While On Life's Journey.....

As we gather around Thanksgiving tables I would like you to think about that very special person in your life that greatly influenced who you are today; then, please use Thanksgiving to acknowledge this person out loud. Since I won’t be having Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I would like to acknowledge the special person in my life: My Aunt Mary.

My Aunt Mary was a first generation Sicilian-American, born in 1927, the youngest of nine children. She was 19 years old when I was born. She was already married and had a lovely daughter. Her mother and father immigrated to the US from San Stefano, Sicily, at the turn of the century. She raised in a Little Italy located in New Jersey. I have many memories of interactions with Aunt Mary, her little family (which eventually included a son), and the extended family we shared. The memory that I think actually endeared me to her was conversations between her mother, my mother, and one of her sisters about her attending “hair dressers school” but really going to “secretarial school”. Back then there were jobs that were “acceptable” (hair dresser), and “not acceptable” (secretary—there is a Sicilian word my grandfather would say to describe the women that became secretaries, but it wouldn’t be appropriate here). To prove to my grandfather that she was studying the art of doing hair, every September, right before school started, Aunt Mary would give me a perm. Never came out too good. Picture a fuzzy cue-tip. I always tried to act appreciative because I was pleased that I was able to spend time with her, and, most of all, I didn’t want to give the “secret” up that she wasn’t really into hair. As I listened to those conversations between the adult women of the family talking about my Aunt, I became intrigued with this woman that was different from the traditional role my mother and other aunts had taken. And, there seemed to be something exciting about someone that was doing something she wasn’t suppose to be doing. In my memory, Aunt Mary was always the prettiest one of the entire family, her hair always looked perfect, and she was always smartly dressed. As I started to become a young woman, I watched the way she carried herself, and tried to emulate her. I loved her laugh, her drama, her tears, her joy. She did secure a position as an executive secretary and did very well. She was the first of this deeply religious immigrant Sicilian family to divorce as soon as her father was buried. She was the one that cared for her mother as she developed dementia. She was the one that finished raising two wonderfully bright, beautiful and loyal children. She was the one that eventually married the man she really loved. She is the one that, I perceived, defined what she wanted from life, then created it. I watched, observed, this woman through my infancy, childhood, womanhood, and now as she is in the winter of her life and I am in the autumn of me. She continues to model grace even in aging.

While my mother gave me strength to get through my life, my Aunt Mary gave me the spirit and courage to define what I wanted my life to be, then go out and create. At Thanksgiving, and every day of the year, I am thankful that I was born into her family.

Be well on your journey down memory lane.

MAx Fabry, http://www.lifestylechangescounseling.com