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When I went to vote on Election Day I figured it would be the usual experience. I would wait in line until it was my turn and suddenly it would be a rush to get in there and get the right levers pulled as quickly as I could because other folks were waiting behind me. Normally, I vote alone but after I stepped in there and pulled the curtain closed, the ghosts appeared.
There was my maternal grandfather George. We called him "Grampy." He was raised in a rural Upstate New York town and as a young man he was best friends with the local Klan leader. He discarded that friendship and his faith when he fell in love with a Catholic French-Canadian girl, whom he later married. She died when I was too young to have any memories of her but she was their too. My grandma.
Alongside them were my paternal grandparents of whom I also have no memory. They had been very poor and left Sicily in the early part of the 20th century to find a better life for themselves and their children. Not long after they had settled in Ft. Edward, NY, one son became gravely ill and the local doctor told them they should go back to Sicily because the climate would be better for him. They took his advice but the child died soon after their return to the old country. My grandmother said she never wanted to see Sicily again, and they came back to the U.S. My grandfather worked in a mill and saved enough money to open his own shoe-repair store. In the evenings the store became a classroom where he taught fellow immigrants in the neighborhood to read and write in English, for free.
Some of their children were there too, even the ones who had died before I was born, like my Uncle Joe. He had taken a flesh-wound in France during the war but had managed to carry his seriously injured buddy to safety. There wasn't enough penicillin for everyone so Joe's wound got infected and he died there. His buddy survived to tell the story.
My dad was there too. He had never seen the ugly face of racial prejudice up close till the time he argued, in vain, with restaurant owners in a Southern town to let African-American soldiers, fresh from defending this country in Europe, eat in their dining rooms. He was a loyal Democrat through-and-through, from when he worked on the Kennedy campaigns in the 60s to more recent times, ranting on a daily basis about each new Neocon atrocity during the Bush years and writing LTTE's as frequently as the papers would allow. He had passed a few months after the Dems took Congress in 2006.
All these ghosts had known hardship and struggle, had clung to their prejudices and then discarded them. All had two religions -- one that worshipped God and another that held as most holy an idea -- that we all own this country of ours and we are all responsible for making it a place of welcome. They had neither chosen nor expected the struggles they fought in. We will neither chose nor always expect the ones we face.
The legacy of these ghosts is my cornball notion of what the idea of America means. It is, as I see it, a great dining table in a warm, well-lit place on a stormy night. This table has one rule to follow before you can be seated: bring all your tastiest foods in your covered pots and never turn away anyone from the table just because of their complexion or their creed or the way they may speak or who they love. All who abide by the simple rule of this table should be allowed to enjoy every dish set out on it and once seated we should endlessly repeat the command of my Sicilian-American grandmother: "Mangia!"
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