Josephine
Lisa Marie Miller
©
Copyright 2024 by Lisa Marie Miller
|
Photo courtesy of the author. |
The
person who lovingly said “yes” the most was also the
person who knew how to say “no.” On March 5, 2025,
Josephine Mistretta Albano would have turned 110. Still, my
grandmother did manage to grace Brooklyn and the world for
ninety-eight years, moving sweetly and marching assertively through
the early twentieth century, right into the next millennium. She lost
neither her smile nor her stride as she saw the Jazz Age, Great
Depression, World Wars, changing times and technological innovations.
She belonged to all of them, that is, as far as she chose to. I was
just fortunate that she belonged to me.
I
never lived more than a few houses, blocks or a single staircase away
from my maternal grandmother. She, herself, had grown up not very far
away from our own Brooklyn streets. Both the daughter and wife of
Italian immigrant men, she was used to being told “No.”
Still, although a fully willing and model helper, even as a young
child, whether setting the table for her overworked mother or holding
her youngest sibling on her lap, she nevertheless refused to give up
other things that were important to her. Long styles hardly suited
her frizzy black locks so, ignoring the protests, she emerged with
the new, fashionable short hair of the 1920s. She loved her family,
but she also loved her handsome, young Italian fiancé. A fancy
bridal feast and special white gown would never happen amid all her
father’s resistance, but a wedding did. The nineteen-year-old
Josephine got married in a big hat in a small, empty church, with
only a pair of cousins to witness; she had chosen to elope. When I
asked her years later if she had climbed out the window and down a
ladder, she simply said, “No, I just walked out the door with
my suitcase.” It hurt her to hurt her parents but she also knew
she could not hurt herself. Even with her new husband, the devoted
wife was still devoted to preserving her chosen identity, as she
repeatedly replaced the lipstick that got repeatedly thrown out. The
story of young people asserting their appearance and romantic choices
may be an old one as each new generation tries to push forward. Yet,
my grandmother also had no trouble pushing backwards, as well. Her
first experience as a working woman lasted only a day. She had
decided her heart was in homemaking, not in a date factory. She quit
and spent her fifty-nine cent salary on some candy. “Gram”
continued through the years doing what she loved best, giving to her
own family now, as she had to her mother and many siblings. Still,
this woman, barely five feet tall and of petite build, had loving,
gentle brown eyes that still flashed “No” when she deemed
it called for. “You have to wear a dropped waist dress,”
one suitable for a seventy-seven year old, she heard and ignored, as
she went to have her dream green satin bridesmaid style gown made for
my wedding. Gram caused harm to no one but that did not mean Spunky
the cat could sneak upstairs and help himself to the middle of her
bed. She had no trouble “leading” him out time and time
again, while he made himself a “dead weight.”
Sometimes,
the dead weight was the stubbornness of others hurting someone she
loved. With her open, generous heart, she went all out to help when
no one else would, whether it was temporarily storing a grandchild’s
things or lending some money to an out-of-luck sibling, she was the
one to give the compassionate “yesses,” just as she had
given the necessary “nos.” She agreed to reach out to
talk with that difficult person in my life to make some peace for me
or to help me make private calls from the drugstore pay phone to see
if my boyfriend could spend New Year’s Eve with us. When
old-fashioned family opposition had squelched her kind offer of her
couch, she assisted me while I looked for his chance at a 1 a.m. car
service ride home. Throughout the years, my friends and boyfriends
always found a steady welcome from her; her door was always open.
That door was also open at any time and in almost any situation. As I
worked into the night finishing a gargantuan school project, I made
repeated trips to her then upstairs apartment delivering printed work
that she checked for omitted pages. Years later, when I was working
into the night caring for a baby, my grandmother, now in her
mid-eighties, still said “yes,” or rather, just offered
to ease my childcare burden for a day without even being asked at
all.
Josephine
was kind to everyone, thoughtfully true to herself, bound to those
she loved, but not mindlessly tied to any time or place. She lived
the span of the twentieth century and took what she chose. Gram was
filled with stories of the past: being the first house on the block
to have electricity, her mother scrubbing at the washboard,
vegetables bought from the horse-drawn cart, life with ten siblings
in one space, sparsity during the Depression. Her tomato sauce would
be nothing but homemade and as comforting as the authentic Italian
prayer she taught to replace nightmares with beautiful dreams. A
special dinner greeted us every Sunday afternoon and on holidays, she
happily busied about the kitchen, preparing and serving meals in a
house filled with uncles, aunts, cousins and us…enjoying the
traditions she held on to so dearly. Determined to hold on to the
old-fashioned when it could not be topped by the new, her antique
furniture and sewing machine still adorned her bedroom in the
twenty-first century. As she put aside my gift of a little pink
calculator in favor of adding for oneself and occasionally broke into
a Charleston, she kept the best of the past as a treasure, one that
she shared with everyone else, just as she gave me the very necklace
she had received when she, herself, became fifteen.
Yet,
with her rich life in the past, if one were to ask my grandmother
which time she preferred, she would unequivocally answer, “today,”
when ladies did not look like sad old women with no makeup, huddled
in drab clothing, and when she had a modern stove, refrigerator,
washing machine and microwave. There is a picture in the family album
of Gram posing with her new color television set. “Yes, bring
it on,” she seemed to say, “but let’s also not let
go of the good things we’ve had!”
As
she picked and chose from the decades, granting her “yesses”
and “nos” where she saw fit, her open nature always said
“Yes” to fun. Gram was the person to go to when you
needed someone to dress up in a costume for a wacky photo, sit beside
you on the kiddie rollercoaster or sing lyrics into a tape recorder.
My father, uncle and grandfather once decided to challenge someone to
a soda-drinking contest. Gram was the obvious, willing choice for any
silliness and made nine dollars for the three dollars they each put
up per glass. As she whirled around her apartment cooking and
cleaning, her mind spun her own comic plots and she was ready to
strike the unsuspecting friend or family member. This sweet, petite,
feminine woman was not beyond handling a mouse to scare my terrified
grandfather, unleashing water gun droplets on my mother lounging in
the backyard or sprinkling tiny bits of paper onto a sleeping
person’s head as he snoozed at the table. Even the dentist was
not immune to her antics as he jumped to find her sitting in his
chair wearing plastic vampire teeth. She said “Yes” to
fun and silliness with a youthful “just because” to
delight and surprise, and her own determined, active mind led her to
create her own surprises as well. Sometimes, they were thoughtful,
caring ones, as on an especially quiet Easter when I sat bored in my
wide-brimmed, ribboned hat and she quickly and quietly placed a fancy
Victorian teacup from the china closet in front of me, filled with
some fresh-brewed solace.
She
could always surprise you but you could always count on her.
Josephine knew how to play, but she also knew how to pray. Although
brought up in the Catholic tradition, she found that connecting with
God was an act of the heart. A “sometimes” churchgoer,
she felt that spirituality and prayer meant more than attending
services. As she dealt others tangible acts of kindness, she also
prayed for them, even housing tiny statues of saints atop the frames
of some family pictures.
A
pair of door-to-door nuns chose her house as the place to have their
lunch. My grandmother met resistance and suffered disappointment
throughout many personal events in her life, but the world at large
would say “Yes” to letting this special woman into their
lives. People sought the delight and comfort of her company or ran to
her as their confidante. Her great grandchild sensed her warmth on
his very first newborn day; he drank three full ounces from the small
infant bottle only with her and he went on as a baby to eat his best
when snuggled on her lap. I asked her to be his godmother, just as
she had been mine for my confirmation over twenty-five years earlier,
when I proudly took the name “Josephine,” a name she
prized as “antique.”
One
might not know what Josephine, or “Gram,” or “Aunt
Jo” would do at any moment or even be able to guess what she
had done as she fearlessly said “yes” to whatever she
decided to. One might not know that she fashioned her own white
eighth grade graduation dress, that she played a comic, ragged “bum”
to riotous laughter in the school play, that she won a first place
medal for the hundred yard dash or that she could play the piano by
ear. One might not know which of her favorites would be on her
television on any given day. Perhaps it would not surprising for a
grandmother to be viewing The Young and the Restless,
but it
might be unusual to find Godzilla movies, motorcycle racing,
professional wrestling and automotive repair on her watchlist. Those
who say “yes” and “no” thoughtfully and
individually in life will present such unpredictability. It was no
wonder that her nephews listened wide-eyed to her fictions about how
she got her pearl brooch while “deep sea diving.”
My
grandmother welcomed with both energy and patience all the good
things the ongoing years could bring to her and to those she loved.
Yet, with her youthful spirit and glow, she said “No” to
“age,” forever describing herself as thirty-nine. It may
not have been a great idea when she still chose to climb a ladder at
ninety, but the message itself was great. The number, itself, did not
matter because all the numbers mattered equally—the years of
the great grandmother, the young wife, the child.
On
November 12, 1922, little seven-year-old Josephine Mistretta was shot
by a stray bullet from a Brooklyn family brawl as she took her baby
brother to buy an Eskimo Pie ice cream. The bullet entered her arm
and luckily exited it right near her heart, but she
had lost a
great deal of blood and required a transfusion. The newspaper stated,
“Josephine will probably die.” The front page of the
November 13 Brooklyn Daily Eagle featured a black and
white image of
a little girl with big brown eyes and dark curls sitting upon the
neighborhood traveling “photo pose” horse. Josephine did
not die; they could not have been more wrong. What lived on in the
world for another ninety-one years and what has lasted in people’s
minds through today is the spark, the special essence of a
person—here, the extraordinary, multifaceted spirit of a person
who lived deliberately and who would describe herself as a housewife
from Brooklyn.
Lisa Marie Miller lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York in the
USA, where she encourages students to find the rich stories in their
own personal lives. She has had a few writing credits: two poems
published in a small prayer journal, a poem posted on the “Society
of Classical Poets” website, two essays on teaching, included
in a small volume on film and a collection about using interesting
themes, respectively, and a conference paper essay on clothing and
decorating that was contributed to the conference journal.
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