This was a good day that a family experienced during Spring 40 years ago.
I’m guessing I was 11, as the Braves were my team in minor league. I assume there was a game earlier in the day, but I was so obsessed with the sport there may not have been one. I either liked being seen in public as a “baseball player” or the feel of scratchy wool against my skin. I report. You decide.
Corey, the blond would be 5 and Kevin about 7. There’s another picture in this set including my mom and dad, but it’s not handy, so we’ll just go with the Daley boys. Just a couple months’ later, mom and dad stopped sharing Polaroid frames and every other aspect of life except us.
The family fracture affected all of us differently, but I fared OK mostly due to my surrogate parents, Tony and Barbara Gonnella. Yeah, my best friend’s parents took me in and I always felt part of a true nuclear family, an Italian family at that! Tony was the ultimate sports dad and was always at our games. Mrs. G. was always just there and I could always talk to her. And she was beautiful. Still is at… um, well… now. My buddy Mike took a whole lot of ribbing from our buddies in those years about his hot mom, but I never said a word. As a teenager essentially squatting in that house, she was like my 2nd mom and while her beauty was not lost on me, I respected her and my best friend. Still, I think that image of her as a woman in her 30’s burned an ideal in my malleable mind. There was no “Gonnella sister” and it took a couple decades before I met a woman from that mold. I wasn’t consciously looking for her, but when she appeared I was regressed to a babbling teenager.
I didn’t fully realize the mold thing until recently as I’ve been asking myself questions and cleaning out compartments in my mind for answers. Of course, being a person of significant depth (I am laughing too…), I fully appreciate there are more important things than physical attractiveness, and in a future post I’ll hopefully have learned what some of those are… Actually, as I begrudgingly matured, high intelligence became a demand, and I’ve never been truly happy with a woman that lacked it. That’s especially true now that the kid in the wool uniform is 51. When the physical thing is measured with a stopwatch and excess of that can cause joint displacement and other ailments, you’d better be interesting the other 23:58:30 a day.
Anyway, I’m not sure how this post got here, but lunch or dinner with my two moms has to happen soon. I wonder if the long lost Gonnella sister will join us.
love it. more posts like that!