This boy-child came into the world being a fussy baby... and that characteristic followed Carmine for the rest of his life. When Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" became so popular, we used to joke that Uncle Mino was an Italian version of Felix.
I don't remember anyone in the family calling Uncle Mino by his given name of Carmine, except maybe one of his sisters or brothers if they wanted to get his attention quickly. I don't even know how the name of "Mino" came into being, but everyone in the family called him by that nick-name, pronounced as Minnu. When Uncle Mino introduced himself to anyone outside the family, he always used his given name Carmine, and that was also how his signed his legal signature. Come to think of it, no one other than the family called him Mino.
Uncle Mino was neat and tidy as a child, even neater as a young adult, and fastidious as he got older. He wanted his shirts ironed a certain way, his food served on nice-looking china, and his clothing came from only the best men's stores that New York City had to offer. He always said "Buy the best and it will last forever." He always did, and his clothes were always classic, current, and perfectly pressed, and they did indeed last for decades.
During World War II, Uncle Mino was in the Navy and assigned to a submarine. He had such a strong attention to detail at that time of his life that the captain of the ship requested that Carmine be assigned as his valet. (I'm positive that the captain addressed him as Carmine, not Mino.) Uncle Mino would tell us his war stories when we were kids..... how he had to keep the captain's uniforms wrinkle-free, his shoes shined like mirrors, and his medals polished like gold. I distinctly remember one night at my grandmother's kitchen table when my dad told his brother: "Enough with your war stories... while you were shining shoes, I was fighting Germans."
After the War, Uncle Mino became a draftsman, which led him to a career in architecture. He was a brilliant artist, and could draw just about anything with a pencil and a "proper piece of paper," as he called it. New York City was Uncle Mino's favorite place for sight-seeing..... he would walk around the streets with his eyes looking up at the details on the old buildings. Whenever anyone in the family mentioned going into The City, Uncle Mino would tell them "Look up! Don't forget to look up at the buildings!" One of the last structures that Uncle Mino worked on before retiring from the architectural firm was the Jacob Javits Center on W. 34th Street in Manhattan. He retired only because his company started using computers for their designs, and Uncle Mino was definitely 'old school' when it came to his artwork.
When my generation of cousins were kids, Uncle Mino would pay us for the coins we collected on Halloween. In the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of people would give out pennies and nickels to the trick-or-treating kids, rather than candy. Uncle Mino was an avid coin collector, and he just knew that one day he would come across a very rare coin that had been dropped into one of our Halloween bags. If we gave him 60 cents worth of pennies, he would give us a crisp one-dollar bill. Then Uncle Mino would spend hours polishing up those pennies till they were bright and shining, adding the older ones to his collection.
There was an afternoon in the Spring when I was in the 4th or 5th grade, and Uncle Mino came home with a very small lemon tree in a tin bucket. His plan was to take the tree out of the little bucket, re-plant it with good soil in a large ceramic planter, and keep the plant in the corner of Grandma's kitchen near his chair. That particular corner got a lot of sun during the day, and Uncle Mino had visions of that tree growing up to the ceiling and producing enough lemons to keep the family in lemonade. (My grandmother made the best lemonade, which everyone just loved.)
Into the corner went the newly replanted lemon tree.... right into that sunny corner by Uncle Mino's place at the kitchen table. The tree grew taller over the years, and it did indeed reach the ceiling. However, not one solitary lemon ever grew on that tree. Uncle Mino would talk to the tree, remove old leaves very carefully, and he never allowed anyone to water it. His theory was that the tree needed just one consistent caretaker in order to thrive. Of course, the family made a joke over that tree, because it never did produce any lemons, but Mino took care of that tree for nearly 20 years. When I was in high school, my dad got a couple of very small lemons from the store and managed to tie them onto Mino's tree with fishing line. When Mino walked into the kitchen that particular morning, he stopped in his tracks and his mouth opened in surprise..... but within seconds, he realized that bright yellow lemons wouldn't have sprouted from the tree over-night. He quickly removed the lemons, telling my dad that the thin fishing line would cut into the branches of his tree. "Your lemon tree is a lemon," my dad would tell him.
Uncle Mino got married in the early 1950s. I remember his wife clearly, because she was blond and very pretty, and not Italian. They had two children, a boy and a girl. The marriage, however, didn't last. I've no idea why, but if I had to guess, I would imagine my Uncle's fastidiousness would be right up there at the top of the list of reasons for their divorce. Mino's wife left the state of New York, taking the two children with her. The kids were very young at the time, and Mino's ex-wife kept them away from their father and away from the rest of the family. Uncle Mino didn't see his children for the rest of his life. Two years after Uncle Mino passed away, a young man rang my grandmother's doorbell, and told Aunt Dolly that he was Mino's son. Aunt Dolly of course saw the family resemblance, but had to break the news that Mino had died.
In the early 1960s, Uncle Mino met a woman at work named Kathryn. She was the perfect partner for my uncle because she loved The City.... loved to go to Broadway shows, loved trying new restaurants, loved all the energy and madness of Manhattan. Mino and Kathryn would walk around The City for hours, taking in shows, going out to eat, and then walking around just looking up, up, up at the details on the older buildings. We all thought that Mino and Kathryn would eventually get married, but Kathryn told my grandmother "Marrying your son would never work out. I love him dearly but I'd end up killing him." Kathryn knew how fussy and non-flexible Mino was, and she could tolerate his habits on a friendly social basis, but she was smart enough to know that she couldn't live with those characteristics. Mino and Kathryn stayed friends for two decades, until Kathryn passed away. My uncle had gone to her apartment to pick up her for a date, and Kathryn didn't answer the doorbell. Uncle Mino found the superintendent of the apartment building and they both went back to the apartment door with the key. They found Kathryn in her bed, having died during the night..... it was later found out that she died of a heart attack. Uncle Mino was crushed... it saddened him for years afterwards, and he never dated another woman.
Mino loved all of his nieces and nephews as if they were his own children. He was forever bringing us gifts from The City... he would walk around Manhattan on his lunch-hour and if he saw something in one of the stores that would be "good for the kids," he would buy it and bring it home. One such gift was a very expensive telescope that was nestled into a huge wooden box lined with velvet. It was so elegant that Uncle Mino made us all wash our hands before we even touched the box. Mino would carry the telescope into the yard on clear nights, pointing out the constellations and making us memorize their names and the correct spelling of each. We were probably the only kids in the neighborhood who had their own backyard sky show. That telescope was eventually given to my cousin T, who showed the most interest in the sky. Twenty years ago, that same cousin left his job in the corporate world, bought more telescopes, and started his own star-gazing business that is very successful and very fulfilling to this day.
Uncle Mino went through World War II with hardly getting a scratch, thanks to his position as valet for the captain of the submarine he was assigned to during the War. In his mid 70s, Uncle Mino had to be admitted to the hospital for a simple gall bladder operation. Everything went fine... he came home and was told to rest until his follow-up appointment with his surgeon. My Aunt Dolly took care of her brother's every need, not even letting him walk down the stairs to the kitchen for his meals, for fear of disrupting the stitches from the operation. On a sunny March morning in 1999, Aunt Dolly asked Mino what he'd like for breakfast. "You know what? I'd really like some hot oatmeal today," he told her. And those were the last words he ever spoke.... when Aunt Dolly brought his breakfast up on a tray, Uncle Mino was dead, resting on his own pillow in his own bed, with the covers neatly pulled up and folded by his chest. The family would later find out that he died of a heart attack.
With my generation of cousins, and the generation that followed, we all agreed that you had to understand Uncle Mino before you could love him. And without a doubt, we all loved him. There was nothing we asked him for that he couldn't find for us in The City, that magical place where he went to work every day, taking a bus and two trains to get from Grandma's house in Queens to his office building in the heart of The City. When my generation graduated school and began looking for jobs, Uncle Mino would tell us "Go into Manhattan.... go to The City.... it has more to offer than Queens and Long Island." We would ask "More money?" And Uncle Mino would answer "Money? Who cares about money? Manhattan has more history, and that's what counts!"
No comments:
Post a Comment