LUNA RISING (Volume 1: The Circle of Conversation)

Chapter Two: Memorial Day

 “I’m so proud of you, Tony!”

My mother spoke slowly, looking straight into my eyes. She said this often. I guess it was her way of saying I love you.

She repeated it and I cringed. Had she come all the way from New York to say she was proud of me? I thought of telling her she was ridiculous but I changed my mind. Sure, she was proud of her ‘gifted son’. It was a compensation for the embarrassment that her husband had caused her.

I understood that but I didn’t like it. My father – God have mercy on his soul, he died ten years ago – was still my father. Misunderstood, hated by the family he had married into, he was considered a useless vagabond, but I knew better. He was a nobleman, the last of a family that had come to Sicily a thousand years ago. Papà’s memories of past splendors, of battles lost and won, didn’t jibe with the chain of pizza restaurants owned by my mother’s family. He was convinced my mother had married him for who he was, not for what he did.

Maybe she had, but she would not admit to it. Now that I’m older, I can easily imagine her as a young, starry-eyed college student, going abroad to Europe for the first time, to study art history in Florence. When she’d met this dashing scion of an ancient aristocratic family, she had fallen for him. He was older and elegant. He took her to society balls and gave her piano lessons. Soon they were engaged and married. She brought her new husband to America as a trophy – only to discover that her family looked down on him.

“Then you came along,” she told me, “and everything changed in my life.”

That idea had always made me uncomfortable. Why should I be the one who changed “everything in her life”? I was only a child. I had to deal with the difficult business of growing up.  In what way was I responsible for my mother’s happiness? Yet she insisted I was. I overheard her speak about me to her women friends, around endless cups of coffee in her kitchen. She said absurd things like, “Tony was always a genius with computers; I gave him a computer when he was three, by the time he was five, would you believe it, he had learned all the basics of programming and could even write codes all by himself. I tell you, he’s a born hacker! He could get into anybody’s computer if he wanted to. But he won’t, he’s such a good child.”

Was I good child? Maybe, but a very unhappy one. School was a nightmare. Teachers roamed classes saying inanities, and all the children were nasty. It’s amazing how evil children can be. I was the constant butt of stupid jokes about my name, lunatic, looney...

My next school was better, a special school for the gifted that I was sent to after my father died. I was eight, I missed Papà, I even missed Mom. I was lost. I took refuge in my trusted computer. By the time I was fifteen, I had graduated and been offered a job as a computer programmer – I am specialized in engine variations. I work with one of the best teams in the video game industry. I guess you could say I’m highly paid for an nineteen year-old. That’s why my mother is so proud of me.

What makes me mad is that I’ve done nothing to be this way. It’s just the way I am – good with programming, nothing else. It’s as if your mother told you she’s proud of you because you’ve got blue eyes or long legs. It’s ridiculous.

And it’s not me.

And here she was, in Montreal, spending Memorial Day week-end with me, dripping maternal honey all over. We were sitting on the porch of a small house, at the back of a much larger one that belonged to my mother’s friend, an old hag whom I rarely saw, thank God.  I had wanted a job with one of the big firms in Silicon Valley but Mom had stopped me from going, saying it was too far from the East coast. Montreal, home to several video game companies, had been a compromise. The old hag just rented me her guest cottage and that reassured my mother who felt her precious son was in safe hands.