Rose Ciaccio Ragucci – When she was born her father wanted to nickname her “Rose Bud”. But her mother said “don’t call her Rose Bud because it will stick.” So they called her “Baby Rose” instead. And that stuck. Even now her cousin Fran calls her “Baby Rose”.
Several other Ciaccio family members had nicknames:
Whenever the phone range in the middle of the night we knew it was Jimmy. Rose would pick up the phone and start listening to him, half asleep. He would talk for a quite a while – typically more than a half hour. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I listened to half the conversation. It was quite an inconvienence but it was the only time they would converse over the phone.
This stopped once he moved to Israel (another story!).
By the time I started dating my husband, John, my grandma was already in the nursing home. She absolutely adored John. He made her laugh and he’d ask her great questions about her life. We still laugh today about “Riley”. Grandma told John one day that someone (I don’t remember who) was “living the Life of Riley”. John asked Grandma “Who’s Riley?” She said “Oh, he had it good!!” She never told him who Riley was (old TV show character) but we still joke about Riley all the time.
One day, she told him about her trip to America. Her family was Italian but lived in Tunis, Tunisia because her father worked there. He came to America and she came with her mother and siblings later. They left from Marseilles, France. She said that she remembered her mother making them be quiet and making them stay away from the windows during the trip and she said that the windows were all painted black. They came to America during the war so they were trying to keep the ship dark at night so that it wouldn’t be bombed. In fact, after the ship dropped them off in America, it was bombed on the way back to Europe.
My grandmother fell twice in her later years. Each time, she literally broke one of her eyes. She was almost totally blind in the last 6-8 months of her life. At that point, she developed “blind senility”. She could see shadows and light and dark but not even enough to make out a shape. It would make her think she was seeing things and it was heartbreaking. In her last year of life, before she became blind, she would ask me if John and I were going to have a baby. I confided in her that we were trying. After she became blind and very senile, she would say to my mother (her daughter Rose) “bring me the boy. I want to see the boy”. My mom would ask “What boy? We don’t have any boys.” My mom was an only child, I was an only child, there were never any boys. Grandma would ask to see the baby, the boy. So I always knew that my baby would be a boy because my grandma told me before I was even pregnant. She never lived to see him but she would have loved him!
When I began dating Rose, she lived with her parents at 2 Village Green in Colonia. Before I met her, her Uncle Jack lived with them for a while and had the upstairs finished into 2 rooms and a bathroom. After he moved out Rose claimed the upstairs as her own – with a bedroom and a living room.
In the center of the upstairs living room was a ceiling lamp in the shape of a upside-down bowl. One day when I was there, she said that the light wasn’t working. So, I decided to open it up and see what I could do. The bowl shaped light was held on with a nut in the center. Unknown to me, the ceiling leaked water. So as I finished unscrewing the nut, the light bowl quickly came down and spilled water all over the place. It was filled with lots of water! Once the lamp dryed up, the light worked again. From that day on I would check the light and empty any water that it collected. Obviously the roof was leaking and that’s where it would accumulate.