My new muse is my grandfathers notebooks.~~ beautiful yellowing sheets covered in fancy, floral, old-world script that looks like a cross between ancient palimpsests and Cy Twombly drawings.
Every Sunday after lunch my grandfather would retreat to his club chair, pencil in hand, and write for hours on end. No one ever bothered to ask what he was writing, and when he died the notebooks remained in a pile on the TV stand along with his dictionaries, newspaper clippings, and crossword puzzles. I have recently begun to translate the notebooks with the help of various Italian-speaking friends and to my utter surprise they are filled with the most amazing musings on politics, religion, and philosophy. Some pages contain quotes by Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, and Churchill. Others are drafts of letters to his beloved sister Corradina in Pozzallo, Sicily.
My grandfather was a simple, quiet man, a blue collar laborer, an immigrant who became a patriotic American, yet remained steadfastly loyal and devoted to his homeland and it's traditions. I am now discovering that there was another, more complicated side to him. The notebooks are a window into the person who was my grandfather, a man who I adored, a man I am still getting to know.......
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