Keeping with Kings.

January 10, 2008 also marks my Pop's 80Th trip around the sun. Can you imagine? The man's pretty amazing, he takes nothing for granted and has been in amazement of life every step of the way. He's not one to be fussed over, but does enjoy a certain amount of quality time with his tribe. He's the type of father that insists that all the kids come home for the annual family, but the noise gets so deafening that the novelty wears off and he'll beat a hasty retreat. But he does this in the spirit that the kids are having a grand time on their own, so his efforts are successful.

Growing up he was a spirited lad. He had two roads ahead of him, jail or the marines. Carpe diem, Semper Fi; off to the military he went. He came back to the states after his service to fall in love, marry and have a family. After the first child came he must have seen that his time was limited (more kids would be a-comin') and he dumped my brother with his parents and fled to Europe, at least until the money ran out. He said the experience was one of the best things he ever did. Dad's sense of living is legendary. It would aid him in his professional career paths; private eye, insurance salesman, travel agent and rake.

He parlayed his military training, or all the movies he'd seen on base, to becoming a private detective. He won't say much about this time in early career but he does have amazing tricks for unlocking doors, translating Farsi, and remembering license plates (or just the alphabet game we'd play with them). As he would regularly expose insurance fraud, he found that there was more money and less danger in selling the stuff. Dad taught us that if you did what you loved, the money would always follow. Insurance lead it's way to travel insurance and then to bringing in most of Syracusa, Sicily to populate the greater Hartford, CT area, and selling the tickets for steamship and eventually air travel. Dad worked with his father in an agency that spanned nearly forty years in a volatile, adventurous industry. Dad puts his mind to something, it goes places.

After the loss of his first wife, my siblings' mom, the neighborhood came right into insulate the young widower and four precious children. The local nuns were on hand, the grandparents on both sides, the cousins and especially the neighbors. The lady around the corner took in the family laundry to ease the burden, and to ensure propriety in the time of mourning, stitched up all the 'front doors' on his boxer shorts with red thread. She did it in little cross-stitches. The neighborhood was a pretty safe and wonderful place to grow, because of people like Mrs. Hutch. These people always looked out for each other. Dad always believes that the good people find each other. He believes that what you put out in the world, will come back to you. He eventually fell in love again and brought two more disciples into the world; Me and the baby. We became all he feared; loud, outgoing, sensitive, social, talented and loyal children that will take anything down that messed with our family. In other words we became six chips off the block.

When one of us Malaprop's (wrong word, wrong time, wrong use) we can look to our Pop for that trait. When the kids start the giggle that can drive a spouse from the room, especially if more than two of us are together, Dad only has himself to blame. Our sense of humor all falls from the gnarled tree that Uno, developed. Dad began to call himself Uno more regularly in the mid nineties. It was not that he had an overdeveloped penchant for the card game, it was that he was number one over this tribe and for clarity sake, he should bear the standard. It was about this time in the nineties when the family began breeding pretty regularly. I had nephews and nieces popping up all over the place. There were so many christenings that I was running out of vests and bolo-ties to wear to them. To keep everyone abreast on the families and their doings Uno took pen to paper to start desktop publishing the first volume of 'Spatagram'. In it you would find who to pray for, who to congratulate and who's birthday you just missed. This volume of Spatagram would deal categorically with the households and fill everyone in on what was coming up in the way of events. Yep this is just pre-Internet and it was looked forward to every month. Uno's verve for life was ahead of the cyber-curve, who knew? Uno would always sign off on his editions "with love from Uno and Due"; Due, number two, was to throw props to Moms. He would also wrap the edition with a quote. His most used was, "the child who heeds, sucks up to, calls, cooks for, dotes, honors his parents, is the child remembered in the Will. Thank god we weren't raised competitive or there's no telling what kind of forces of nature we would have all grown into.

Happy Birthday Dad, Pa, Pop, Master Anton, Spats, Uno and King Of All You Survey; we're looking up to you as what we hope to be. Except for how you dress. My vests and bolo ties aside, you are the owner of green corduroy pants with red lobsters stitched into them.