Image from the Past

Like most people, no matter how many pictures I see from the past, I remember my grandparents simply as old. A natural thing, as I only knew them in their elder years. (My paternal grandmother passed away before I could even remember her.) My mother's parents were both bent and silver by the time I remember them, and Grandpa was blind. My Dad's father, Papà, was the only grandparent who lived long enough that I really "knew" him.

He wasn't your warm and fuzzy type grandparent. He was a hard worker all his life and even in retirement, spent his days planting not only his own vegetable garden, but one for two of my aunts. He had provided a home and sustenance for his family, but I also knew he'd been abusive to his wife and kids (it was an unfortunate Old Country cultural habit; if your wife said something you didn't like, you had the "right" to physically hurt them). So my feelings were always a bit ambivent toward him.

And, despite the formal wedding portraits in the dining room of the old house, I always pictured him as grey, balding, and stoop-shouldered.

While wandering around Barnes & Noble today I passed a big coffee table book called Italians in America. Naturally I couldn't resist taking a look at the pictures.

One I found gave me pause. It was labeled something like "Street characters of Chicago," then below "a worker for the gas company."

My grandfather worked his entire life digging ditches for the Providence Gas Company.

The Italian man in the picture was not yet stoop shouldered. He might have been in his forties. He wore a soft slouch hat to protect himself from the sun, and had the luxuriant full moustache as was in fashion around the turn of the century. He was wearing those old-fashioned 19th-century trousers that came up past your waist when held up by the ubiquitous suspenders, and a white work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He was frozen in time, lifting a shovelful of earth in preparation for another gas line.

Had the picture been taken in Providence, it might have been my Papà, developing those stooped shoulders...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 12:50:00 AM

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