They live on the same floor of the same Massachusetts nursing home now - the 94-year-old former Rose Popolo; her 85-year-old sister, Sadie Bell; their 83-year-old brother, Frank Popolo, and his 90-year-old wife, Aunt Genie - so I get to see them all in a single visit. On a recent Saturday evening, I coax all but Aunt Genie, who's asleep in her room, down the hall to a faux-Colonial sitting room. I pull up chairs. We sit. We talk. My mother is quiet, but she's smiling. She's very happy about the pizza I just delivered.
Aunt Sadie seems to remember me, and she seems to know that Rose is her sister and Frank her brother. But she looks at us quizzically, as if not quite sure.
Uncle Frank, in a wheelchair, also seems to remember me, but he wonders where I've been.
"I'm in Baltimore now, Uncle Frank," I tell him. "Been there for 30 years."
"Hell, that's nothing," he snaps. "I've been with the post office 35."
He calls me Greeko now. He seems to call everyone Greeko now, even the nurses. Uncle Frank was always a smiling, pleasant man - a father of seven kids who still managed to take genuine interest in the lives of his many nieces and nephews. He worked in real estate. He sold fencing. And he worked for the post office - so long that he still remembers street addresses from his first routes, and he starts reciting some. Along the way, he mentions an address that my mother instantly recognizes - 151 W. High St.
"That's our mother's house," she says from the chair to my left. "That's where we grew up. There were 10 of us kids."
"High Street?" Sadie frowns.
"There was a house and a barn," my mother goes on. "We played in the barn. I was Harold Lloyd, and Mary Sullivan was Lillian Gish."
My mother loves to tell this story. When she was a girl, two of the silent film stars were Lillian Gish and Harold Lloyd. Lloyd was a comedian famous for performing slapstick and dangerous stunts for the camera. My mother and her lifelong friend, Mary Sullivan, re-enacted scenes from movies in the loft of the small barn. My mother played Harold Lloyd.
"And you fell from the barn loft," I say.
"She what?" Aunt Sadie says. "She fell?"
"I did not," my mother says, shocked at my assertion.
"That's what you always told me, Ma," I said. "You were playing Harold Lloyd hanging from the big clock on a building in one of his movies, and you fell and landed on your hip. And that's the hip the doctor replaced in 1968, when you were 54."
