Buddy Remembers - Then and Now

Book excerpt: This book is a memoir, the description of my parents’ lives based on my remembrances, conversations with relatives, reviews of family photographs, as well as examining remaining personal documents of our family. This memoir started as a brief description, and was something I had planned for a long time. Initially, I thought it would be perhaps a few dozen pages. Instead, it grew organically and became a much more detailed recollection of my mother and father’s lives, their marriage, their approaches to life, how they raised my sister and me, and their continuing influence upon me. They came to America as immigrant children; they developed here within their cultural boundaries as Italian Americans; they struggled, thrived and pursued their personal goals. They are still with me today. It has been simultaneously an exhilarating and exhausting process as the writing expanded. This is far beyond any sort of genealogical charting or the identification of distant relatives. Rather, it provides perceptions about my feelings and beliefs regarding my parents, their positive qualities and flaws, as well as how I perceive them now that I am an older adult. This process is one that I urge other children to engage in, writing about their parents so that there will be descriptions of the roles they played. I call such writing a critical component of the collective humanity, tracing the historical journeys that would then be available to the remaining family members and their ancestors. Conceivably, such continued writings could become an endless documentation of family behaviors and interactions. It might even provide a greater clarity and understanding of one’s parents through a long-range lens.