The Second Shot Heard Around the World- Part 5

jus·tice n.

The quality of being just; fairness.

The principle of moral rightness; equity.

Conformity to moral rightness in action or attitude; righteousness.

The upholding of what is just, especially fair treatment and due reward in accordance with honor, standards, or law.

Law. The administration and procedure of law.

Conformity to truth, fact, or sound reason: The overcharged customer was angry, and with justice.

Abbr. J. Law.

A judge.

A justice of the peace.

Idiom:

do justice to

To treat adequately, fairly, or with full appreciation: The subject is so complex that I cannot do justice to it in a brief survey.

What was right here? What was fair?

Right after the celebration of my son’s marriage, the following days & weeks, I had relented about the boundaries I had set up with Daniel.

I had come to see him. There had been almost a half a year’s “breathing space” for me.

I had gone to see him, the main event of the fall was over, he had seen for himself that the nature of our relationship was changed. Not severed, but changed. I had assured him I was still hoping for an amicable separation, & that with time we would, as had happened with the father of my children, be able to see each other again in social situations.

I was not shutting him out of my life, but I was moving forward toward a different living arrangement a little over two hours away. Just enough space I felt, to ensure he would not be obsessing about me all the time, & hoping for an outcome I clearly was not going to go along with. I was not coming back to remain in his life as his wife.

We had worked together so that he was left with a home he had put his own heart into, where there was my contribution as well. The farmhouse we had renovated was in far better shape than when we had purchased it. He had the little flock of animals with him. He had launched his own little business in the barn, had a mix of old items he loved to gather by roadsides when folks in New England style tradition would leave out with a FREE sign for junkers to pick up. The original Yankee wisdom of giving things to others to recycle & move out of the homes what was no longer needed or desired. Things of practical use to someone else though. Daniel loved that kind of thing. When we were out driving together, there was hardly ever a trip when he would not suddenly slow down, stop or pull an abrupt Ui on a country road if something of potential value caught his eye.

He loved to cook. That in fact was exactly what he was doing when I first met him. He had coming bouncing out of a building dressed completely in white on a Saturday afternoon the spring we met by a dumpster, where I had been hauling out & hoeing a room which was in need of cleaning near his post at the time; Operation Blessing in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The moment our paths crossed, I found in him a generous heart & a willing ear. “Come on inside young lady,” he’d said. “I’ll put the coffee on.”

He had street smarts, Daniel did. For the next seven years we were together, he & I helped each other & others sort through a myriad of crisises & traumas, listened to secret confidences about former betrayals & other heart-breaking episodes in our own lives & those we ministered to. He stood tall as my protector & valiant defender of the right & the righteous.

We caused quite a stir with our two worlds coming together there.

People talked to us, & people talked ABOUT us.

They would shake their heads, in wonder at how two such different people with such vastly different heritage, could get together at all. He had grown up in the Boston area as well, haunting the North End, likely crossing paths not once but many times, when I was at Simmons completing my final year in community health nursing. I did my visiting nursing component in that area of the city. He hung out with many of the men he called his friends & buddies off of Prince Street, as had his older brother.

But his education in a formal sense ended not long after the 8th grade. For a variety of reasons he had trouble sitting still to learn. Not the least of them was, the less enlightened era he was coming of age in. Seven years my senior, Daniel was always escaping the punishment for his brash actions of nuns & his Green Beret Marine father. Who according to Daniel was a very big deal in his part of town & in the Italian community. His parents too, were married once, & they also were known & celebrated as a handsome couple. I heard many. many stories of how Daniel the first protected his beautiful Luigina from the unwanted advances of other admirers.

Opposites attract. Differences in a relationship can most certainly complement each other & strengthen a union. People talk. And they talked to Daniel a lot. Because he had an open & engaging smile, an instant allure for & to the ladies, a dark, Mediterranean charisma, & an absolutely mesmerizing way of telling a story. About anything. About his dreams.

Daniel would have technicolor, movie length extraordinary dreams. And an absolutely fascinating way of talking about them when he woke up.

I had come into this stage of my life, when I met him, with some wounds from battles fought amongst more educated men. Far more educated. Many more initials after their names. Not physical wounds, soul-seared ones.

Tons of connections, power & influence, but cold, calculating power mongers whom I was furious at. Daniel “got it”. He was angry with me, for me. What he lacked in formal education he more than made up for in sheer energy & loyalty, charm, & warmth.

He loved me, He protected me. He fought on my side, & saw the issues & challenges I was facing the way I did.

He also loved the elderly. At the time we first started seeing each other, he had a little camper parked next to an elderly couple’s home in Rochester, New Hampshire for his own mobile home, and looked after this couple. For free. He never charged them. He was pragmatic. He worked at Operation Blessing because he was really good at taking the goods & offerings left at the ecumenical outreach center there, & getting them to families who needed them. He drove trucks, he fixed broken down cars. He could charm a snake right out of a tree. he was Robin Hood to my Maid Marion.

He would counsel with others, really giving them his heart & full, undivided attention, when he wasn’t buzzing around doing, doing, doing. He was incredibly emotional & wore those emotions on his sleeve. He had not learned the cultured, sophisticated ways of masking his passionate feelings, indeed, he reveled in his emotionality. I used to call him the hummingbird.

Daniel was a man’s man. He displayed a valiant nature.

I loved his versatility, his seemingly endless buoyancy, & ability to look up when things were down. His humming. His fastidiousness around his kitchen. He commanded authority in his kitchen the way Dad did in his aircraft. He knew all the health codes about preparing food & he did that too, with love & passion. He knew all the local markets & their vendors. He was an abundant provider, he fed me, clothed me, brought me gifts. Along with everyone else he loved. Especially his daughter Marilyn.

It was refreshing coming from Ivy League campuses I had haunted, rubbing elbows & locking minds with far more uptight frozen men in that department. He never “candy-coated “ anything. He never censored what came into his mind. It popped in there, & out it came from his mouth. At least that was how it was initially. He saw me as a “dove with a broken wing” that the Lord had brought to him to heal & protect. And at the time, he was right. I was.

The novelty of us as a couple set many a hard boiled New England congregants’ eyebrows raised & tongues wagging. When we argued, we argued like the couple in My Cousin Vinny. Minds matching minds, excited by the challenge. Who was right. Who knew what they were talking about.

His mind was, is brillliant, with a different kind of intelligence than gains awards, & robes, & special sashes at an Ivy League graduation. He thought with his heart, but not always with wisdom. He had his greatest challenge, & still does with bridling his temper.

And telling the truth. His stories, while entertaining & fascinating, always seemed to drift from the open, honest center of truth. I chalked it up to the times of his boyhood when coming up with a fast explanation to escape another beating as a survival skill. But I insisted, no, it became almost exhausting at the end to call him on the little twists his reporting of events would take. The truth never seemed entirely good enough for him. There was always an almost compulsive need to put a little spin on it, one that always was self-serving.

I saw that he had an uncanny attunement to his intuition. He could pick up on people’s character traits & inner motives with a rare accuracy.

He also was attracted to me. He both loved & hated my advanced education. Loved me like a madonna, but when he was mad, or restless, also nurtured really dark shadow emotions too. It is a fact that the concept of vendetta came from his origins. His obvious disdain for those who had been blessed with more in these more formal surroundings he was envious of. And jealousy is a green-eyed monster.

When he wanted to taunt me, or even just joust in some way, emotionally, mentally or even physically, he called me Harvard. When he would come home from spending time with other men he considered powerful & influential in our community, & they would ask him why he was with me, as I was always such a challenge to his natural male privilege he & everyone else took for granted because of his good looks & confident bounce & swagger, he would simply say; because she teaches me. She went to Harvard! Like they were the real dimwits. Duh!!!

What was really on the line though, was our shared faith. What it meant to be a close family. To live out the faith we both shared. The calling we both responded to.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. His wonders to behold.

Because I was an attendant at the Divinity School, I validated for him his unique prophetic gifts. We read the Bible together, or rather, I read it aloud. We prayed together. We traveled together. We visited practically every church in the seacoast region & most of them in Orlando region as well, when visiting, & residing near Marilyn for a whole winter season one year.

Down there, more than a thousand miles from home, in one of his darker moods, in a fit of uncontrolled rage at supper time, he flew at me in that same small trailer & attacked me, full on in the face. Trying to scratch me, mar me. Force me under his patriarchal domination.

This is where the real battle of wits, the matching of the minds was.

Down there I was required by Florida law to take a continuing education module on domestic violence, & I shared it with him & the men at a rooming house we were working with. Again set apart in our own little world, are little portable pumpkin shell.

After the attack, I left him for the first time. I stayed in a women’s shelter for a week.

I had made some friends in nursing, at work, & they listened & helped. Work always was a cloak of safety for me too. It was the key to my freedom, always. But when an angry man was after you, you could not expose those you were caring for to the unpredictable nature of a love turned to obsession. It was not ethical. It was not right. He taught me more, more than I had already learned in the Ivy League about how to cover my tracks when necessary. To protect my patients, the children in my family, & my own life.

I had had practice so many times with so many urgent or emergent situations, I knew how to access needed resources quickly. I knew how to maintain safety & get out of harm’s way. Call a cooling off period. Get back into my own aura, my own rhythms again, which are, when not under siege, far more calm & peaceable than the fiery Fichera family. Far more placid than the inner turmoil that erupted in Daniel when he was angry.

He is just the kind of guy, that, when it came to a public trial, & exposure in the media in another state like California or Florida, would have had the perverse effect of drawing his own share of demented groupies had I not been keenly cognizant of this.

In his happier, playful, humorous moods, he had the attractive looks that a Pacino or Deniro had, have.

When he revealed the shadow aspect of his character he looked like Saddam Hussein.

check in soon for Part 6