Bonicelli Lucia Spada - Dont sing at the table: life lessons from my grandmothers

Chapter One
Viola

Glamorous Viola at age 20.

Y olanda Perin Trigiani (Viola) stood at five feet five inches, but seemed much taller because she was short-waisted and had long legs. In her youth, she wore wide-brimmed hats, festooned with peacock plumes and adornments (silk flowers, bands of grosgrain, velvet berries), making her appear taller still. Even as a girl she had mature, striking looks and a serious countenance. Her ancestry was apparent in her strong profile, upright posture, and quick stride. Here comes the Venetian, theyd say when she walked down Garibaldi Avenue in Roseto, Pennsylvania.

Violas thick, jet-black hair fell in smooth waves. She had a square jaw, a prominent nose with a high bridge, dark brown eyes that were neither large nor limpid, but dark and intense, with a downcast lid (later in life, she contemplated an eye job when her lids became heavy, and it was difficult to read or to see stitch work up close, but decided against the surgery). She had beautiful lips, straight, strong white teeth, and a wide smile.

Think Joan Crawford.

My grandfather, Michael (nicknamed Dick), thought his Viola was an Italian version of the stunning star.

In fact, there was a bit of Hollywood stardust to their early courtshiptheir first date was to the movies to see Joan Crawford in Montana Moon . (By the way, Viola argued years later that they saw Carolina Moon . When I checked the chronology and told her that Joan Crawford made a movie in 1931 called Montana Moon , my grandmother replied, I was there. It was Carolina Moon . Oh, well.)

My grandparents met when they were in their early twenties (he was four years older than she) in a pants factory in Bangor, Pennsylvania. She was tagged as a leader early on. She excelled as a machine operator, then was promoted to forelady by the age of sixteen. By the time she met my grandfather, she was a pro, with a few years of management experience under her belt and fifty operators to oversee. She mastered every machine on the floor, knew how to get the best out of her operators, and managed them to exceed their numbers and output. Operators that worked under her remember her clear, distinctive voice, which could be heard over the loud buzz of machines in the factory.

Viola and Michaels love story was fraught with near misses. My grandfather left for a time and worked in mills as a machinist first in the Bronx and then in Connecticut. Viola thought shed lost him for good. But he eventually returned to his hometown, the factory, and to her, and, in 1932, they married.

Michael Anthony Trigiani had southern Italian (Bari) good looks, dark hair, full lips, and gray eyes. In pictures, he also seems matinee-idol handsome to me, but that may be Violas influence on the subject.

Back when she was wooing my grandfather, Viola would make him lunch every day and leave it for him in the pressing room. Those lunches became a theme with her. She made Italian delicacies, small, elegant sandwiches made with roasted peppers or thin-sliced capicola on the best bread, buttered lightly and wrapped in bleached, pressed cotton. There were ginger cookies, the size of a quarter, or slices of almond-scented pound cake, or oil pretzels, and always fresh fruit, figs, oranges, or a banana. There were thermoses of hot coffee, or bottles of cold soda. She thought of everythingutensils, napkins, portable ambience.

At the end of the workday, Viola would pick up the empty basket and take it home to repeat the process the next morning. I wondered what my grandfathers coworkers thought when their tough forelady extended this loving and gentle gesture to the man she loved each day.

Viola packed lunches throughout her life for all occasions: hampers loaded for long car trips, goody baskets left on doorsteps for someone in need, and later on, meals on-the-go for social excursions, including her gambling runs with her senior girlfriends to Atlantic City. Viola was not a warm, fuzzy character, but she showed her generosity and caring in those picnic hampers.