What Inspires Me: One Relentless Man

On a cool summer evening in the late 1930s, my Grandmother stood on a neighborhood sidewalk, talking in Italian to a friend that lived on the same street. In the middle of conversation, the friend noticed a man walking up the sidewalk.

“Here comes your husband,” she said. My Grandmother replied that it couldn’t be him, that she didn’t recognize the silhouetted figure. A stunning moment later, she realized it was him, although she couldn’t see his face. The man she married was covered in soot and grime from a new job at the railroad yard, one of the first he held in a steadfast pursuit of their version of the American Dream.

Coming to America was just the first step at the bottom of the hill. He was relentless in his ascent up the mountain of that dream.

That dream must have looked impossible to a man whose English was rough, and came to the USA with primarily physical skills.

His was the story of thousands of Italians who emigrated to these shores, to the land of hope and dreams for sons and daughters to follow.

Joe DiMaggio turned to baseball because he hated the lingering smell of dead fish that stained his father’s fishing boat. Rocky Marciano ran straight into a boxing ring, to avoid the factory life that crippled his father into a shell of his former self.

My Grandfather’s family came from the unforgiving terrain of Southern Italy, for just a chance to chase something better.

His relentless nature proved to make a modestly successful immigrant life, and paved the way for the generations after him. We enjoy what we have now in part from the fruits of his labors.

He had to continue to be relentless with sadness and grief as a life companion. He lost a brother in our country’s Great War, a brother fighting for the nation he had just begun to call “home.” Fighting for the freedom we enjoy and take for granted in modern America.

He had to continue to be relentless after the death of a son who was barely a teenager in the early ’60s. His attempted therapy to make his sadness go away was cleaning the floors of the restaurant that would support our family. My cousin’s description of his demeanor was that of “a rock,” steadfast in the face of the worst tragedy.

He was relentless with old age and declining health, still coming to the restaurant although he, at times, had to drag one of his legs across the floor while walking. He never complained of physical pain or ailments. It was hard, maybe impossible, to know if he was feeling under the weather. There were no clues.

I make it a common practice that whenever I think I have a “problem,” I think of what my Grandfather had to go through. His courage and relentless nature are traits that are hard to replicate, deemed unnecessary in our society, concerned with comfort and convenience.

I can only admire, and myself barely scratch the surface of, the relentlessness ingrained into the hearts and will of the immigrants that dug through the mud and built the foundation of our lives.

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