My hospital needed some utility upgrades. The final step was repaving the parking lot. So yesterday, going from my office to the hospital ward, I passed giant asphalt paving trucks with their crew scurrying among them. As is typical where we live, they spoke in Mexican Spanish. What struck me was how old they looked, must have been pushing 60 if not beyond.
In a flash, I saw my grandfather among them. Better said my “Nonno”, he’d been born & raised on a small farm in Southern Italy. Barely of fighting age and an only son, he narrowly escaped conscription under Mussolini then hid in the hills as the occupying Germans tried to hold off the advancing Allies. The post-war Mezzogiorno was a bleak, hard scrabble place so he, like so many others, scraped what little he had to pack my “Nonni” and my toddler mom onto a ship for America. Barely literate in Abruzzese, a Neapolitan dialect barely inteligible to “standard” Italian, he joined a construction crew full of similar immigrants and there he worked until he looked very much like those grandfathers outside my office.
Decades since, I still remember vividly exploring his tiny garage and seeing his 2 pairs of construction boots. One had a hole burned all the way through the leather. He explained in his heavily accented English that those were his cement boots. He’d mistakenly worn them on a day he was assigned to work with hot asphalt and had paid the consequences.
Immigrant construction worker with a few years’ formal education, which, judging from how his village looked when I visited in 2003 can’t have been particularly formal. Nonni never spent a day in school in her life and sewed shoes for a living. On my dad’s side – high school educations at least before careers as a bricklayer and a waitress. My parents were the first, presumably ever, in their families to go to college. My siblings & I all have graduate degrees. My brother & I are both “Dr Scahill” around the office.
I look at my sons, now 2 and coming up on 4, and wonder how they’ll see the world. Dominic, named for Nonno, insists on wearing his boots whenever I wear mine as we “work together” on our little ranch. But my boots have no asphalt burn holes. He certainly notices that when I go to work, I wear not those boots & overalls but an Oxford shirt & “formal” sneakers. Someone gifted us a storybook, Mi Papa Tiene un Moto. They love it. Their Papa tiene un moto tambien. But that Papa takes his daughter through their poor but joyful Mexican immigrant community. I ride my moto to an air conditioned office where I answer email and write computer code. I remember seeing those boots, Nonni’s sewing machine, the house Grandpa built with his hands, the diner where Grandma worked. To Dominic & Tanc, they are all mere legends.
“Clogs to clogs in 3 generations” is an old Lancastrian saying with equivalents in many cultures. From the moment I first heard it, I could see why. Indeed, grandchildren forgetting their forebears’ hustle is resonant enough it’s been formally researched.
Boys, if the internet has survived long enough for you to be reading this, please know I don’t write this to prejudge or set expectations for your career choices. Assuming humans do still work in the brave new world of AI, whether you lay asphalt, treat sick children or program computers, I only hope you feel happy & fulfilled. (Indeed, if I had to bet on 1 of those professions to exist in 2045, it would be construction.) I just hope you’ll remember your great grandfather’s boots.
The picture is not of Nonno’s actual boots, but, wow, ChatGPT did a nice job bringing my memory back to life.
