Traditions

Ya gotta love livin’ baby, ‘cause dyin’s a pain in the ass! --Frank Sinatra

It’s about 2:30 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday. I’m preparing for my sixth annual Super Bowl Party. About a dozen people should cram into the living room of my penthouse apartment in Carnegie. I’m making spaghetti sauce the way Grandma Guerrieri taught me, a recipe she learned from her mother.

Her words of wisdom hang heavy. “Don’t burn the garlic,” she told me. “Not only does it make the sauce bitter, but it’ll stink up the house.” The garlic and onion at the bottom of the pot is now covered up with tomato sauce, a little wine, sugar, salt, pepper, basil and the secret ingredient, baking soda (it cuts the acid … watching it melt into the sauce is a soothing moment, a little like watching Guinness settle).
The sauce simmers. I’m on my second glass of Dago Red. Frank Sinatra’s singing, “Strangers in the Night,” the first album of his I ever heard, on vinyl in my grandparents’ basement. I was about 11, shooting pool with Charlie.

I called home. Normally I’d call Grandma, but she’s not there any more. It’s been three weeks. It hasn’t been a week since what would’ve been her 78th birthday, and what is the eighth anniversary of the night Charlie (her husband and my grandfather, to the uninitiated) went to sleep and didn’t wake up.

Chuck (my father, to the uninitiated) told me I should have been weaned off this. Grandma stopped answering her phone at the nursing home shortly before Thanksgiving. But like my father, I’m a creature of habit. Chuck told me last week that he didn’t know what to do with the time he had now. He’d spent a lot of afternoons after work at the nursing home, looking after his mother and my last surviving grandparent.

Grandma’s birthday usually fell around Super Bowl weekend, but for the better part of the past eight years, I approached this time of the year with a mix of dread and celebration.

The first Super Bowl I really remember watching was XXV (that’s 25, for those of you who only know Roman numerals from Rocky movies). I was XIII years old, and we were all at Grandma and Charlie’s. Grandma was LXV years old that weekend. Whitney Houston sang the best version of the National Anthem at any Super Bowl I’ve ever seen, and the New York Giants beat the Buffalo Bills, XX-XIX, after Scott Norwood missed a field goal to win it for the Bills.

We ate fried chicken. Grandma loved chicken. Charlie hated it, a reminder of diets past, but humored his wife. We ordered in. Grandma was one of those old-school Italian women who always had a meal ready.
I told the Rev. Dave Rhodes as he was preparing for her eulogy that I was 14 years old before I knew shirt boxes normally held shirts, not cookies. I knew that every time I stopped to see Grandma, I could get a meal out of it. Even if I surprised her, she’d ask if I ate, and if I said no, she’d disappear into the kitchen. I’d hear pots clanging and water running, and within 15 minutes, I’d have pasta, bread and butter and a salad.

In my first year of college, the Cleveland Browns decided to pack up and leave town and the Pittsburgh Steelers made it to the Super Bowl, another turn of the knife in the hearts of Browns fans everywhere. The Friday before the Super Bowl was Grandma’s birthday – a milestone for her. She’d turn 70.

I called to wish Grandma happy birthday, and talked to Charlie for what turned out to be the last time. The next morning, Chuck got a frantic call from Grandma.

“I can’t wake up your father.”

I was out all day Saturday, and found out Sunday morning. My friends were in Bowling Green from Youngstown, and drove me home after Super Bowl XXX (the Steelers lost to the Dallas Cowboys, XXVII-XVII…pity Charlie missed it. He always enjoyed watching the Steelers lose).

The funeral was howlingly funny. We remembered the stupid things Charlie did (the funniest of which involved him using a marital aid to massage his scalp and regrow hair) and I ate well. I set back to Bowling Green to finish my second semester in college and grieve.

My junior year in college, I remained in a residence hall, but my friends started moving into houses and apartments. The Denver Broncos were playing the Green Bay Packers. Deep in the recesses of my heart, brain and soul, I thought of Charlie, who died over Super Bowl weekend two years earlier. Charlie had never met a party (or a meal) that he could walk away from. When his brother Kenny was fighting a losing battle against cancer, Charlie and his brothers took up a collection, which they used for a party for Kenny.

I knew that Charlie would approve of a Super Bowl party as a way to keep the reminder of his death at bay. In my mind, I could hear him say “fuck ‘em” at the fates themselves, who conspired to take him on the day after a party for his wife’s 70th birthday, and the day before the Super Bowl, the greatest cause for parties in America.

I spent the afternoon and much of the evening in the kitchen, making pepperoni rolls for the evening. I played to a packed house, and John Elway finally got a Super Bowl victory, defeating the defending champions, the Green Bay Packers.

The next year, I continued the tradition, this time making spaghetti sauce. I received many compliments on The Sauce, which of course I passed along to Grandma. I didn’t get to eat much of it. I was bustling around the kitchen cooking and playing host. Grandma would have approved.

She liked cooking for an audience, but wouldn’t eat. She’d stand at the snack bar with a cigarette in her hand. I don’t know how she did it, but Grandma, her three sisters and her two sisters-in-law could all hold a cigarette with an inch of ash without it moving! After Charlie died, she shed a lot of weight, because she didn’t have that built-in audience to cook for.

So I continued the tradition, cooking spaghetti for Super Bowl parties, even when I moved to Pittsburgh. Last year, though, I didn’t throw a party. I had my own crosses to bear and too many things going wrong in my life. I called Grandma on Super Bowl Sunday, her 77th birthday. I had been home three weeks earlier, watching the Ohio State Buckeyes win the national championship Friday night. I went to Grandma’s on Sunday to watch the Browns and the Steelers in the AFC playoffs.

The Browns jumped out to an early lead. We were ecstatic. Grandma made spaghetti. The Steelers came back and won. Grandma and I swore and threw things at the television. It was our last normal afternoon together.

I was home the weekend after the Super Bowl for a friend’s wedding and Mom’s gallbladder surgery. As it turned out, I would be spending far more time at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.

I visited a friend, who lived in the same apartment complex as Grandma, for pizza and The GodfatherII (which she hadn’t seen). I noticed an ambulance in front of another building.

“That looks like Grandma’s building,” I thought. My mind instantly wandered to the worst. “Naah,” I thought to myself. “If something was bad, I’d get a call.”

Right about when someone tried to kill Frank Pentangeli, I got the call. Mom told me Grandma had fallen and broken her leg. Grandma had to move out of her apartment and into a nursing home. I got her couch. She made me promise not to have sex on it.

About two weeks after moving into the nursing home, Grandma had a heart attack. At least, a doctor told her that. She wasn’t buying it.

“You’re fulla shit,” she told the doctor.

In August, she went into the hospital for organ failure. She had a blown valve in her heart. It wouldn’t heal on its own. Doctors wouldn’t open her up to fix it. She also had kidney failure. We were pretty sure the only way she was leaving the hospital was in a bag.

But she rallied, and went back to the nursing home.

“I don’t understand how she’s still alive,” Chuck said.

“She’s too mean to die,” I told him.

The funeral director, who had known her for most of her life, called her “feisty,” a nice diplomatic way of putting it. Grandma was a lioness. We were all her cubs, and God help you if you came between her and her family. The nurse on duty at South Side Hospital sent Grandma home as her sister lay dying of cancer.

“But my sister’s probably not going to make it through the night,” Grandma said. The nurse remained indifferent. Sure enough, Aunt Phil died that night. The next day, Grandma saw red. A doctor got lippy with her. She cold-cocked him.

Aunt Phil didn’t have insurance, so Grandma started getting bills. She called the hospital with ice water in her veins and rage in her voice.
“I’ll pay ten dollars a week until I die if I have to,” she said.
“Just let me talk to the nurse who sent me home the night my sister died.” She never got another bill again.

Before I left for college, she told me, “Behave or I’ll kill you.” To prove she meant it, she added, “I can just as easily end my life in prison as I can in a nursing home.”

The last noteworthy moment I had with her was before Thanksgiving. I usually saw her on Sunday, hungover and on my way back to Pittsburgh.
But that weekend, I saw her on Saturday. She noticed, and asked me why. I told her – a blonde with cool glasses named Kate agreed to be seen in public with me Sunday evening, to watch a screening of the rerelease of Alien.

“Get my purse,” Grandma said, and pulled a twenty out to help defray the cost of the evening’s fun.

Shortly after that, Grandma quit eating. She quit drinking. She quit taking her oxygen. She kept taking her painkillers. Not answering her phone was an afterthought.

“She made up her mind,” Chuck told me.

She was fairly lucid when I saw her for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
After that, she faded away. Charlie and my mother’s mother died suddenly, a shock if not a surprise. It wasn’t easy. After Grandma died, I discovered it wasn’t much easier when you saw it coming.

For the Super Bowl party, I went through three pounds of spaghetti (well, two pounds of spaghetti and one pound of linguine, if you want to be particular), three loaves of garlic bread, a bottle of Coke and half a case of beer for the Super Bowl, as well as a giant cookie cake brought by a pretty girl of Italian descent, first generation American, just like Grandma.

I got some praise for the sauce, but I didn’t need it. Grandma thought the best compliment she could get for her sauce was silence.

“I don’t hear anyone complaining, so it must be good,” she told me.

The Patriots won. Bill Belichick got his second Super Bowl ring. I watched him win his first playoff game, with the Browns against the Patriots, at Grandma and Charlie’s.

It’s now 11:30 p.m. I turned on Junior Walker and the All-Stars.
They’re singing, “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You.” Charlie would sing it once in a while when he was in a good mood, particularly when he was beating me at cards.

After being on my feet for most of the last 12 hours, my heels are killing me, and I’m exhausted. I’m still young and in relatively good shape. Grandma was well on the other side of 50 by the time I knew her, overweight and a chain smoker. How she did it for years, I’ll never know.

If there is a God and a Heaven, Grandma’s got her feet up and she’s eating. I figure she deserves it.