World Turning

I grew up about 50 yards away from my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and two cousins. When I was young,  very young, about ten, let’s say, I would sometimes come home from school and ask my mom if I could go over to see my grandparents for a while. So I’d cut through the next door neighbor’s lawn and crawl under the wooden fence that separated that middle house from theirs. In the spring, the fence had lilacs and forsythia growing on it that I would have to push aside to sneak through.

I’d go inside by the basement door that was in the garage and turn left. In a cool, dark room in the back, my grandfather did tailoring work for the local ladies in town. I’d hear the rhythm of his sewing machine that he ran with his foot on a wrought iron panel underneath as I entered and he would look up, his tape measure draped around his neck. I’d kiss him hello, he’d ask me how school was. Then he’d quiz me in Italian on the days of the week and the months of the year that he was starting to teach me to say by writing them out in neat columns on the cardboard backings that came in the pressed shirts from the laundry. “Tuesday – Martedi. February – Febbraio”. Then I’d go upstairs and my aunt, Zizi, would grab me, pinch my cheeks and ask if I was hungry. I’d say no and she’d make me a snack anyway.  The yellow wall phone would ring, and it would be my mom, ostensibly calling to say hello to Zizi but in all likelihood, checking to make sure I made it across the 50 yards of uninterrupted lawn without incident. While they chatted, I’d walk down the short hall to the bedrooms and go see my grandmother. She would be seated in her upholstered swivel chair at the foot of her bed, close to the TV, watching AS THE WORLD TURNS.  She’d smile at me and ask me to sit in the chair with her and tell me what I’d missed that day on her “story” – the one that she never missed, that helped her to perfect her English and that made her smile that unbelievable, beautiful smile I will work hard to never forget.

This week, I will hand in my last writing assignment for AS THE WORLD TURNS. It will go off the air on Friday, September, 17, 2010, roughly 38 years after any one of those many afternoons with my grandmother and 53 years after it’s debut. It’s been an honor to be part of this story as it ends.  I am grateful to everyone there for the opportunity to help ease the show into memory. And I hope my grandma, “Mom” as we all called her, would have been proud to know that I had a tiny part in helping some other grandmothers and granddaughters create their histories together.  And I hope those granddaughters remember, if nothing else, how good her smile made them feel while the credits rolled over the spinning globe, and a nice sounding man would declare, always with a degree of hope in his voice: “Tune in tomorrow for the next episode of AS THE WORLD TURNS”.

-May 24, 2010