No Trip To Italy and Losing a Good Friend

This is one of the sad stories of my life. This one comes from high school, when I was a senior. My school planned the mother of all senior trips: a trip to Rome and Florence, Italy in January 1967. The trip was announced in November so we would have time to prepare for the trip. The cost was very reasonable for those day--$300. That included airfare, meals, transportation on the ground in Italy--everything. I was so excited about going on this trip which would also visit Florence to see the amazing artwork in that city. In fact, most of the trip was centered around art in Italy. The nuns and priests from school were chaperones as well as parents.


I remember coming home and telling my parents with the letter that the school sent to them. I was so sure they would be happy and think that it was an amazing opportunity for a 17 year old. But I was wrong. My mother thought it was not a good idea. She felt teenagers should not be going off to Italy because they wouldn't appreciate it. And it was a lot of money for my family. I tried the approach of telling my mother I would look for a job to help pay for the trip, but she did not approve of the trip and said so. A job to pay my way would not matter. My father said nothing. Raising children was my mother's business, not his. Especially not expressing his opinions about his daughters.

When I went to my grandparents' house for dinner the next week, I told my grandmother about the trip and my mother's reaction. My grandmother was horrified that my mother had reacted that way. That weekend, we were summoned to my grandparents' house and my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bob were there too. My grandmother wanted to talk to my parents about the trip to Italy. She, my Aunt Elsie, and my Uncle Donald (Elsie and Donald were my godparents) attempted to talk to my mother about the trip, pointing out the benefits to me of the trip and saying that it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go on such a trip. They all offered to pay for my way on the trip, they felt that strongly about it.

But my mother also felt strongly, in the negative, about the trip. She didn't want to accept money from my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, I think, because she would feel beholding to them. But more important, she did not feel that 17-year-olds should be going to Italy. We wouldn't appreciate it; we would not obey the chaperones, And, I will never forget this, she said, "I've never been to Europe; no daughter of mine is going off to Europe when I've never even been there."

I had always thought that parents wanted their children to have opportunities that they never had, but apparently that was not my mother's philosophy. My grandmother begged my father to talk to my mother and explain how important it was that I take this wonderful opportunity, but he would not go against my mother's decision. And it was HER decision. My parents did not discuss it--pros and cons. My mother had decided and that was that. My Aunt Elsie tried to talk to my mother about it and was basically told to stay out of our family business. This she said to her best friend; she didn't want my Aunt Elsie to look like a savior in my eyes, when my mother and I did not get along well. It was a case of my mother asserting her authority over me and what I did or did not do, So I was not allowed to go on the trip (which everyone said was the most amazing time of their lives).

My second best friend Bridget, whom I had been spending a lot of time with since Nancy and her boyfriend were preoccupied with each other. Bridget's mother, a very good friend of my grandmother, invited me to go to New York City for a long weekend while the rest of our class was in Italy. I was thrilled to be asked, and Mrs. Green was paying for everything. My mother said that I could go (she had been to NYC so I guess that's why it was all right). Bridget said something to someone at school about our mini-trip. And my best friend Nancy became jealous. She snubbed me at school and when I asked her what was the matter, she told me to be friends with Bridget but I had betrayed her by agreeing to go with Bridget. Apparently Nancy wanted to go too, but Mrs. Green did not really know Nancy and Bridget was not her close friend the way Bridget and I were. Nancy never spoke to me after she heard I was going to NYC with Bridget. She was cold and aloof and snubbed me and spread rumors about me the whole year after that. I was so sad and crushed that Nancy would do that to me. I couldn't make Mrs. Green take her on the trip, and why shouldn't I go if I was asked and my mother had said yes. It was a terrible thing to lose my best friend over something so silly. It was petty jealousy.

My grandmother, my aunt, and my mother did not have a very good relationship after the offer of the trip was turned down and Grandma and Aunt Elsie were told to stay out of our business. There was always hostility and tension amongst them after that. I still harbor anger with my mother for not letting me go for such a senseless reason. And I only grew closer to my grandmother and my aunt and my mother knew it, and was jealous. I also was angry with my father that he would not intercede and at least discuss it with my mother, or overrule her decision. But he never wanted cross my mother or make her upset, because then she would get extremely angry and out of control. But I was angry with him for not standing up to her, and telling her that she was wrong in this case.

This trip and the fall-out haunted me until I was 50 years old, nearly 51. I decided to take a 12-day cruise in the Mediterranean which visited Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, and Croatia. It was a wonderful experience and made up for the trip for which I had been denied all those years ago.

My Early Years, as Told to Me

Children usually don't have many memories until they acquire language. I think this was true for me. What I know of my very early years comes from stories that were told to me by my parents or other relatives. There were stories about me when I was around the age of one, when I was walking and eating solid food (apparently my mother didn't breast-feed for long, because that wasn't the "modern" thing to do). Some of the stories are funny; some of the stories worry me a little because they make me wonder what was really going on behind the truth of the story. A funny story first: My parents liked Italian food, and Utica had many good Italian restaurants due to the influx of Italian immigrants after World Wars I and II. They would often take me with them to their favorite Italian restaurant, and order me a small bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce, and when I'd had enough to eat, I would dump the remainder to the spaghetti on my head! I was also in my pajamas. I must have looked lovely, sitting in the high chair in my pajamas with spaghetti with marinara sauce streaming down my hair and face, but it was a good signal that I had finished eating, don't you think?

The next story is not quite so funny. We lived on the second floor (the top flat) of a two-story flat at 1603 Holland Avenue in Utica, New York. In the Northeastern United States, these types of houses were very common; it was as if there were two house stuck one on top of another; each was called a flat. When my father would leave home each morning to go to hid teaching job a few blocks away at Utica Free Academy (where he was a building construction teacher and where he and his brothers had attended high school), I would run down the stairs toward the door after him in my pajamas after him screaming and crying," Daddy! Don't go! Don't go, Daddy!" My mother would retrieve me from the bottom of the stairs, and I would sob all the way back to our flat. And, she later told me, she would cry and I would cry for hours. Apparently, my mother was quite unhappy or depressed. She didn't really know anyone in the city except for my grandparents and my Aunt Elsie, her best friend from Virginia and my two uncles. My mother was a very gregarious person and being cooped up in the house with a baby must have been torture for her. When I was a much younger baby, maybe 3-4 months old, she tols me, when my father left for school, I would cry and she would cry, all day long. She must have been depressed, but in those days, no one talked about depression. She really couldn't call her family in Virginia, because that was very expensive.

My mother never talked to me much about my earliest childhood, but when she did, it always involved her crying and being unhappy and feeling alone and isolated. There were no places for young mothers to go and do things. On the weekends, my father and his father were building our house on Valley View Road in New Hartford, which was just a few miles away from our flat and from my grandparents' house on Storrs Avenue in Utica. It was also near my Aunt Elsie and Uncle Bob's house on Sunset Ave. Later they moved to Thieme Place; still later they moved about 20 miles away to Vernon, NY to be closer to Uncle Bob's work at Griffis Air Base where he was a civilian engineer. The only "outsiders" we visited when I was this young age were my dad's supervisor and his wife, Henry and Jo Guilfoyle who lived down the street on Holland Ave from us. Their daughter Connie babysat for me and took me to the movies.

Usually, whenever, we went to visit someone, I went with my parents. They would bring a big navy blue blanket and put it on the floor, and put me on the blanket. I would curl up on it and go to sleep with my toy cat. When it was time to go, my parents would bundle me up in the blanket to take me home. Later on, that same blanket became the blanket that was used on my bed. That blanket, though threadbare, lasted a very long time. There were some spots that were picked nearly clean through where I had soothed myself to sleep, but the blanket just kept on being used just for me.