The Box

An excerpt from my upcoming memoir Sweet Virginia

I never really knew my father. All I can tell you is from the few stories my brother and sister have told me and the idealized stories told to me by my mother.

He grew up on the streets near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn during the late years of the Depression and World War II. The son of immigrants from Palermo, Sicily, he had two older sisters. His father had died young, the cause of which is a family mystery. My grandmother, the legend goes, was raised on an estate outside of the city and ran away with someone far beneath her social status.

I am even unsure of my last name. I recently took a DNA test to find lost relatives and found none with the same name, even distant cousins. Strange. It is almost as if we don’t exist or our name was changed. 1500 relatives popped up and not one DiBella.

My father, who had been hit by a trolley car, spent a portion of his youth in the hospital. The injury resulted in a slight limp that lasted throughout his life and also prevented him from serving in the military during the Korean War.

Taken under the wing of the owner of a garment factory, that were common in Brooklyn during this era, he apprenticed as a tailor learning how to make women’s coats.

The story gets murkier at this point and changed as my mother aged.

One thing is for certain, at some point, he was forced to change careers and decided to become a cab driver.

It was on a fateful night in the winter of 1977, that while driving his cab he was killed by a driver that had traveled, ironically, from our neighborhood in Marine Park Brooklyn to Washington Heights to purchase drugs. I was six years old.

The last memory I have of my father was from the previous Christmas Eve a few months earlier. Our family tradition was to open gifts after 12am. I sat on the brown carpeted floor of our living room as wrapping paper flew around us. Heavy cigarette smoke-filled our small house as the extended family gathered to celebrate the holiday.

My mother had purchased a brown and burgundy plaid shirt for me to give to my father as a Christmas gift. In the melee of gift exchanging, I opened the box that contained the shirt by accident. I recall quizzically looking at the shirt as any six-year-old receiving clothes from “that aunt” would.

My mother bent over and said, “no that’s for daddy.” I handed him the unwrapped box containing the shirt. He was sitting on our brown vinyl slip-covered couch on the seat closest to the window. I handed him the shirt and he smiled.

That’s it. Everything else I know or, think I remember, was told to me.

My mom passed away at the start of 2020. She never remarried, in fact, she never went on a date after my father was killed. I use the term killed because that is what happened. People die of a heart attack. People are killed when a mother fucker gets in his car high as fuck and drives through a hard-working man’s car.

The morning after she died, we gathered at my sister’s kitchen table to coordinate the funeral. It is an unfortunate fact of life, that we all at some point will have to do the same thing.

My mother kept a box of mementos in her closet. I had seen a lot of the things before but when she died, my sister pulled out the box and we were going through it at her kitchen table. There was no treasure to be found and we weren’t looking for any.

Among the items in the box was an index card with pre-written lines on it. The card yellowed from forty years in the box had the date my father was killed on the top along with columns marked by red lines.

Written on each line were the fares for the evening with the pick-up and drop-off points. Back in the 70s, this must have been how drivers kept track of their earnings for their shift.

Pick up at 51st and 2nd Avenue and drop off at 75th and Park for $1.50. Line after line of rides. Not much money, money earned dollar by dollar to pay for things his family needed. Nobody was getting rich driving a cab. They were guys with stories. Maybe a tough break or two or not and much education to fall back on.

I held that card in my hand and looked at where he picked up the passengers that were in his car when he was killed. I realized that this was the only time I had seen his handwriting. What was he thinking when he picked them up? Was he daydreaming while he made his way to the FDR to head to Washington Heights? Was he thinking about my brother in Navy boot camp, my sister becoming a young woman or was he thinking about his son home in a bi-lateral cast and the doctor’s bills that were piling up?

What was my father’s dream job? What was his favorite thing to do as a kid? Did he have any hobbies? I don’t know any of it.

This book has largely been about what my mother taught me, but in reality, it is about what my father taught me too. But instead of words, I can only learn from his actions.

On that fateful night, his head wasn’t buried in a bottle somewhere, wallowing in his own misery. He wasn’t at home sleeping in a warm bed hoping someone else would come up with a solution to his problems, he was out driving around New York City earning a dollar at a time for his family.

There is no glamour in that, there are no statues of cab drivers, but there should be.

The regular guy that maybe was handed a tough break when his business went overseas for cheap labor, whose main focus was providing for his wife and kids. I know essentially nothing about my father, but I know from these few things that I can only hope to be half the man he was.

There are times when I am with my kids that I see a lot of myself in them and I think they see themselves in me. Would I have seen myself in my father? Would he have known what to tell me when everything was collapsing around me?

A yellowed index card, house keys, a couple of pictures, and a broken watch. That is what my mother had in this box. But there was something else, among the things in the box was an anniversary card, the last that he gave her from their 20th anniversary a few weeks before he was killed. I remember this card sitting on top of her armoire for many years after his death.

My wife and kids think it is stupid that I like greeting cards. My wife thinks it’s a waste of money and says she’s not a card person whatever that means.

My mother always gave me a card for my birthday. She had the most elegant handwriting I had ever seen. Penmanship is a lost art but it must have been a priority during her school years.

I have kept every card my mother gave me in a box. She had a knack for picking out the perfect card. The theme was always the same: I love you; I am proud of you and I believe in you.

Getting her card always brought tears to my eyes. Even if she didn’t know exactly how I was feeling at the time, she would find the right card containing the words I needed to hear.

All of my fortitudes are a result of the example set by my parents. How easy would it have been for either of them to have thrown up their hands and say “No Mas!!”

Many people do. Things get hard and people look for someone to blame. I said before that my mother always told me that God would never give me more than I could handle and she was right.

I am getting near the end of my first book and will soon be sending it to the editor for revisions. I hope to have it published by the end of the year but that will take some good fortune. But I am nothing if not optimistic. I will keep you posted.

Thank you for all of your support during this journey.

JD HEART OF A LION 10 YEAR TRANSFORMATION