You'll Toss Around and Call My Name
A tribute & a very personal recording
At the very bottom of this post, paid subscribers will find the recording mentioned in this piece. I hope you enjoy.
“You remind me of my grandmother,” is not a line you say to a girl that you like. Not if you want a second date. But I said it, and we’re married now, so I guess it’s okay.
The thing is that she did remind me of my grandmother. The stories about her life had a surreal element, like they were part of some legend. She felt like a movie. Not one particular movie, but rather a collection of different films that have nothing to do with each other, all stitched together to create this unique, dualistic person.
The same type of lore seemed to surround my grandmother, even when she was still alive.
She was pious. Likely too pious. I was confused the first time I noticed she refused to receive communion like the rest of the congregation at Sunday mass. She simply knelt in her pew, a somber and stoic look upon her face. I asked my mother, of course, but I was too young to be given an explanation.
She danced and sang, yet only had two drinks in her entire life. One was a Guinness––that I handed her during Christmas one year––of which she maybe had two sips, indulging us all, for a photo op.
She was generous and kind, but she could also outshoot any man at the Tiro A Segno rifle and supper club in NYC, where she was once a card carrying member.
She was omniscient. I could fool my mom, but not my grandmother. “I know what you’re doing,” she would say with a smirk, allowing it to happen but making sure I knew that she knew. But I never knew how she knew. She just did.
There was a story about three sets of teeth. Something about her adult teeth coming in, then falling out, and my great grandmother fearing and vocalizing in Italian, that her daughter is going to be ugly. And then another set grew in. I remember asking my grandmother about it, and she said she prayed really hard and God gifted her another set of teeth.
She was married before my grandfather. It was the kind of marriage you could only hope to survive. She never spoke about it in depth, and my mother wasn’t born yet, so she only knew so much. What we do know is that she did eventually escape, but not before he threw her down the stairs one last time. There was a divorce, but never an annulment, which would’ve required a whole to-do with witnesses and second hand accounts, and that wasn’t going to happen because my great uncle Frank eventually kicked the shit out of the guy. But despite the fact that God gifted my grandmother a third set of teeth, she was too devout to assume absolution for the divorce, and this was the reason she sat out during communion every Sunday.
Finding the recording of her singing felt like yet another piece of her mythological past. It was a 78 rpm record that felt about as thick as a dinner plate. There were grooves on only one side. It sat in my collection for years, as I had no means of playing it because modern turntables only played 33 or 45 rpm records. Eventually, somewhere around the dawn of the bedroom studio, my friend Will and I took a stab at converting the record to digital. After a few trips to Radio Shack and a whole bunch of math, we successfully recorded and time corrected the digital file to compensate for the difference in record speeds. We hit play, and my grandmother’s voice came through.
Her voice was clear and angelic. I recognized her inflection, but at the same time, the woman on the recording was one I’d never met. I wasn’t even an idea when that recording was made. My mother hadn’t even entered this world at that point.
I took my hard drive and drove straight from Will’s house in Philadelphia up to my grandmother’s back in New York. I plugged my computer into a small speaker while sitting across from her in the kitchen and hit play. I said, “Do you know who that is?”
She smiled, laughed, and said, “It’s me.”
The story I remember her telling me at the dinner table is that someone came to the house to record her, but that’s how legends go. My mother said the real story is that this was the early 1950s, and her father didn’t want her to have a singing career, so she secretly visited a recording studio. She took her sister, my aunt Josie, as well as her son, my uncle Rick, who was maybe 5 at the time. You can hear him laugh in the background at one point in the recording. Those are all the details we have. It doesn’t feel real, and yet we have the proof.
A few years later, I took a stab at turning it into a duet. It has sat on my hard drive for 11 years. Maybe it felt sacrilegious. Maybe I wanted to keep it to myself. Or maybe I was too afraid to tamper with the lore of my grandmother.
Why share it now? Maybe because I walked into a deli the other day and it smelled like my grandma’s chicken soup. Or maybe because I caught a glimpse of my wife last weekend as she stood on a city street in Boston with that same poise my grandmother had. That look that seemed to contain secrets. The one that holds an entire lifetime of stories.
Or maybe I just miss her.
In case you missed it, I will be playing two shows at this close of this year. Tickets can be purchased here.
As mentioned above, this is a duet between my grandmother and I. Her part was recorded in the early 50s, with nothing but her voice and an old organ. I then recorded my parts in 2013, approximately a year after she’d passed.