Reviews of My Past 10 Books, With Thanks to Mother Cabrini

This is me with Ana Almanzar, founder of the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation Book Club. Ana recently left our foundation to become Deputy Mayor of New York City. Lately, my colleague Clare Meehan has led the club, and I bet she will one day become U.S. President.

In 2023, I haven't been as active reading books or posting Goodreads reviews. Since the pandemic, my reading has taken a back seat to doom-scrolling the news, streaming videos (highly recommended: "Only Murders in the Building"), and getting my heart broken by the New York Mets.

I wouldn't even have read the books I'm posting about here, save for the intervention of Mother Cabrini -- or, I should say, my colleagues at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation who have been participating in a book club for the past year.

It's been a lot of fun... mostly because my younger, extremely smart, and very well-read colleagues are always choosing books that I would never have picked on my own. This has led to some exciting discoveries. Such as Exhibit 1:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We have a book club at work, so I needed to read it and thought I wouldn't like it... not being a gamer, or even having an interest in gaming, and having never read anything by this author. I only knew it as "Bill Gates' favorite recent book." It turns out it's now my favorite recent book too. I was surprised and delighted. It was well-written, lyrical, and profoundly moving. I was underlining passages and often reacting out loud as I read. This is a wonderful book, in real life. Thank you, Ana, and thank you, Clare. Best book club pick. Ever. 

Many of the book club's other selections were just about as good, worthwhile, and revelatory. Exhibit 2:

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nicely done. The story kept me interested, and the book inspired me to research the historical issues. This was a book club selection during Black History Month, and it has encouraged me to expand the range of what I read. This one reminded me somewhat of one of my all-time favorites, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

I could say just about the same for these four books:

All were rewarding and thought-provoking -- although, honestly, I only voted to read "The Happiest Man on Earth" because I thought it would be a short, happy book. SPOILER ALERT: Eddie may indeed be happy, but even after reading his relatively short book, I can't imagine why.

I'm leaving out "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" because I had already read and reviewed it more than five years earlier (on advice from another work colleague at a former job), and "The Givers" by David Callahan, which we at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation all collectively gave up on during the past holiday season, probably because it reminded us all too much of work.

The only two books our club read that I didn't like were Exhibits 3 and 4:

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I honestly couldn't finish this book. I found the writing pretentious and dense, and I kept thinking, "This writer needs an editor." Then I got to the scene with the squid, and I gave up.

And then, silly me, I read that this is the author's debut novel, and it won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I put this in the category of the Oscar-winning movie, "Everything Everywhere All at Once," which I also disliked. It's obvious I just don't get it, but it's also just as obvious I'll never win a Pulitzer or an Oscar. So I can't give this less than three stars on the basis of subjectivity.

Still, I won't be finishing this book. Life is too short. On a related note, here's The Onion weighing in this week about people who don't read the books they review on Goodreads 🙂 --> https://www.theonion.com/goodreads-no... 

The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World by Dorie Clark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really only learned one thing from this book: I had no idea there were that many consultants in the world. 

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On my own, I've found I tend to read books with practical applications or offering advice. I need all the help I can get. Here are two recent reads I found useful:

Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers by Dylan Marron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admire Dylan Marron and his approach to humanizing social interactions on the Internet. Hate should not be a game. The perspective offered in this book is more life-affirming, and I now constantly think of Dylan's mantra that "empathy is not endorsement." I can only hope it makes me a more empathetic person in this new, odd, gamified world. A good, fast, uplifting read.

 

How Magicians Think: Misdirection, Deception, and Why Magic Matters by Joshua Jay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trusting our inner child is a central lesson in this collection of anecdotes. The author adds insights that unveil the magician's mindset while encouraging self-reflection. After reading this book, I more deeply admire the dedication and professionalism of magicians, their tireless work behind the scenes, and their profound impact on our sense of wonder. Magic DOES matter. 

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I'm currently reading "The Creative Act" by Rick Rubin -- which I had suggested to our club in favor of "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow." Silly me. I'm still searching for that elusive "short, happy book." I told Clare I may have to write one, and she told me she would read it. So now the pressure is on, and I'll be relying on Rick to guide me. I also look forward to Viet Thanh Nguyen's review of my writing.

Finally, I need to read "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" by George Saunders, a copy of which my best friend gave me some time ago.

I really need to learn to be a better friend. I wonder if there's a book offering advice about that.

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PS- Let's turn this up to 11! Here's my review of "The Creative Act," which I finished in mid-July:

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this book full of encouragement and insight... however, I do not recommend listening to the Audible version, as I tried to. I'd give the Audible version only 3 stars. I did not think Rick Ruben was an effective narrator, but what he has to say is genuinely worthwhile. As an audiobook, it's seemingly an endless parade of aphorisms (i.e., "even spontaneity can improve with practice") that fly by too quickly to consider the proper context. If you read this book -- and if you are interested in the creative process, I DO highly recommend it -- consider purchasing a physical copy... and a companion workbook.

View all my Goodreads reviews

The Evolution of a Saturday

Posting here about an ordinary Saturday, which began when I noticed a Rambler Rose blooming on a vine that my wife and I feared had died over the past winter.

Later, we traveled to Queens to see the New York Mets -- who lost. It was cold and windy where we sat. The day before, the temperature had reached 90. The scoreboard said the temperature was 63 at game time, and it never changed, but it seemed much colder in the wind.

At the end of our row of seats sat a couple with a baby. A man sitting next to me with his son returned from a food run in the early innings with a wool Mets hat he had purchased for the couple's baby. They were strangers when the game began; they left as friends.

At the end of the game, Mets relief pitcher Adam Ottavino (an excellent photographer who, like me, grew up a Yankees fan) talked to the New York Post about his time with the Mets and Yankees. He said the modern Yankees fan has "a little bit more of an expectation of perfect play and an All-Star at every position. Whereas I think the Mets fan, the expectation isn't quite as high. It's more of a level of hope."

Hope is a journey where great things are possible but not expected. I prefer this approach to life: the unexpected act of kindness, the unexpected rose.

While we were at the game, my daughter stopped by our house to feed the cats. She texted photos of post-prandial Batman, illustrating an essential lesson in portrait photography: the angles make all the difference. 🙂

Before returning home, we stopped for a Guinness and a Harp at a favorite Irish bar -- The Cottage in Teaneck, NJ. The bartender there reminded my wife of her late brother, who lived a kind, too-short life. We toasted him.

The place was filled with laughter. Small groups of friends were competing in a trivia contest, and one woman wore a black sweatshirt proclaiming, "Pigeons Are Liars." On one of the TV screens above the bar, I watched Aaron Judge -- my favorite baseball player even though he's a Yankee -- crash through the rightfield bullpen gate at Dodger Stadium to rob J.D. Martinez of at least a double.

On the journey home, I stopped to take a photo of St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Every Sunday, I post images of churches in New Jersey on one of my Instagram accounts.

It's an odd hobby, but it often fills me with hope.

Haiku at Sandy Hook

Emerald City.

I can see it from Jersey.

There is no wizard.

It's no secret: I love New York's skyline, and I often write haikus about the city: Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2.

The view above is an edited version of what you'd see about 20 miles away from the northernmost point of Sandy Hook Reservation in New Jersey.

In un-filtered real life, you can even pan right to see the Parachute Jump, the iconic, now-dormant ride at Coney Island:

I visited Sandy Hook last weekend with photography friends from Black Glass Gallery.

These next few days are an ideal time to visit for yourself. Sandy Hook is part of Gateway National Recreation Area. If you get there before Memorial Day, there is no entrance fee and no charge for parking. It's a wonderful place to explore, with plenty of room to avoid crowds.

As Friend ChatGPT tells me, the park is named after the Sandy Hook Peninsula, which is a narrow strip of land that extends for several miles into the Atlantic Ocean. One of the main features of the park is the Sandy Hook Lighthouse, built in 1764 and one of the oldest lighthouses in the U.S. Visitors can climb to the top for panoramic views.

Another popular attraction at Sandy Hook is Fort Hancock, is a former military base that was active from the late 1800s until the mid-20th century. Visitors can tour the old barracks, gun batteries, and other historic structures at the fort.

Still, for me, it's the view from this platform, looking about 20 miles to the north, that's the biggest highlight:

I can't help myself. Just yesterday, Google Photos randomly sent me this video compilation of the New York City skyline photos from my photo cloud -- many taken from the back of a NJ Transit bus commuting to or from work. Google randomly chose a great Tears for Fears song as a soundtrack too (and assures me it is not a copyright violation :)

I love New York, even if there is no wizard there.

This Is the Way Poetry Month Ends

It ended with a howl!

This is a photo taken April 29, 2023, of Talena Lachelle Queen, the poet laureate of Paterson, NJ, reading Allen Ginsberg's virtually unreadable "Howl" at the Paterson Museum, where Ginsberg once read his poetry decades ago.

Although National Poetry Month has ended, "Paterson's Poets: Voices From The Silk City" will remain on exhibit there (at 2 Market St.) through June 24.

As the museum notes: "Since its founding in 1792, Paterson has been home to many poets. Still more have visited Paterson and been enthused by the beauty of the Great Falls or the ingenuity of the city's residents. This exhibit celebrates and honors the poets who were not only inspired by Paterson, but became a part of our community, whether they lived, worked or played here."

On intriguing display features "The Bulldog Poets" of School No. 4, a group founded by ESL teacher Joseph Verilla in 1994. Their motto: "No bull, just dog." According to the exhibit, poets Kamarra Fabor, Leslie Graham, Shernese Myers and La-Chaka Price drew from their experiences with crime, drugs and family struggles, and won acclaim at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996. Earlier this month at a museum event, four members of the group re-created a photo from the '90s. Thanks to Chris Fabor Muhammad of yourcreativeforce.com for letting me re-post it here:

As for me, I'm ending poetry month with another prompted poem (with the prompt as the title), a little longer than usual, although not at all inspired by "Howl." 🙂

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What Have You Learned from the Study of Other Languages?

 

I studied Classical Latin, taught by “Father Bone Ass”

at a Catholic university called “Our Lady of the Lake” in French.

My professor was also my dormitory’s rector

charged with the enforcement of “parietals,”

which has nothing, and everything, to do with biology.

 

His name was literally “Banas,” a common word root for “being unbearable”

in the Tagalog dialect in the Filipino language.

Not quite “unbearable,” either.

“Banas” is a mix of sweltering humidity and annoyance

specific to the Austronesian climate.

 

Father Banas had a dry sense of humor.

He of course knew his crude, banal nickname,

although “Bone Ass” is untranslatable in Tagalog.

My professor bore our boorishness with a patient smile.

He taught Catullus, a poet who is untranslatable in English.

 

Which Father Banas also, of course, knew to be true.

 

We struggled in translation.

As an inside joke, he gave our class advice from a modern poet.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko had said that translations are like women:

The more beautiful they are, the less true.

Or Russian words to that effect.

 

What I heard in English studying Classical Latin inspired a love of poetry,

the way Yevtushenko inspired a generation of young Russians

in their fight against Stalinism during the Cold War.

I am not a fighter, or a lover.

I am an observer.

 

I watched as Catullus’ poems for Lesbia

sank deeper and deeper into perversity.

The poet had no Latin words for the passion he sought to express.

“Odi et amo” encapsulated a messy entanglement of obsession and desire,

of love that strains against calcification in verse.

 

Of “love” only poets can begin to untangle.

 

And then I wondered, what is “perverse”?

I was born and raised in New Jersey,

on land the Dutch stole from the Lenni Lenape

and named after the Delaware Indian word

meaning “between the mountains and the water.”

 

Once Father Banas sat at my breakfast table

when he saw I was eating alone in a campus dining hall.

He was always kind, and he knew I was homesick,

alone on the shores of St. Mary’s Lake,

missing my life between the mountains and the waters.

 

He told me he missed his brother, a missionary in Bangladesh, “The Land of Bengal.”

The Indo-Aryan suffix “Desh” derives from the Sanskrit word for “land,”

now combined with a geographical, ethnolinguistic and cultural term

referring to the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal.

We spoke of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets.

 

We conspired, “breathing together” about the refuge of art.

 

I last saw Father Banas at his funeral at the grand basilica on the shores of the lake.

A “basilica” is not a “cathedral,” but a church accorded special privileges by the pope.

It houses an “ombrellino,” a silk canopy striped in papal colors of yellow and red,

and a “tintinnabulum,” a bell atop the pole carried in procession on special occasions,

and somewhere within, a basilica also displays the crossed keys symbolic of St. Peter.

 

The funeral of Father Banas, like the future pluperfect of my own,

was not a special occasion, save for the procession of his brother priests.

I remember the reading from the Book of Wisdom:

how the souls of the departed darted about

as sparks through stubble,

 

And how we the living… every one of us, even the poets…

raised our voices in formulaic prayer,

professing the word “thy” three times during the “Our Father,”

invoking the ineffable power of intercession

that “your” does not possess in modern English.

 

This is how I learned that everything simple is complicated.

Words are translations of nuances we universalize and neuter.

Forgive me the length of this poem.

I considered all these words carefully, today,

alone at my breakfast table:

 

in homage to the hallowed life of Father Banas,

in praise of the trespasses of Catullus.

--Bob Varettoni, 4/30/23

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PS- The photo of Paterson behind Talena on top of this page is a sight that inspired another poem I once wrote... "Scenic Overlook."

Poetry Month in New Jersey, 2023

What to do early on a Saturday night in New Jersey?

How about some poetry during National Poetry Month?

This coming Saturday, April 29, the wonderful local Word Seed organization is hosting an event at one of the state's "hidden gem" locations -- the Paterson Museum (2 Market St., near the Great Falls). I've posted the flyer here; the free event starts at 5 p.m.

The program will pay tribute to poets no longer with us from the Silk City's past, including Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams.

Last weekend I visited to see the Poetry Month exhibit there and had the whole museum to myself for a few minutes.

I also stopped by the Museum of Modern Art during lunch hour earlier this week in New York and stumbled across the Dial-a-Poem exhibit there.

Of course, I had to dial 917-994-8949. (And you can too!)

I heard a poem by Frank O’Hara (who died in 1966), then John Cage (who died in 1992), then Bill Berkson (who died in 2016). I was afraid to call again and find out who would die next.

Actually, the MOMA exhibit dates back to 1968, when John Giorno began delivering instant poetry through a free telephone hotline in New York City. So everything on the hotline dates back 55 years or so.

As far as new poetry is concerned... from someone still alive... which would be me, for now... I've been following through on my resolution to write weekly prompted poems this year.

Here are three recent original poems. The first, writing about my hometown; and the second and third poems with the prompts in the titles.

I'm also excited about two upcoming prompted poems, but I'll wait until after Saturday to finish those. I'd like some input first from the ghosts of Allen and William.

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How to Write the Great New Milford NJ Poem

 

Before your start, you must accept

You are invisible.

 

You live in the suburbs.

People walk dogs past your house,

In front of your white picket fence.

Sometimes they stop and peer

Into your dining room window,

Pointing in your direction,

As if they’ve seen a ghost.

 

They don’t know you can see them.

You do not participate in Little League baseball,

Or Junior League football.

Your children left home long ago.

 

The town pool has closed without warning.

Its parking lot, empty; its grounds, overgrown.

Your family used to swim there.

The Burger King is still open.

Decades ago, the borough attorney

Protested the “Home of the Whopper” sign

Because he said it insulted Italian Americans.

Your children used to eat there.

 

Begin now by offering a prayer to Bertha Reetz

At her abandoned stone in the French Burial Ground.

Remain calm when you hear gunshots

From the range behind the Recycling Center.

The police are shooting blanks, scattering the deer

In your town’s only remaining sliver of woods

Along the Hackensack River.

 

Gather the scraps of your neighbors’ families:

Sticky, dirt-crusted Dairy Queen napkins and cups

Littering the curbside along River Road.

Cross the street to the garbage can

At the bus stop outside Canterbury Village.

Use extreme caution. You are invisible to traffic.

 

You return home alone.

You start to write a poem.

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Poetic Words Children Need to Learn

 

Salt-water taffy…

 

in cardboard boxes

Salt-water taffy, the color of swirling rainbows

Salt-water taffy that you can only buy on the boardwalk at the Shore

Salt-water taffy that sticks to your teeth and gums

Salt-water taffy that your mother loves

 

Years later, your mother will grow old,

And you will ask her for memories of when you were young.

She will tell you instead she doesn’t want to think of the past

Because it only makes her sad.

She doesn’t remember the salt-water taffy.

 

Salt-water taffy used to be her favorite.

You need to know that about my mother.

She didn’t always have sad memories.

She knew salt-water taffy wasn’t good for us,

but she loved the taste.

 

The improbable, magnificent sweetness,

now missing from our lives.

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Consider the Inequity in How Lives Were Impacted by the Pandemic

 

Prompt: Write a poem in 2023 contemplating what challenges persist in the aftermath…

 

I can’t write this poem

Because three years have passed

For all of us, equally,

 

Including you.

 

Mark my words:

The only constant in life

Is time’s erosion of inequity…

 

The numbering of our days.

The defenseless of our nights.

Alive or dead.

 

In 2020, I counted bathtub Marys

Adorning suburban lawns

During socially distant walks.

 

In 2023, I still dream of you,

As I might forever.

I have counted every hair on your head.

What's the Best (or Worst) Cover Version of a Song?

A busker in Helen, Georgia, singing "Angel From Montgomery"
as good as John Prine, almost as good as Bonnie Raitt.

What's the best (or worst) cover version you've heard of a favorite song?

I'm "asking for a friend" because -- somewhere in Bergenfield, NJ (I won't say precisely where or when to protect the innocent) -- I recently heard a performance of the worst cover version in the history of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind."

It was jangly and upbeat, and I rushed home just to play the original version to restore balance in the world. That's when I also stumbled up another cover of the same song by Johnny Cash. It was heart-breakingly good. Give it a listen...

 

Around the same time, Cash also recorded his famous cover of Trent Reznor's "Hurt" -- which is here, if you're not one of the several hundred million people who have already streamed it.

Perhaps my all-time favorite great cover is Springsteen's version of "Jersey Girl," originally by Tom Waits. Here are 10 others I love:

• "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley (originally Leonard Cohen)
• "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell (Gloria Jones, and "our song," according to someone I once dated)
• "Angel from Montgomery" by Bonnie Raitt (John Prine)
• Just about any cover version of "Creep" (although Radiohead's original version is classic)
• "Mad World" by Gary Jules (Tears for Fears)
• "The Sound of Silence" by Disturbed (Paul Simon, a bold choice, considering how Paul's "American Tune" is perhaps my all-time favorite song)
• "Me and Bobbie McGee" by Janis Joplin (Kris Kristofferson)
• "Hasten Down the Wind" by Linda Ronstadt (Warren Zevon)
• "Sweet Jane" by the Cowboy Junkies (Lou Reed)
• "Songbird" by Eva Cassidy (but only as a homage to Christine McVie)

How did I exclude anything by Tori Amos? Well, anyway, those were the first that came to mind on this, Aretha Franklin's birthday.

Aretha, after all, out-covers anyone, even Bruce and Tori, with her version of Otis Redding's "Respect." Did you ever hear her version of Elton John's "Border Song"? She changes the end lyric from "What's his color? I don't care" to the more challenging "What's is color? Do you care?"

As for bad covers, I think I remember The Muppets once singing "We Built This City" about a dozen years ago. But maybe I was hallucinating, and I never much liked original by Jefferson Airplane/Starship anyway.

Perhaps -- having just watched the final episodes of "Daisy Jones & The Six" last night -- I'll say my least favorite cover is U2's version of the otherwise haunting "Dancing Barefoot."

Covering a Patti Smith classic? Some things just shouldn't be done.

What do you think?

Poem: 'Byzantium in Jersey'

My grandfather, 1969, Budd Lake, NJ

Last week's poetry prompt from Dimitri Reyes intrigued me greatly.

"Today is my grandfather's birthday," Dimitri wrote. "Though he is no longer on this plane, I still hear him in my mind and I honor him through voice & spirit... When doing research into my own Puerto Rican culture and discovering how I was going to traverse 'creation myth,' my grandfather's successes and failures helped fill in the spaces -- fully and honestly."

I listened to Dimitri's poem, "Papi Pichón" ("Father Pigeon"), and the poet invited me to "create my own bird."

So this week I couldn't get my own grandfather out of my mind. He died in 1976, and just in the past three months, I've mourned the death of three other close and extended family members.

I also thought of a favorite poem, one I used to recite to my daughters as a lullaby, about the passage of time. This morning -- thinking of Yeats' bird of hammered gold and gold enamelling, and imitating (poorly) the iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme of "Sailing to Byzantium" -- I wrote the following (although, PS, I'm still debating that next-to-last line... considering "This, my father's father's mysterium"):

Byzantium in Jersey

 

This, my grandfather, in his Sunday best:

a cigarette dangling from its holder,

a tattered suit, a worn Italian vest,

with me at his side, decades less older.

He does not hold my hand. There is no rest.

He lectures as we walk, points my shoulders

toward a butterfly he displays to me

along the shores of Budd Lake, New Jersey.

 

This, a back country road, is my classroom:

milkweed, honeysuckle, red columbine,

hummingbirds, spotted touch-me-nots in bloom,

blue robbins’ eggs, goldenrod, dandelions.

My grandfather names them for me, assumes

I will remember that sparrow, that vine,

the chicony, those edible lilies,

the songs of mimicking catbirds we see.

 

These have all vanished for me.

 

I live in the suburbs, reminisce now

about ancestors. One Sunday, I walk

the Hackensack riverbank in a drought.

During the golden hour, a gyring hawk

directs my gaze to a sun-kissed bough

where a crow blinks back in silence, stalking.

This, I know, is my father’s father’s song

of what is past, or passing, or to come.

"Varry and Kate," my grandparents.
Photo by my father.

 

Poem: 'Grief's Cliche'

I have only one prompted poem to offer today for February, and it was written in March.

Another that I wrote was too personal (naming names). I submitted still another for publication (with the assurance it was otherwise unpublished), and the last of the weekly prompts I received from my poetry Patreon was a reading, rather than writing, assignment.

The prompt for the poem below was simply, "How is your body a mausoleum of flowers?"

"Mausoleum of Flowers" is the title of this poem by Daniel B. Summerhill, and the image had special meaning to me as I contemplated the funeral and burial of my uncle on March 2.

For the past week, I couldn't get this short poem out of my head. I kept thinking of the roses pictured here, the ones gathered in front of the altar of Sacred Heart Church in Clifton and later placed upon the grave at Calvary Cemetery in Paterson. This was my first draft:

Missing You

I pricked my finger on the rose
I cast atop your grave.

My droplet of blood,
camouflaged by the buds
the others threw on you.

Then you were hidden too;
your body, a mausoleum of flowers.

While each of us beheld
the shorn beauty of your life
and pretended we would live forever.

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And this is where I landed (revised, 3/24/23):

Grief's Cliche

The rose I cast upon your coffin
is scent-less in the dead winter’s cold.

Thorns, rendered painless;
my fingertips, numb.

Curiously, I see a timid trickle of my blood
mix with the petals already covering you.

Then, lost in red, you are hidden too:
Your body, a mausoleum of flowers.

I exhale. A puff of air dissipates like incense.

My life shorn, my body suspends itself.

Lungs empty, I kill time at your grave.

I crave belief, yet question all truths:

This pretense I am sharing
a final breathless moment with you.

Remembering Fr. Julian in 1,000 Words

93 years ago today, a mother was cradling her first-born son in her arms at St. Mary’s Hospital in Passaic, NJ.

She had been told her newborn had only days to live or, at best, would spend his life in a wheelchair.

She was a woman of strong Catholic faith, and she offered both their lives to the service of God, if only He would spare her son.

Her name was Rachel Varettoni. She was my grandmother, and I called her “Nonna.” She lived a long, devout life of service – raising and supporting a family of three boys, and instilling in them a profound faith in God’s goodness – and she died 22 years ago on the eve of her 100th birthday.

I called her first-born son “Father Julian.” He fully recovered, albeit (as his beloved nephew Bill reminds me) with one leg shorter than the other, resulting in chronic back pain later in life. As his mother had vowed, Fr. Julian indeed devoted his life to God. He grew, both physically and spiritually, to be the strongest man I ever knew.

That’s us in the photo, after he carted toddler-me around the grounds of his parents’ home in Budd Lake. It was a modest farmhouse on a fair-sized plot of land, purchased during The Depression, where Fr. Julian was its lifelong caretaker. It’s where he suffered a seizure that led to his death last Thursday night on the literal eve of his 93rd birthday.

 

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Fr. Julian with my sister; Budd Lake, circa 1969;
he chopped all the wood in the background.

Most people remember Fr. Julian at the altar. He was pious. His sermons were thoughtful and eloquent. They didn’t come easily to him since he was uncomfortable as a public speaker. Few people realized this because he practiced diligently – and enlisted the aid of my father with some of his words – to give sermons that would make his mother proud.

He accomplished so much as a parish priest in service to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson. You can read about this in his obituary: his devotion to music ministry (which he also inherited from his mother); his progressiveness in the service of those in need; his lifelong joy in building and fixing and refurbishing… most often with his own capable hands.

Fr. Julian at the altar at my parents' wedding in 1955.
Dad waited to propose to Mom until after his brother
was ordained so he could officiate at the Mass.

He was also the priest at every family wedding, and present at every family gathering. Decades ago, before cell phones, he would record family events with a video camera perched on his shoulder. He also chronicled details of vacation trips on a portable tape recorder.

Fr. Julian was an adventurous traveler: once taking my mother up in a hot-air balloon over Colorado, and once taking my sister Sue and me on his parish’s pilgrimage to Rome. He led us up the centuries-old stone steps of an otherwise closed parapet so we could see a breath-taking, God’s-eye view of St. Peter’s Square.

He married my Mom and Dad. He was the priest at every family funeral. He buried his parents and my Dad. Later in life, he said Mass for my wife and children and me around Nonna’s dining room table every Christmas Eve.

But here’s what I remember most about Fr. Julian. I remember him most in Budd Lake, where he returned for decades every Wednesday on his day off and on Sundays after Masses, to take care of his mother and their home.

When they were young, Fr. Julian and his brothers used to sit on the brick steps by the front porch and harmonize in song. The house faced Route 46, which was a country road back then, and the brothers tried to identify each car by the make and model as it passed. Fr. Julian always won this game, because he could identify the make and model of every car by the sound of its engine, before it was even in sight.

Nonna with her three sons on her 99th birthday.

When I was a boy, I watched Fr. Julian effortlessly perform tremendous feats of strength. He was a carpenter, like Jesus. But he was also an electrician and an architect and a plumber and a gardener. He could fix anything. He could build anything. He would always buy whatever he needed at Sears.

In the summer, he shucked freshly picked rhubarb with the same sure and graceful hand movements of a concert violinist. In the fall, he loved the solitude and repetitive grace of roaming his land on his tractor to collect the fallen leaves.

I once visited him in his basement workshop and heard him, alone, giggling like a schoolboy. Fr. Julian had taken apart his car’s carburetor, and he was reassembling its hundreds of intricate pieces… simply for the joy of it.

Fr. Julian enjoyed jigsaw puzzles; here's the one
he was working on before he died.

As the years went on, and some of the property was sold, Nonna’s garden and grapevines shrank in size, and now lay barren after her death. All the bottles of her homemade wine are empty, but the small greenhouse Fr. Julian built for her still stands. So do the remnants of a path that he cleared behind the old garage. He had installed Stations of the Cross in that small patch of woods, where he and his mother could wander and pray.

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Now this extraordinary life has come full circle.

I learned the sad news about Fr. Julian’s death in a phone call from my sister. They were especially close, and my strong sister Sue was in tears. I had taken my Mom to visit with Fr. Julian just days earlier, and it was such a happy, life-affirming visit. Sue was happy to hear this. My wife, when I told her about Fr. Julian’s death, remarked that it was “the best birthday present he could have gotten.”

She said this because Fr. Julian had a profound, unquestioning faith handed down from his mother. My own mother told me that during their recent visit Fr. Julian said he was ready to go “home.” So this is what I believe, without any doubt:

Fr. Julian woke up on his 93rd birthday in Heaven, with Nonna holding him in her arms once again.

Mom, me, and Fr. Julian this past Monday