Nonna Clemy

Nonna Clemy

He is good because he cares… That was what someone said about Obama…
This reminds me of my mother… She is good because she cares…
That is why she and her sister Lina took care of their mother, Nonna Clemy…

Nonna Clemy loved to travel and see things… so her daughter Rosy (my mother)… took her in a ship cruise of the Mediterranean… that was when Nonna Clemy was 90 years old… and could barely see due to the cataract in both eyes…
My mother used her connections to be seated at the captain’s table, for the whole trip… She did all that for her mother because she cared…

Nonna Clemy split her time between Paris, at Lina’s and Brindisi with her younger daughter Rosy, my mother… she was treated like a queen by her whole family…

When in Paris she was going every Wednesday afternoon to see her brother Gustave… who was afflicted with Parkinson Disease… and see the remaining brothers and sisters of the Riches clan…

Every spring her daughter Rosy would take the train for a two day trip to Paris… and take her mother to Brindisi and take care of her for the summer… Although for Nonna Clemy the family was far away she never complained on that fact… I guess my mother learned from her mother never to complain about things which are beyond your control…

Smile to life and life will smile to you…

Smile to life...

Smile to life… and life will smile to you

My mother died two days ago… she was in Brindisi in a hospital…
Her name was Rosetta Abouskela Favia…Rosy for short…

My mother was a very jovial person… her motto was “Smile to life and life will smile to you”… and she really lived with a smile…

I was thinking… what if she is with Tikva, what would she do… she would take charge and make sure that her great granddaughter has all she needs… because that is what my mother did… take care of people…

When I was four I went to kindergarten… my mother was picking me up from school (called Homecraft House)… and on the way we passed by the house where she lived when she was a teenager… The apartment was on the mezzanine floor… and my mother showed me where her room was… and she told me that she was sometimes sneaking out by jumping out of the window… she must have been quite precocious…

When she was fifty her husband Guido had a heart attack and died two days later… It was the first time he had a heart problem… so sudden a departure… Yet my mother took it with a lot of courage… she had a son of fifteen to take care of… my brother Giorgio…

Why did she stay in Brindisi… instead of moving to Milan or Paris… where she had family… instead of staying in the deep south of Italy…

Except for a brief period in Venice, my mother had always lived in southern Mediterranean… in Alexandria where she was born… in Athens, in Haifa, in Beyrouth and in Brindisi… She felt more comfortable in that part of the world… people are warmer and more hospitable… what is a pity that she became a widow that early in her sojourn in this port city…

My mother had a full life… and she made the best of situations… always… whatever the hurdle… When my wife Orit left the house… my mother hopped on a plane to take care of her granddaughters, and stayed quite a while…

Whenever Gal or Sharon had some friends traveling in Europe… they were given two addresses… either my Aunt Lina’s (my mother’s sister) in Paris… or if they were going to Greece, to my mother’s house, in the dead center of Brindisi where they could take the ferry to Greece…

That of course is after being fed with a meal of the best Mediterranean cuisine…

I’ll miss you Mamouni… I certainly miss your cooking… how you made things out of nothing, whether it is in the kitchen… or in repairing a suit I burned when ironing… I always knew that if I needed something… I could call you…

Ciao Mamouni, je t’aime mamman, Iassou Kiria Rosy… Sagapo miteramou…

SMILE TO LIFE AND LIFE WILL SMILE TO YOU

Guns

Guns

The other day I was looking an Italian detective film on TV and the Police Chief was commenting on guns… he was telling his assistant that he was without a gun… we must learn to live without using a gun… we are not God… our life is fulfilled without it…

That made me think… Why is it that all TV series, except for sit-coms, all entail guns and death… the whole alphabet of abbreviations CSI, CIA, FBI, NCIS, ATF… etc… involve guns… and death…

Then I started to think… how many people I know own a gun… ONE… This guy, I knew a long time ago… told me that he had a gun collection (which I never saw)… his name is Bob G…

Other than that nobody I know has a gun… so why is it that so much of the entertainment, and unfortunately news too, we are shown involve guns…

Are guns such a necessity that a show will be unsuccessful unless someone is killed by a gun… is the NRA philosophy so much impregnated in our daily lives… that we absolutely need their tacit blessing…

I wonder how long it will take for the Networks to devise a “reality kill” show… or we will let the armed forces and the police force with that priviledge…

A Winner

A Winner

My grandchild is a very social person… One thing she dislikes is playing games where she may lose… Instinctively one may say… She has to learn to be competitive… Does she… is this a necessary ingredient to life in the XXI Century… Must we always compete with one another…

Should we direct our children towards playing games where the sole objective is winning… preferably with some destructive violence… that was certainly remnants of a XX Century mind… but that frame of mind can be stopped… If one creates games that makes one forget having adversaries… just the joy of enjoying one self…

Sounds like a nostalgic hippie… but I lived the first sixty five years of my life without having a single fistfight… yes I had competitors in business but I was thinking of winning… in a win win situation… rather than beating my competitor… and so far it worked…

The other day I went to NASA Ames Center to watch the launch of the Kepler Mission Spacecraft… In Search for Habitable Planets… It is a mission where the spaceship’s… telescopes will look for other planets similar to Earth… thus increasing the probability of it being inhabited… results are predicted in three and a half years…

What I found totally out of place was that this very noble intergalactic mission was preceded with the USA national anthem…

If there is a habitable planet with intelligent life… and are looking… what shall they think of us…

A Day In The Life...

A day in the life…

A day of intensive thoughts… Went for my walk with Bill, and told him about the interview with Ninoslav Randjelovic, I saw yesterday on Russia Television… Nino, a Serb Movie Director was complaining that he was unable to get anyone interested in the disappearance of some 1,300 people from Kosovo over the last ten years…
Pouf… these people disappear “without a trace”… like they never existed… none were found… none escaped… no remains… nothing… and nobody cares…
His theory was that they were victims of a trade in “body parts”… apparently bodies go for a million Euro each… you do the math…

Is this for real… is there a post nazi world which allows the killing of individuals as in a slaughterhouse… what are we becoming…

Later, on the same day… I heard that the catholic bishop (which I refuse to give him the importance of mentioning his name)… who refuses to acknowledge the holocaust, has been found in Argentina… and the Argentino government told him to leave…
I thought that it might be good to send him to Guantanamo… for a refresher…

I then saw on PBS a program on Himmler’s doctor… who saved some 60,000 Jews and Gentiles…

Another program I saw (on PBS) was on slavery and their ancestral roots… one of the people interviewed was Mae Jamyson… the first black woman astronaut… I was thinking, when she looks up and says “i’ve been up there…” what a feat… from slavery to astronaut…

A Doll

A Doll

When Gal was four… we were living in Paris at that time… we came to California on vacation. In addition to Disneyland… the San Diego Zoo and other marvels… there was one place Gal was in awe… ToysRus…

Being at the Barbie age… she wanted to get a couple of Barbies… one of them was a black female Barbie… she already had a Ken… so she bought some dresses and some other stuff… She might remember what other stuff we got…

About a year later we went to Florida on vacation… Gal wanted a doll so we stopped in a Woolworth in Miami and went to the toy department looking for the Barbie section… and we found it, but… impossible to find a black Ken… Luckily one of the sales clerk spoke French… and he had heard Gal ask about the black Ken… he interjected and told us… black dolls are far from being popular over here… When I told him that they were sold in California… he told me that California is different…

Today… some thirty odd years later… I wonder what color dolls did the Obama children bring with them in the White House…

Gratitude

Gratitude

This morning, as I was driving in San Jose I crossed two “bums” as my friend Bill defined them…. I must say it surprised me… because Bill is very learned in his knowledge of the English language… why did he choose that term… to depict these two unfortunate men crossing the street…
Are we really set to consider ourselves in an “us versus them” world… a world divided into privileged and under privileged… and if that is so… where do I fit in… have I graduated upstairs… because I look far from looking like a “bum”…
But did I… did I graduate from “bummery”… just because I am clean and drive a car…
When I look at these “bums”… I feel a deep sadness, knowing that I detached from them just because of sheer luck…
Lucky that I stopped taking Requip and went through Deep Brain Stymulation (DBS)… and for that I am deeply indebted to the Neuro-surgery staff at Stanford…

Thank you…