing more than to collapse beneath the newspaper.

But he didn’t. He collapsed beneath the kids. My mom says-and I remember this-that, coming home, he would wrestle with me on the floor, let me crawl on him, pounce on him, let me live the dream of any child who’s read Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop. And at a certain point in our game, he’d drift off to sleep, while my game went on with him as a prop.

That sums it up for me. All that my father had, he gave to his children-until there was nothing left to give. Whenever I hear Jesus talk about "laying down one’s life," it’s a vivid image for me. It’s my father in his work clothes, out cold on the floor of that little apartment on 150 South Main Street in Pittston, Pennsylvania.

My dad was a dad whom other dads sought out for advice. He died on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception in 2002, so I can no longer call him to get his take on parenting teenagers or adult children-this new phase of my life. But I have a rich store of memory to draw from, and so I’m still learning lessons from Pop. I’d like to share a few of those lessons with you.

No one who knew my parents ever doubted or questioned whether my dad loved his wife. You could tell by the way he looked at her and spoke her name. If he lived with any persistent temptation to sin, it must have been idolatry.

In matters of preference or taste, he always deferred to Mom. Over years of marriage he had formed a neat coincidence of thought, word, and deed: What pleased him most was whatever brought her the greatest pleasure. He was happiest when he saw her happy. Her happiness was the barometer of his own. Thus, virtue was its own reward.

Even though my mother was an accomplished mind-reader-we men are easy reads-and even though my father was an almost silent man, he daily spoke his mind on certain subjects: my mother’s beauty and his love for her. We should all take a lesson, and speak up in matters of love.

And we should back up our words with great deeds, heroic deeds. My father’s deeds tended to be home-handiwork- projects that involved power tools. My ineptitude rules these out. But, once or twice a year, we husbands should do something outlandish: write a sonnet, build something, search out that perfect doorbell she’s been unable to locate on eBay. If you do this, your children will recognize you as the hero whenever they read the great love stories of the world. You are the knight on a quest for his lady. You are Jacob, who labored 14years to win the heart of Rachel. You are The Man.

This is what I saw in Pop’s love for my mom: When we love our wives, we’re teaching our sons how to be husbands. We’re showing our daughters the kind of men we want them to marry.

Smile.

Your facial expression works like a mirror for your children. They look at you and gauge their self-worth. Whether we intend it or not, our faces say "you make me happy" or "you irritate me" or "you bore me" or "your presence makes no difference to me whatsoever." To our children, our expression is never in neutral.

Our expression can make a significant change in the emotional climate of the home. Mother Teresa urged parents to smile often, even when they didn’t feel like smiling. St. Josemaría Escrivá called such smiles the greatest sacrifices, greater than corporal mortifications-and again they’re for the sake of others.

If we get in the habit of smiling, we’ll probably find more reasons to smile as time goes on.

When your children are small, hold them close and hold them often. Hug them, give them piggyback rides, roughhouse according to their preference.

God wired our bodies to find fulfillment in loving, physical expressions. It’s no secret, for example, that the chemical oxytocin, released during breastfeeding, helps to relax a new mother. Recent research at Harvard Medical School indicates that close contact with children does something similar for men. When a man holds a baby (or even a baby doll!), his body adjusts the levels of the hormones largely responsible for male aggression, over-competitiveness, and such.

Babies domesticate us in a powerful way. It’s the baby who takes a man and makes him a dad, and the transformation shakes him to his constituent chemistry.

This goes a long way in explaining my father’s serenity. I don’t think he ever passed up a chance to hold a baby or a small child. Some of my earliest memories are of pretending I was asleep at the end of a long car ride, so that Pop would carry me into the house. I’m sure he knew I was pretending. I’m sure he didn’t mind.

Once, when he was in his late seventies, he was pacing the floor with my newborn daughter in his arms. She had been asleep for quite some time, but he didn’t put her down. In one of his rare philosophical moments, he told me then that he believed there was a "silent language of love" that passed between adults and children. We didn’t need to speak out loud, and they didn’t need to learn our expressions.

That’s the language we dads must learn to speak with our bodies.

Choose your battles. Choose few.

My father was an almost silent man. He kept anger packed away for very rare occasions. My nephew Mark still remembers how my dad shocked him out of adolescent rebellion. Pop used strong words with him, and even raised his voice a little. If Pop had been a man given to tirades, another furious rage would have been meaningless. But his few, well-chosen words were all it took to make a teenager raise the white flag.

Another example: When my sisters were in college, they were exposed to the latest theories on every subject under the sun, and they’d sometimes come home and "correct" my father’s mistaken notions. They enlightened him on child rearing, for example, and told him that his methods would turn his youngest son into a monster.

Pop didn’t argue with them. Instead, he praised them for studying so hard and listening in class. Then he’d go right on finishing his crossword puzzle and living as he had lived his life till then, and as his children would come around to live, once the class was over and the latest theories passed into oblivion.

If kids today don’t appreciate anything, it’s because their parents don’t. Model gratitude by thanking your wife often, thanking your children often, for what they do and for who they are. Catch them doing good things and thank them.

If we don’t learn to be grateful, we’ll forget that we’re always on the receiving end of God’s giving. And we’ll soon slide into habits of resentment. Resentment is the deadliest poison on earth. We shouldn’t allow even a drop of it to remain in our hearts or in our homes.

Gratitude, on the other hand, is the simple road to heaven because it makes life heavenly on earth.

I place this last instead of first, because I was tempted just to write the entire article on this topic. Prayer is primary. Good Catholic parenting doesn’t mean so much talking at our kids about God as talking to God about our kids. We need to pray, in a sustained and disciplined way.

The bottom line is this: Happiness requires love, and lover equires sacrifice. The newspapers like to run feel-good stories about parents donating organs for their children. And my love and yours may require such extreme forms of heroism someday. But most of the time our sacrifice will be very low-key. Sometimes we’ll have to stay up all night with a crying baby and then get dressed and put on a happy face for work the next day.

Sometimes the greatest sacrifice will be to change the diaper as soon as we’re asked-or, better, before anyone else has even noticed that it needs changing. Sometimes the greatest sacrifice of all will be to arrive home at the end of the day wearing a smile-just because we know that a smile will make the house and the evening much brighter than the weary expression that more accurately reflects our day.

Loving sacrifice means that we want our first thought to be for others rather than for ourselves.

It seems contradictory, but it’s true: If we seek our own fulfillment, we end up perpetually frustrated and dissatisfied. When we seek to fulfill others, we find fulfillment ourselves.

Why is that? Because, as fathers, we’re made to be godlike. St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians: "For this reason I bend my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth receives its name that he may grant you from his glorious riches to be strengthened with power through his Spirit unto the progress of the inner man" (Eph. 3:14-16).

All fatherhood takes its name from God’s fatherhood, which his eternal. And what is His fatherhood? The Father gives His life eternally in a perfect gift to the Son.

Its image on earth is the crucifix behind the altar-the image of a man giving himself in love.

Its other image for me is my father, and for my father it was his father. What will it be for your children and mine?

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