On another stop of the Subway tour, I did a reading at the Half King in Chelsea. This is a superb Irish literary bar with a very welcoming room for reading and a very desirable venue for authors.
Old college pals as well as friends from California and former students showed up, a nice little turnout. As I prepared myself to go on, dealing with pregame jitters and sipping on a shot of Irish to steel my nerves, a woman rose up from her table and walked over.
“Hi, I’m Patricia.”
No clue. My brain scanned and scanned and scanned and spit out nothing. She cut me a break.
“I’m your cousin.”
It clicked. Yes, she was. I saw it now. A first cousin I quickly calculated I hadn’t laid eyes on for many decades, a daughter of my Uncle Mike and Aunt Ruth. Ruth was Jewish and therefore made for certain ridiculous complications for my ethnocentric Italian American family, but I liked her a lot. She was warm and kind and sweet to me when I was a little boy, and her three daughters were wonderful childhood playmates I thought I would never forget. But as tonight demonstrated, on that point I seem to have been overconfident.
My cousin and her husband, as it happened, lived on the road where my grandparents once had their farm and which was the launching point for my dad’s self-appointed exile, and she had read the book. I had heard from her sister Jen that there was one aspect in particular that they appreciated. The memoir flickeringly brought to life on the page their loving mom, who had died when they were very young, so young in fact that they had precious little memory of her. This knocked me out.
I had made my share of questionable choices in the book, and obviously in my life for that matter, but this was one thing I had gotten a little bit right, even if I didn’t know it, or intend it. Whatever gift I gave her, she had granted me something more precious.
Whose book was this again?