A Long Story Short
2015; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 30; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1007/s11606-015-3230-9
ISSN1525-1497
Autores Tópico(s)Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis
ResumoA s a sinewy young boy in interwar Italy, his friends in the town of Nocera Terinese had called him BMaginot,â fter the seemingly impregnable French line of defense against her Teutonic neighbors to the east.Like his father, he had been apprenticed to a carpenter, from whom he had learned his trade.At the height of the Great Depression, he had made himself a working wooden bicycle (working, that is, when pointed downhill), those of metal and rubber being then cost-prohibitive.My father had emigrated from Italy to the United States in 1951, making a living for himself and his family as a carpenter and general contractor.I remember marveling as a little boy at his hands, really more paws than hands, and his massive fingers.Would I, too, have them when I grew up?Alas, no.Nor, unlike my surgeon brother, did I inherit his manual dexterity.No, indeed; I became a general internist.After putting his two sons through medical school and retiring thirty years ago, he'd had no trouble keeping busy, what with family, friends, travels with my mom, reading, Italian music (from vinyl through 8-track through cassette through CD through MP3), and tinkering in his basement retreat on various woodworking projects.He remained physically active and vigorous, working out and walking daily.Through it all, there was his enthusiasm for the oral tradition in which he had been raised, for the telling and retelling of stories and proverbs of Nocera, both to preserve the past and to glean from it lessons for today and tomorrow.Each year when late spring rolled around, he and mom would return to his native Calabria for the summer, where he would enjoy the local wine and produce, and the banter with other speakers of his lingua madre who, like him, had been raised in the oral tradition of southern Italy.There, too, he kept a bicycle, this one a Bianchi with Campagnolo parts.Come September, they would return to the States.For the last 15 years or so, since moving from Long Island to Florida, the garage had replaced the basement (basements being hard to come by in Florida) as his retreat of choice, and the summer migration offered the added bonus of a respite from the stifling summer heat and humidity of Tampa Bay.This spring, though, would be different.At eighty-seven, he developed profound weakness, and workup disclosed a microcytic anemia.On endoscopy, he had a bleeding duodenal ulcer, the appearance and location of which raised the specter of malignancy.Abdominal CT revealed a mass in the head of the pancreas.Instead of effortless rapport with
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