Bloom Where You Are Planted

By Paula Jane

This extraordinary real-life memoir is about overcoming obstacles, victory, and defeat, an inspirational family narrative, and a historical trajectory of facts and culture in the US from the 1950s to the present time. There are undertones of a yearning for a return to the more civilized society that baby boomers grew up in. As the wife of the man, who after climbing the corporate ladder for years became the president of Mack Trucks Inc., the author had to uproot four children and move many times. While attending to all of her children who have been involved in every childhood sport imaginable, her main focus was on her youngest with cystic fibrosis, a fatal disease, which requires multiple treatments several times daily. That was an incredulous balancing routine, doling out equal attention to all the children. The extreme highs and lows of life have skewed the family perspective by the trauma of the youngest family member toggling on the tenuous tightrope between life and death. The family learned to never sweat the small stuff as they incessantly waited for the other shoe to drop. Paula’s family has greatly appreciated every morsel of happiness, lives awash with triumph and tragedy. When people who live with intense life challenges share similar circumstances with others, they become of one accord, form bonds and intimacy. Paula survived a rife of life-threatening childhood illnesses, a molestation, apathy, and subpar grades in a draconian Catholic school where nun oppression was the rule. It was turned around twenty-five years later when she graduated magna cum laude from Emory University. Paula changed hats often working in airline passenger service, as professional ski instructor, as an older student, as an events planner for the Carter Presidential Center, and as an editorial producer for CNN Atlanta and NYC. They were all happening while relocating residences often, raising four daughters—one with special needs, and volunteering for everything from PTA, Girl Scouts, church, Little League. She also cared for her dying sister for six years and escorted her executive husband to global conferences. Paula rides with Central Park Mounted Patrol and is Gigi (grandma), where life has taught her to Bloom—wherever she has been planted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781684098446

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Bloom

Where You Are

Planted

Paula Jane

Copyright © 2017 Paula Jane

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

ISBN 978-1-68409-843-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68409-844-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

For my four Daughters Keri, Nora, Shannon, and Casey, and mostly to God who will help pull me through. When they were little, I taught my girls. Now my independent daughters are teaching me. Now I recount the story of the six of us who share this planet and this century with you dear readers who also own a piece of this dedication.

Prologue

Ineed to write this book now. For one reason, I’m gratified that I’ve partaken is this life as it has been, and I’ve heard inner whisperings within me for about a dozen year to write this book, scribbling notes on scratch paper along the way. For the other reason, my big, proud, strong, independent husband is currently undergoing treatment for Multiple Myeloma with a stem cell transplant. Multiple Myeloma is cancer of the blood plasma, and it affects the bones evidently so because my towering six-foot-one husband now measures at five foot nine. This setback is such a departure from what he has been doing for the past forty years. A couple of months ago, he retired as president of Mack Trucks Inc. Kevin made key decisions in the company and provided support for all the dealers in North America. He took the job very seriously but not himself so seriously. I’m just a lucky guy with good timing who has found himself a niche. At his retirement parties, I was asked how I felt about his retirement to which I replied, I’m happy to find my husband in the bed next to me every morning when I wake and every night when I sleep. To watch My Love be so diminished is killing me. It’s unfair that Kevin frequently traveled for the past thirty years, giving his best to his work, and now upon his retirement, we are faced with this. Through the years our marriage has not been without its difficulties as frankly, being married to a traveling man is not ideal for a marriage. I have advised my Daughters to marry men who stay home at night; they have taken my advice. All week long, raising our Daughters alone, I never took a break as the only parent in attendance. I would do my best to keep order and discipline all week long, and when Kevin came home from a trip, it was fun time with Daddy, and Kevin would palliate his guilt of being away by spoiling the girls with far-reaching generosity and leniency, undermining all the work of raising solid, grounded kids. Dining alone nightly had been a most depressing thing for me, and I did it far too often while he was entertaining at fabulous locales. I Bloom in the gratification that our Daughters have grown to be the kind of adults that anyone would be proud to be their parent. I also can be glad that the traveling days for Kevin are over, and he’s all mine to Bloom with now. I fend off despair over my husband’s terrible disease and Bloom by sharing our story, hopefully with humorous anecdotes along the way. We all need to find our own way to Bloom because life happens. We never control, expect, or know what will face us; therefore, the optimal way to cope with our host of experiences, happy, or sad is to flourish and Bloom! If this story amuses, stimulates, inspires, arouses laughter, evokes any reflective or provocative thoughts, then I’m happy.

We all gravitate to what we can relate to. Anecdotes in my story may have the Baby-Boomer generation nodding and thinking, Yes, I agree, or I remember that. One example is having a thousand channels on the television and not finding anything suitable because we don’t like programming geared to mostly youthful pop culture. Let’s face it we don’t want to bother with all the technology to find other TV choices because all that attachment apparatus enslaves us, not to mention we’re not so skilled in working them either. When in doubt, I tune into Turner Classic Movies! Extra bonus nods if my reader is Catholic, Italian, corporate wives, those who’ve dealt with health issues, a relative, a neighbor that covers a lot since I’ve lived in many places, nostalgic folks who are wistful about ephemera from the past and more genteel times or anyone once part of the Mack Truck family alliance, and Mothers. This book provides empathy with Baby Boomers and gives us a bit of a voice. I love and appreciate my kids. Nevertheless, my cohorts have been through similar milestones, as our Parents, The Greatest Generation,—Tom Brokaw, we’re with each other. Our kids don’t have the development that we have gained over the duration of our lengthier, more evolved, lives.

One of the most important messages I’d like to convey in this book is that growth and learning are lifelong processes and it’s never too late to be encouraged to seek out and pursue our dreams in order to Bloom.

Chapter 1

Just after anxiously passing through the Midtown Tunnel in and speeding past the Empire State Building on 34th Street, lights and sirens blasted beckoning my Father, Don, in the 1946 green Studebaker (with the design that looked like it was coming and going at the same time) to pull over! Oh, and it was New Year’s Eve. A nice, burly red-faced Irish cop approached my Dad’s car and called out, What’s yer hurry?

Don pointed to his wife Margaret’s protruding abdomen and exclaimed in an absolute panic, My wife has begun labor, she’s about to POP!

Well, why didn’t ya say so, mister, and thus began my wild ride journey with a police escort downtown to St. Vincent’s Hospital the West Village. We all just about got there when I swam right out, the fourth and final child of my Parents, Don and Margaret.

And the ride has continued to be wild, just like that first day.

Margaret was primping at her vanity for a neighborhood New Year’s Eve party, she liked what she saw in the mirror. Mom always loved her looks. I remember her often humming to herself, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, seemingly about herself. Mom was especially glowing because she was expecting her fourth Baby the following month. Margaret was feeling contented about her station in life. The ninth and last child (of seven boys and two girls), Margrite of Annunciada (for the Annunciation) Pranzitelli and Giovanni Mastropolo (who both emigrated from Campobasso, Italy). had come up in the world from crowded housing in the Bronx, marrying a witty, affectionate, attractive, highly educated aristocratic doctor’s son who became successful in his own right as an executive in the NYC newspaper business, living in a nice home in Long Island’s Gold Coast Community, Manhasset, New York. Margaret was living the American dream in 1950s post-war America. Margaret’s husband’s mother Alleyne did not want her beloved son to marry the peasant stock, a poor, uneducated Italian. Don was no snob. He just liked what he saw in Margaret and thus married Margaret anyway. Margaret admitted that she was used to all the attention being the youngest of nine and being so cute that she was a little spoiled and lazy. Meanwhile, back at the primping vanity, Margaret announced to hubby Don, We’re not going to this party tonight. I’m going to deliver.

Don replied, That’s crazy, you’re not due for a month.

This is my fourth and I should know. We have got to go to the hospital. So off they went. I can imagine my Father who was extremely solicitous of his family could become overly nervous about everyone’s well-being. He was probably dancing in circles at that point.

Margaret and Don conceived a boy about a decade earlier in New Orleans just before Don left for Europe to fight in World War II and never met his son Don Jr. until he was a toddler. Margaret went home to 221st Street in the Bronx to be with her Parents, her Sister, and all the wives of her Brothers to bond together for support during the war. Years later upon his homecoming on May 19, 1946, when Dad walked through that Bronx door, he beheld his little family. With arms outstretched, he enthused to his young son in a big voice (Dad had presence), Hey, Big Boy, where’s Dada? Not knowing the scary stranger with the big voice, little Don cried and pointed to his Dad’s picture in a uniform on the living room table. He was a bit grayer at the temples and quite thinner, wearing his uniform, ahem, that was all the foreplay Mom needed. While my grandma Annunciada took care of Don Jr., Don Sr. and Marg went right up to their closet of a bedroom and conceived their Daughter Nancy who was born February 19, 1947, (count backward) In fact, the same ritual ensued in those tiny closet bedrooms with the first wave of my thirty something cousins, aptly named, Baby Boomers. Then when they started coming in pairs, vis-à-vis my twin cousins Peter and Paul, Dad said to Mom, It’s time to get our own place. What a time of bonding that must have all been. There are likely many similar stories passed down to us boomers about their Parents’ war homecoming. At twenty-nine, Dad was one of the older soldiers drafted into WWII when FDR declared war on December 2, 1941, Day of Infamy. Mom and Dad were married in August of that year, four months earlier. Upon army enlistment, holding a couple of master’s degrees from Georgetown rendered my Dad as one of the more educated soldiers thus on the fast track for becoming an officer. His first assignment was Fort Dix then to New Orleans where he then sent for my mother. When the United States entered World War II, the Federal government took control of the Jackson Barracks to use it as a port of embarkation. The polo field was transformed into temporarily billeting for men, preparing to ship overseas in support of the war. Then my mother went to work as a secretary for a physician general at LaGarde General Hospital on the army base at Ponchatrain Lakefront, and their firstborn son was conceived, and Dad was shipped off in the middle of the night without word for security purposes. The transatlantic boat accommodations fell short of any five-star lodging for sure; the boys slept in hammocks that swayed with the rocking of the spartan military vessel across the ocean to Europe. Dad climbed the ranks to First Lieutenant Betowski and it sounds like fighting a war can be lots of waiting around because he wrote to my mother in the States every night. The letters were saved and I have them all, tied in the same yellow ribbon that my mother had secured them in years earlier. Every single letter began the same way, My Own Darling Precious Wife. The only time Dad ever shot anything was when he heard stealth rustling in the bushes, and Dad said, Who goes there? Nothing. He repeated, Who goes there? Still nothing. It was the only time he used his gun. It was a poor horse with unfortunate timing. My Father left New York City for ETO, (European Theatre of Operations) on the RMS Mauretania, a former White Star ocean liner recommissioned and dedicated for soldier transport during WWII. The ship travelled without escort in