Writing Assignment #1: My Birth

I like to think about important things that happened on my birthday. It gives me a sense of historical perspective and maybe lends some mystical significance to that day, May 18, 1960. I love to tell people that Pope John Paul II was born exactly forty years before me. Maybe there is mystical significance in the fact that my family bears the name of Boniface, as in Pope Boniface, of which there were at least nine. I also enjoy the fact that Mt. St. Helens erupted the day I turned twenty, as if the earth itself saw fit to acknowledge the occasion. And somehow I feel proud to know that Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency of the United States exactly one hundred years before my birth, as if I had anything to do with it. I’m less inclined to tell people that on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Plessey v. Fergusson, which held that separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites was a constitutional practice. But then again, maybe there is some mystical connection in the fact that I became the first lawyer in the family (I think.)

But in the great scheme of things, I don’t see May 18 as any kind of historical marker on the great timeline of human events. Rather, when I think of my birth, I see another brick being placed on the foundation of a home built of love and determination that was laid by my grandparents.

The circumstances of my birth could hardly have been more different from those of my grandfather, who was called Ben. While we were both born into families of many siblings, I was brought home from the hospital into the warm security of loving parents and middle America, while Ben was born in an Italian village to unmarried parents and given away in a primitive display of class consciousness. It seems that Ben’s biological father was of noble ancestry, the so-called landed gentry, while his mother was of lesser birth. His parents could not, or would not, keep him, or any of his siblings, and so their sixteen children were dispersed, the girls permitted to remain in the village, the boys sent further away to prevent any future claims on an inheritance.

Ben’s adoptive family was by turns loving and cruel. But the violence imparted by his adoptive father, together with the abandonment of his natural father, eclipsed any warmth bestowed by his adoptive mother. Ben was alone in the world, without roots, as he set across the Atlantic to find a new life in America. He wandered the country; he worked on the railroads. Just two generations later, I was in Catholic school, with seven siblings around me, being shepherded through the tumultuous sixties by parents who placed their children as their highest priority.

And what of my grandmother, the woman who, together with Ben, would begin a new family, in a new land, from scratch? Filomena was two years old, living in Italy with her mother, when her father died in a copper mine in Arizona. He was buried there. When Filomena arrived in Pittsburgh as an immigrant at the age of fifteen, maybe she felt as adrift as Ben. Together they created a life, producing eight children, losing only one to illness during a time of polio, diphtheria and typhoid. Despite the Depression, they provided everything their children would need to succeed in America, the most important of which were love and education. My father, Ben and Filomena’s second son, became a physician, and together with my mother produced eight children of his own, each of whom was brought into a world of love and security such as my grandfather never knew.

The date of my birth will not be recorded in history like that of any Pope. But on the day of my birth, I took my place in the history of my family, another brick lovingly placed upon the foundation of a home where there once was none.