It is difficult to find a literal translation of my name, a charming aspect of many Italian surnames, like Mr. Tadpole or Ms. Courteous. My name is a word that wants to exist but does not. It’s just a name. If you have a name like mine, that’s about all you can say. When you think of me just think of Tom Jones.
My father’s mother was a DeSimone, which means what it says. After all, there are a lot of Simons out there, simple and otherwise, and many of them are Sicilian. They say that my grandmother was cheated out of her inheritance of a thousand acres near Selinunte, which the Persians called paradise, but who can believe it?
All I know for sure is that my grandmother was sent over here at 14 to marry my grandfather, whose first wife died in childbirth and who needed replacing. So they sent my grandmother. This seemed like a good idea to everybody involved, except my grandmother, poor thing, who had the misfortune of being lucky in land but not in love. She was certainly gotten rid of when they sent her to South Philadelphia, which was even more like Mars than it is now.
She told me that she held onto the title of her land until 1936, when she sold it to a cousin who showed up out of nowhere and offered her $400, which she promptly took, since she was now a widow herself, and with eight children - the original Octomom, only with no choice and one at a time.
She had a parchment with a lot of seals and crests, which was very beautiful and which she kept in a trunk under her bed, in one of the two rooms in which nine slept. But it didn’t mean anything to anybody except this cousin, who came over when they didn’t have enough to eat. And $400 was a lot. The title went back to Sicily, which might also have been Mars, and this cousin was never heard from again.
It was all hard to believe, since when I was told this story she was shelling peas – gold tooth, gray hair in a bun stuck with a needle, drooping lobes from earrings inserted at birth, Converse All Stars with holes cut for her bunions under a housedress like a tent and an apron around that. The peas she grew herself, in her enormous garden that was overflowing with vegetables, set by the big stone house where she lived with my aunt and uncle in 1963.
She shelled the peas with hands so knurled it was difficult to see how she did it. This was also true when she peeled an apple, sending one long tendril of peel to the table in seconds. It was hard to pay attention to anything else. And she told me using her English vocabulary of roughly 85 words, which represented about one word per year. All I could think at the time was that if her garden in Merion could deliver so much food, then she did the right thing to take the $400. There’s only so much you can do with zucchini.
