The marriage of my parents My father Dad and Mom were married Oct. 4, 1942 (if I remember correctly).
Dad in uniform as an officer (with leather boots and pants puffing hard on his knee), mom in white dress resolved the lesser evil, as it could allow the rigid and economic hardship of war.
The marriage was celebrated in the Church of Martorana with the greek-orthodox rite, who also was a child - on subsequent occasions - I learned to know, with all those highly symbolic ritual. How
: the bride and groom put by papas under one veil, the solemn moment when they drink from the same glass that then the papas is to break the floor behind the altar, the ritual turn around the altar three times preceded by papas hieratic and solemn chants, the dense smoke of incense, the iconostasis.
All these I have seen in years in marriages with the greek rite which I attended (from that of my Uncle Goofy) and my fervent imagination has applied to the memory of the wedding of my parents.
tells me that my cousin Luciana mother kept a small album of photos taken that day and kept it somewhere, once she saw it, because mom told her to take it.
But mom, in different circumstances, had previously stated its determination to destroy herself a series of documents from the past that concern. So now, I do not know what happened to that album.
Sooner or later I'll have to start looking in some of the wardrobe closets where mom kept old papers and things of his past.
The marriage was "poor man" in the sense that everything was reduced - by necessity - to a minimum. The ceremony and then the outline of a small reception in a room adjacent to the same church. Four gifts from friends and kin, including: a complete edition of the works of Gabriele D'Annunzio in many blue-bound volumes, a carved wooden center table, a basin, made to hold the nut in the center of which - on a small ledge - sitting on the legs stood back a little squirrel with a nut trapped between the front paws.
The marriage took place in the interval between the end of the period spent by my father at the Infantry Officers Training School of Spoleto and its assignment to a permanent location.
In fact, shortly after the wedding, my mother got the transfer (previously taught at a middle school) in Battersea, where his father was shelved by the Company pending destination.
Soon, in fact, went to the front of Africa.
Later, Dad told me he was not party to the case: the war was lost and, perhaps, he could avoid it. But he - he told me - he said he asked to go egualmente.Mi also that this had not said anything to Mom: it was a secret, I seemed to understand.
Party Dad, Mom returned to Palermo: he had no reason to sit at Battipaglia.
Mom was, in effect, a "war bride".
Dad, which stood in Tunisia, was taken prisoner with his troops by allied forces just one month after his arrival in Africa and from there interned in a tough field, operated by the French, in the deep south of Algeria, in the desert.
He returned only in 1946 or so.
their marriage vividly remember a single image: a picture of it in black and white, grainy, which I saw as a child and now I do not know where to find their own. In the picture you can see Mom and Dad leaving the church smiling mother with her smile a bit 'timid, rather charming dad in the eye, but his face always serious. Dad solemn in his uniform as an officer, mother mild in her white dress, faces blurred around the young and elderly relatives. But everything is very blurred in my memory.
I was not there, of course, but at the same time through stories and images seen for a few moments, now missing or unavailable, I was there.
And I realize that the memory of things past the family should be preserved in every way. The sentence is inevitable that the memory fades slowly and inevitably becomes blurred. When there
time to do this, see more, thinking that - later - there will always be adequate time and opportunity and imagining that our memory does not betray us ever.
When it comes time to finally fix things once and for all, making memories in the history here that we realize that what seemed clear and crisp definition and lost in the meantime, lots of details, they sank forever .
now I think, on balance, that our children should be set as did Tiziano Terzani with his son, when he realized that his end - a little later - was sealed. Far
their gift of our stories, to satisfy their curiosity about our past, but ask them in listening to reciprocate and "registration" of the stories.
To achieve this there must be a shared desire (I would say more, the desire to "give themselves" to each other) bilateral and acceptance of impermanence.
Now that Mom is gone I do not have to drink no source of memories and stories.
solto my memory remains flawed and uncertain.
