by Angela Rocco DeCarlo
copyright 2009
I'm the baby.
So, of course, I never sat at the head of my parents' heavily carved walnut dining room table in our Chicago house.
Until now.
My husband Dan and I have returned with our three grown sons - Mark, Michael and Danny - to my family's house to have a last time together in the place that holds so many precious memories for us all.
We're in my former Rocco family home - an iconic bungalow, on Honorary Pete Rocco Dr., in a once solidly Italian neighborhood on the Far West Side of the city known as The Island - where we will have our “Last Supper.”
It is late October. The leaves outside are golden, the air chilly and my entire family has left sunny Southern California to fly thousands of miles to pay homage to the place and the people we love.
The building's sole final resident was my beloved late elder sister, Christine Frances Rocco, and we'd already been back for her funeral months before. This is another sentimental journey: to have one last meal at my mother's table before the house passes out of the family.
If we're fortunate to be born into families that lavish love on us, we treasure those who loved us so. In this house are many memories of family holiday and birthday celebrations. This is the place where I grew up, where my then-boyfriend Dan sat with me at this table as my family looked him over. Later on, his parents often joined us, as his family lived on the next block.
This neighborly arrangement made it possible for our young sons to have four grandparents - Peter and Della Rocco and Mary and Michael DeCarlo - sitting with them at that table on Christmas Eve or Thanksgiving along with uncles and aunts and cousins.
Since 1990, when my father passed on, my mother having gone before him in 1985, my sister updated the house while still keeping some of the family furnishings. Our boys loved visiting their beloved Aunt Cookie whenever we were in Chicago, often bringing friends along. It is a great gift to be able to go back home and find the love that was always there.
During our son Michael's senior year in optometric college, he lived in the bungalow with my father and sister. Before he moved in, my sister made my father promise he would not sit at the window each night waiting for Michael to come home. My father was known as a worrier, and not a quiet one, but a rather noisy dramatic one, given to fuming loudly while pacing wildly. However, he'd calm down somewhat in later years, and as a widowed man he astounded us all by learning how to cook and take care of the house as my sister continued to work. He loved to make Michael breakfast before he headed off to school. It was a very happy time for them all.
For all our children and grandchildren, it was a second home. With Auntie's passing, Danny was devastated, not only at the loss of her, but also the happy times to which he looked forward when he would visit Chicago with his family.
We all lull ourselves into thinking that things will stay the same forever. Our parents will always be there, and our siblings will, too. We can go visit them whenever we find the time. Then life takes over and we don't have as much time as we wish … and things change, whether we're prepared for it or not.
First times are often fun, and those wonderful firsts are legend in our lives. First love. First kiss. First date. Indelible memories we carry always.
But last times are rarely so easy, especially when we don't realize it's the last.
We kiss a sister good-bye at the airport, already planning her next visit to California. Only it never happens. I often worried about her falling down the basement steps. But never, not once, did it cross my mind that she might die. So that airport kiss was the last time we embraced.
I miss her daily and long for her return in that way people talk about after losing a loved one, especially suddenly. After a certain length of time, when we're trying to be brave and go on with life, we get annoyed, frustrated, thinking. “OK, this is long enough, I want you back right now,” I would dream of her and scold. “Where have you been? I've missed you so much.”
Of course, life is full of lasts.
Surely, there's a last time we bend over to pick up a child's toy. Or the last time we are needed to tie his shoe laces. The last time he willingly climbs on our lap to be rocked to sleep. Life is so busy, lasts often go by silently, lingering only as footnotes.
I suppose it was this sense of lost lasts that prompted the idea of making this pilgrimage back home.
Our three sons knew this house as well as their own growing up, for it contained people who adored them. But today, seated at my mother's splendid table, we are anything but festive. The house is going to be sold, the furnishings dispersed: it is the end.
So we're seated at the table, on the matching upholstered chairs, not knowing what to say or do. It's so odd. If we were Irish we might be telling funny stories, drinking and laughing. They seem to have that gift.
Alas, Italians are not inclined in that direction. We carry that ancient Mediterranean pagan gloom in our blood and people dying is not a time for revelry or funny stories. No matter how modern we might try to be, we can't quite pull it off. We're miserable.
Eldest son, Mark DeCarlo, is sitting with his arms tightly folded across his chest, his handsome face contorted in a heart-wrenching crunch. “All the people who sat here … all gone,” he laments with a croak.
Middle son Michael sits, teary-eyed but silent.
The baby of our family, Danny, and his wife, Laurie, have instinctively seated themselves and their two babies, Sam and Serritella, in my spot - the baby's place at the end of the table nearest the kitchen.
I feel out of place at the head of my mother's table. I look around at my grown sons and see the baby faces they once had as they sat eating my mother's homemade ravioli, a treat served only on special holidays. Now we're all California “no carbs” people and we do not eat ravioli at our holiday dinners. But at this Last Supper at our Chicago bungalow, we cheat and have take-out pasta. I hoped my mother doesn't know.
Silently, we're all wondering what it will be like to have no home in Chicago to return to. We'll go back to California and this house and all it contained and represented will stay in our hearts and memories. We have other family that will welcome us when we come back.
Suddenly, Mark says, “I'd like Nani's table if no one else wants it.”
What? Mark wants his grandparents' old furniture?
“I'd like their bedroom set, too, if no one wants that,” he adds.
And just like that, there's a future to plan. Perhaps we can keep alive our connection to our Chicago bungalow and beloved family in a tangible way.
When the dinner is over, we hurry outside to rake leaves with the kids. We make piles for them to jump into. We let leaves rain down upon them. Then, finally, we set off to drive them all to the airport. With tears, they take one last look back at their Chicago home.
Dan and I stay to deal with the house and the furnishing.
It's a hard thing. But we feel better knowing that Mark's request has changed things. He couldn't bear to part with this place, where his crib for overnights was cheek to jowl against Nani and Papa's rosewood double bed. And so, he decides to take some of it with him to California. He wants to continue to have family dinners around his grandparents' walnut dining table.
As I write this, the furniture is being refinished and the dining room chairs recovered. Curiously Mark selected a dark burgundy colored fabric. If I remember correctly, it is the color the chairs were when I was a child. He thinks he remembers the color. But he wasn't born yet.
When Mark places his grandparents' walnut dining set in his newly rehabbed house, it will be as it was when Peter Rocco and Della Serritella became husband and wife in 1926. Now the table will serve those of us here, those to come, and those in our hearts.
That walnut table was built to last, and I know it will. As family does.
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Angela Rocco DeCarlo, a former Chicago journalist, resides in Orange, CA, with Dan; Mark lives in LA, Michael and Danny moved from Chicago after college to keep the family together. They are our heros for doing that.
