Back to the Country
Giuseppe Gialdini died on July 1, 1961. He was 78 years old and had been a widower for decades. According to his obituary, he had been a tailor in Fort Bragg for fifty years. Other newspaper clippings also imply that he at one point owned a general store with a partner, as well.
According to Nonna, he was always a very joyful man. Being short, he used to grab the tops of the door frames at her house and swing from them. According to her, he and his wife were (for obvious reasons) trilingual; they would speak to one another in one language, and if they could not find the word they were trying to express, they would switch to the next one!
Overall, I would say that both Giuseppe Gialdini and Maria Pierini felt far more fulfilled by their emigration from Italy than they ever could have by remaining in their homelands, and from what I can tell, they were happy about their choices by the ends of their lives. Two immigrants from one country, and their paths happened to cross thousands of miles from Italy in California. The stories and webs of immigration patterns is something that I believe is beautiful, and it is amazing to consider how such different lives sometimes and somehow intersect along the way.
It is with a sense of irony in my heart that I shall be moving to Europe to pursue graduate school; there are moments where I almost feel that it is a betrayal of my predecessors, but I know that they would be proud of me for seeking out my dreams, as they did. Although my Nonna died before I was officially recognized as an Italian citizen, I had told her that I was considering college in Europe. She was thrilled to hear that, and I'm sure that she would have loved to know about the program that I will partake in. In a strange and perhaps poetic sense, decades later, an incredible opportunity has presented itself for me on the very continent that had so little to offer Giuseppe and Maria. Thus the saga of my family's (and Italian) emigration continues in a twenty-first century context.
