Gumption

 

My people weren’t fancy – not on either side of my family. My maternal grandfather came from a tiny town in Sicily that we reached via a hair-raising drive requiring the skills of an Indy race car driver. To this day, raw meat hangs in the butcher shop window, and the evening’s entertainment is a stroll with your neighbors. (It’s far more fun than it sounds!)

My paternal grandfather ‘s family was equally salt-of-the-earth. He was born in an Ohio village that at its largest boasted fewer than 300 souls.. The steeple of his family’s parish church still dominates the skyline.

It wasn’t an idyllic life. His father died at 49, while Grandpa was still a teenager. That left his mother with at least one dependent child at home. That younger sister also died a few years later, of diphtheria. Although I didn’t seek out their graves, they are surely among those buried in the cemetery not far from that church.

Grandpa Chimera didn’t have it any easier. As a young man, he and his surviving siblings traveled those twisting roads to Palermo, where they embarked for the United States. In his New World, he suffered the loss of his wife just months after my mother’s birth.

My grandparents were not pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps successes. Both of my grandfathers were blue-collar workers, and Grandpa Chimera’s English was comprehensible but broken all his life. Grandpa Shuler, as I recall, didn’t go beyond eighth grade.

But I am proud to come from this stock. I am proud that they had the gumption to leave their small worlds for what they saw as something better, although perhaps also frightening.

I need to remember the courage that produced me.