Living the Dream: A Faith Journey Down a Crooked Road

By Dan Petruccio

Are you on the path that you are supposed to be? Is your life’s journey going in the wrong direction? I hope that my story will inspire you to make the necessary changes to get back on the road you’re supposed to be on. Any good journey requires: directions and a good travel partner that you trust with your life, if need be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: May 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684701612

Book preview

story.

CHAPTER 1

Faith: A Twelve-Year Journey

A s the story was conveyed to me, my mom and dad worked for Whelan’s Drug Store. In the 1940s, the local drugstore provided most of the nonfood staple items that you couldn’t buy at the grocery store. My dad worked on the loading dock, and Mom worked in the office. My dad was a tall, skinny kid from Thirty-First Street in Brooklyn. Mom lived on the corner of Warren Street and Fourth Avenue, also in Brooklyn. Mom was a McGill girl, one of four sisters, living with her older brothers Eddie and Charlie.

Dad was half-Italian and half-Irish. His mom died when he was sixteen and left my father with the task of raising his four younger sisters. His older brother, Sal, married shortly after their mother’s death and was out of the house. My grandfather, in a scandalous act for that time, started to date a woman who was the same age as his oldest son. In a rather hasty and questionable manner, he married her and had another daughter. My father had to quit school and get a job to help support the family.

On the day my mother and father met for the first time, my mother turned to her girlfriend and informed her that she had just met the man whom she would eventually marry. My dad’s father liked my mother because, much like his first wife, she was Irish and her name was Grace. This name has deep religious significance for Catholics, and I think it was an early indication of how this story was going to unfold. In spite of the fact that he liked the girl my dad was dating, my grandfather would not consent to the marriage because he feared the loss of income. If my father married and moved out of the house, he would no longer contribute to the support of the household. My parents had to wait until my father turned twenty-one.

In 1947, my parents married, having a traditional football wedding. The name comes from the informal tossing of sandwiches as the main course at the reception. For their honeymoon, my parents took a room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. My dad saved the receipt for the most pretentious item that they splurged on that night: coffee for two and an assortment of cookies. The bill was under two dollars, but for Grace and Pat Petruccio, that was a lot of money.

The model that was followed by most couples of my parents’ generation was to get an apartment and start their family within a year of marriage. All of my father’s and mother’s siblings followed one after another along that same journey. This was not going to be the case for Grace and Pat. As their younger siblings began to marry and start their families, my parents struggled to get pregnant. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Living in a railroad apartment on Coney Island Avenue, they kept trying with no success. In many ways, this actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise—at least for me it did. They were able to really develop a strong, loving partnership. They worked hard and saved money. Dad worked at Whelan’s Drug Store for twenty-three years, until the day that they closed the factory and moved the operation to New Jersey.

Friday-night spaghetti dinners at a small neighborhood Italian restaurant, twi-night doubleheader Dodger games, and modest vacations to Sugar Maples Family Resort in Maplecrest, New York, filled their schedule, substituting for the family that they couldn’t have. They made the best of an unfortunate situation. They spent weekends in Levittown at Georgie and Hans Bakke’s house. Georgie was Grace’s older sister, and Hans was Georgie’s Norwegian American husband. A veteran of World War II, Hans took advantage of the benefits afforded a veteran and purchased a modest Levitt home. My parents were able to experience vicariously the family that they were denied through their nieces and nephews: Lorraine, Matty, Timmy, and Gene (Teresa would come along much later).

My parents refused to be limited by the difficulties that they faced personally and economically. Dad was never able to finish high school, yet with the benefit of Mom working for the first twelve years of their married life, they were able to live comfortably. In the 1940s and ’50s, twelve years without children seemed like an eternity. Science was not sufficiently advanced to offer answers to the question of why this was happening. As people of faith, my parents put their trust in God and believed he had a plan for them and that it would be revealed in due time. After years of trying and numerous doctor visits, they started to resign themselves to the possibility that they might not have children of their own.

Just about the time that my parents were ready to give up and try adopting a child, my mother heard about a fertility specialist in Manhattan. Dr. Weitzman was highly recommended and certainly an expensive option. Grace got on the train and traveled from Brooklyn into Manhattan to put her trust in this stranger. After examining my mother, Dr. Weitzman had good news. If my parents followed his directions (I never did find out what those directions were), he thought that Grace could get pregnant, answering the prayers to Saint Jude that Mom had been piling up over the years. Within a few months of her first visit to Dr. Weitzman, my mom was pregnant with a son! Pat had the glove already broken in. He was finally going to get his ballplayer.

In one of the cruelest possible twists of fate, my mother had a miscarriage at seven months. Their firstborn son, who was going to be named Daniel, died. I never came to a full understanding of how hard this was for my mother in particular. I don’t think there was ever a day or a new encounter with a person she’d just met when she didn’t retell the story of her loss. In the film Manchester by the Sea, Casey Affleck’s character experiences the horrific tragedy of losing his children in a fire—a fire that ultimately was his fault. The rest of the film shows the character going through the motions of life with a permanent hole that he is unable and unwilling to fill. Mom’s loss was nowhere near as dramatic, but I now realize that there was a permanent sense of loss and sorrow that remained for the rest of her life.

Grace and Pat were people of faith who possessed the strength and resiliency that comes with loss and struggle. Dad had lost his mother at sixteen, and Mom lived with a father who was by all accounts a functioning alcoholic; they had faced tougher battles before. It is important to remember that they were raised during the Depression in cold water flats. The only source of heat was a stove in the kitchen, and the coal was supplied by scraps from passing trains. My parents did what people of faith always do—they placed their trust in God and began to move forward. Within a matter of months, Mom was pregnant once again, and this time there would be no twist of fate, no setback.

In a most appropriate gesture, God granted Grace her wish to be a mother on May 10, 1959—Mother’s Day on the calendar and in her heart. These types of occurrences are called God winks by Squire Rushnell. He describes small, seemingly coincidental events with this term. So often in our lives, we look for grand gestures and bold statements by God, but in most cases, he makes his presence known in whispers and subtle gestures.

My parents continued trying to expand the size of our family, and in reality it was a race against time. Mom was thirty-three years old at the time of my birth, and her biological clock was certainly ticking loudly. Five years after my arrival, my sister, Kathleen, was born. By this time, we were living on East Fourth Street between Avenues U and T in a neighborhood referred to as Gravesend. Before my sister was born we lived in a second-floor apartment. As the birth of my sister approached, my parents needed more living space.

After saving money for seventeen years, Grace and Pat were able to put together enough money for the only home they ever owned. The move was less than fifty feet to the house directly across the street from the apartment. Their new home at 2126 East Fourth Street was one of a set of jockey homes that were built to house the jockeys working at the racetrack that once ran through the neighborhood. These homes certainly matched the size of the original occupants. The homes were attached on both sides and were noticeably narrow and long, with small back and front yards. You had better like your neighbors because the walls were paper-thin. You could actually hear the sound of the person snoring on the other side of the wall! And Poncho, our neighbor, was a prolific snorer.

CHAPTER 2

November 22, 1963

O ne of the most common icebreakers I use in class is to ask the students what their earliest memories are. Over the years I have found the answers to be fascinating.

For me, the earliest memory that I can nail down in considerable detail is November 22, 1963. Being a student of history, I look at the death of John F. Kennedy as a pivotal moment in American history. In reality, Kennedy was truly a flawed individual. In this day and age of full disclosure and transparency, the exploits of Kennedy and